On the way to my 12-step meeting, I heard a commercial on the radio for advertising with our local Christian rock station, and they’re doing a takeoff on the eharmony commercials where the business owner and customer are talking about their experience using this rock station to find each other. Cute-ish commercial, but there was one line which got my attention in a less-positive manner.

The customer says since this business owner advertised on a Christian radio station, they knew it was someone they could trust.

Seriously?

I get what the radio station is going after, but how many people outside of the knowledge of God’s grace through Christ (or even under that) experienced substantial problems when dealing with a Christ-follower?

Everyone is going to fail us and church communities are littered with examples of people doing grave financial harm to their Christian brothers and sisters.

In theory, doing business with a Christian should be a good experience. We know where their moral compass should be pointing and there is additional accountability.

So long as we follow God’s commands without considering justification for our own response to the problem…

I’ve expressed my concerns about Christianity as a business niche in the past and while that post comes off a bit more heavy-handed these days, I haven’t softened my position all that much.

If we have a product or service we believe makes people’s lives better while considering the cost, we want to share that with the people we love.

That may include people in our local extension of the body of Christ (church or other Christian community), but we must be extremely careful in the process.

This requires so much care, I completely stayed away from promoting my business around the Church. This is a personal choice for everyone to make. Maybe I’m in the spot like a guy who drives crazy so he doesn’t put a fish on his car.

Attaching anything with God to something we are doing in the business realm so it puts us in a similar position of social responsibility much like a pastor. Our actions impact how others see and understand Christ, whether that is logical/fair, or not.

It is important for business owners who are also followers of Christ to be extremely circumspect in how we market our business lest we do some Christian anti-evangelism.

Matt Chandler of Village Church made a great point in a sermon, there really is no “Christian music”. There is music with Christian lyrics – there is no “Christian music”.

In a similar fashion, we do not operate “Christian businesses”. We are Christians who operate a business.

Maybe I’m down too much in the semantics, but hopefully you get my point. On a regular basis, we should all take our jobs/businesses before the Lord including everything from the business model, product, promotion, finances, etc. and ask God to point out anything in our actions and motives he does not like (Psalm 139:23-34).

Categories: Living for Christ
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