Columbia-area Christian stores are selling supplies, but their goal is to touch lives

While his wife and four grandchildren visited Cici’s Pizza in the Village at Sandhill shopping center last week, Dentsville resident Lester Neidig scoped out the Family Christian Stores book and gift shop next door.

New to the area, Neidig was searching for a place where his grandchildren could do a little Christmas shopping for their parents in Savannah, who left the four with the Neidigs for the week.

“They are Christian,” Neidig said of the four children – ages 8, 7, 6 and 5 – as are their parents, he said.

Family Christian Stores, the world’s largest nonprofit Christian-focused retailer, is one of at least four major Christian supply stores in the Columbia area that cater – or, as they say, minister – to the diverse needs of every customer who walks through the doors.

Elsewhere in the Midlands, Nashville, Tenn.-based LifeWay Christian operates a retail store at Columbiana Station on Bower Parkway. Shepherd’s Corner, independently owned, operates in the Lankmark Square Shopping Center on Garners Ferry Road.

Family Christian Stores, which is headquartered in Grand Rapids, Mich., operates a store in the Town of Lexington as well as the one at Village at Sandhill in Northeast Richland.

Associates at Family Christian greet each customer who enters. The store’s shelves are loaded with Bibles in numerous translations, books, music, movies, gift items and decor, jewelry, apparel and more.

People come through the doors with divergent needs and interests vastly dissimilar, and the range of items for sale in Christian stores is vast. But all of it is pointed toward a singular solution: to glorify God by helping people find, grow, share and celebrate their faith in Jesus Christ.

“We are retail whose heart is in ministry,” said Brenda Mack, Family Christian store manager at Village at Sandhill. “We start our day praying for each of our guests before we open the doors. We see praying for them as an honor and a privilege.”

Store staffers not only pray for their customers, Mack said. They also will pray with the customers.

“When our guests come in the door, we are there to serve them and help them with whatever their needs are,” Mack said. “If they’re celebrating; if they want marriage resources, children’s books, the (type) Bible they want; when it’s pastors, if it’s Sunday school curriculum, church supplies or pastors help books.”

Like Family Christian, LifeWay is a nonprofit organization – it’s another thing that sets them apart from traditional retailers. Whereas profits of most retail outlets go to the owners or shareholders for personal use, all after-expense revenue in these two private companies goes to various Christian ministries.

One resource at Family Christian’s disposal that lends itself to ministry outreach is its I-Disciple app, a subscription service that provides daily Bible devotions, sermons from various ministers and several other resources. Proceeds from the app’s sales support 14 charities, including child sponsorships.

Recently, Family Christian held a World Vision day, in which the company partnered with World Vision, a Christian organization, to foster child sponsorships. Mack tells the story of a recent customer whose husband was desperately searching for a suitable Christmas present.

The wife was reluctant to identify any preferred gift item, until she learned about the I-Disciple app and the children it supports. “She told him, I have all I need: This is the perfect gift,” Mack recalled. The customer blind-sponsored a child through the outreach, a child who turned out to share the woman’s birthday, Mack said.

“We get to see the ripple effect it (the tools of the faith) has,” Mack said.

Like secular retailers, Family Christian Stores has had challenges. Begun in a Michigan farmhouse in 1931 by the Zondervan brothers, Pat and Bernie, the business became a chain in 1937. Zondervan grew into Family Bookstores, and in 1997 changed its name to Family Christian to reflect the Christian lifestyle of the products it sold. Today it has 245 stores nationally.

A for-profit company at that time, Family Christian was acquired by a private equity firm in 1997 and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2011. The company emerged from bankruptcy and converted to a nonprofit.

“When people shop with us their purchases support our efforts to partner and unite with ministries that are helping families both domestically here in the United States and the world,” said Mary Beth Googasian, Family Christian senior public relations and store events manager in Grand Rapids.

LifeWay Christian Stores came out of its founding in 1891 as an agency of the Southern Baptist Convention, known as the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. The company’s first assignment was the production of Sunday school literature, which remains one of its core offerings.

LifeWay began to be used as a title for the company around 1971, the company says, emanating from the words of Jesus Christ recorded in John 14:6. Jesus, speaking to his disciples, said, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

The company’s mission is to see life transformed by the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, said Cheryl Warren, LifeWay district manager for North Carolina, South Carolina, parts of east Georgia and east Tennessee, and a store in Virginia.

“That’s what our heart and soul is – to be available to be used by God to touch lives and make a difference in their lives,” Warren said. “And that’s where our heartbeat is; that’s what we want to do every single day; that’s why people come to work for us.”

Managers and associates who work in LifeWay’s 170 locations across the country could make more money elsewhere, “but they have made a choice to work in a place where they feel like they can really make a difference in life,” Warren said.

Though LifeWay takes “great joy” in serving individual customers who come through the doors everyday, Warren said, the company believes it was placed here to help equip church leaders, teachers, ministers, music ministers, youth and children’s workers to do what God has called them to do.

Customers who may not feel comfortable going to a church nonetheless walk through the doors of their stores, even though the word “Christian” is above the doors, Warren said. “But they’re looking for answers and they see ‘Christian’ on our sign, and they’ll walk through the door looking for help.

“We take that very seriously and encourage our employees to take time to sit down and visit with folks that are hurting, help them (find) answers.”

Not surprisingly, Christmas is a big shopping season for Christian supply retailers, as it is for others, though their products also fare well at other times of the year, including Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Vacation Bible School and graduations, the retailers said.

Christian supply stores also experience some of the same competitive hurdles as secular retailers, such as figuring out how to deal with retail behemoth Amazon, Googasian said.

Shepherd’s Corner Christian Bookstore opened its doors in Columbia in 1978 at the Cedar Terrace Shopping Center on Garners Ferry Road and moved to its current location in 2002. The business specializes in special orders, including special order wedding bands and also features a large selection of bibles, books and gifts. The store performs custom engraving.