Faith Works: Does the evolution of religious institutions mirror that of grocery stores?
If you would indulge me in a mental meander, I thank you! My plan is to end up in church, but we won’t start there.
What I’m thinking about is the development of retail and how over time the architecture and community relationships to and through our stores have changed.
Far enough back, you have dry goods and grocery stores in the heart of a settlement or village. A shop, usually with a table or counter between you and the goods, versus the more transient markets where a cart or wagon pulls up loaded with produce or trade items. You walk up and dicker or work out exchanges and go home with your food and materials that augment what you’ve raised and grown and made on your own.
These develop into larger mercantile establishments, with more shelving and increased inventory, until Piggly Wiggly comes along about a hundred years ago and invents self-service. The customer walks along the aisles, prices are marked and you check out with a clerk, rather than having the clerk get your items for you off restricted shelves. Before 1916, no one saw this; by the 1930s they were the norm (but a new norm).
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Markets were still neighborhood affairs, though. When I first came to Hebron in 1999, people still remembered the storefront, which had been the Kroger outlet in town, long before the large modern Kroger supermarket was built out on the edge of the community. This also got my father-in-law talking about the corner store Kroger he helped run through World War II as a pre-teen in Indianapolis. There was produce and a butcher in the back, but the whole thing couldn’t have been a thousand square feet (we visited the corner, where the building still stands).
Supermarkets after the war were just that: super. They had a full-service produce department, milk coolers in the back, a meat counter with friendly butchers and often a pharmacy to boot. They were bigger, in purpose built buildings and out on the edge of town usually. Growing up in the '60s, I remember my mother going to our fairly new supermarket but also sometimes visiting the local IGA, mysteriously smaller but just as capacious, and would ride my bike to one of a couple of neighborhood groceries, which were holding on another decade or two, mostly as package liquor stores with a few sundries before they closed.
Big box retail was developing in the South, though, and by 2000 was all across the country, with grocery and retail in the same sprawling complex, built further out of town and continuing to empty downtowns beyond what malls had already done.
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Yet as big box retail and supercenters peaked, the A-word comes along, nibbling away at profit margins to an even smaller percentage but with volume accomplished through delivery. Now, even further out of most communities, built in cornfields, are giant distribution centers where we’re back to pre-Piggly Wiggly retail. The goods are all behind the electronic counter, and the e-clerk gets our goods and delivers them to our homes.
Where am I going with this obvious but perhaps not often enough considered narrative? Well, once we had rural frame churches, then town brick and stone edifices, with full time preachers. Suburbs attracted growth and new church plants, with education wings and added staff.
Now we have, well, big boxes built on land out beyond the edge of things, with increasing numbers of people receiving their spiritual care by way of online means. I guess what I’m mulling is how our retail development and changes in church life are in parallel. What does this mean, and where will it take us? More to contemplate.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he still gets to preach in small wood frame churches from time to time, they’re out there. Tell him what this all makes you think about at [email protected], or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Faith Works: Retail and religion in tension and relation