Just think of Bob McClellan as a middleman for the great new-car salesman in the sky.

Some ads for his McClellan Buick-Pontiac-GM dealership off Highway 94 are addressed to his "dear Christian friend" and offer special low prices to the faithful.

The ubiquitous fish symbol of Christianity graces his business cards.

"We're here to serve and to help people," said McClellan. "Christians need to use their resources in the best way possible."

Christian business owners are increasingly using the Good Book as a workplace manual, a phenomenon that some social activists worry could slight customers and workers who are less-than-true believers.

Christianity's influence can be seen at many businesses in San Diego County.

Some spiritually-minded businesspeople here greet clients with such salutations as "Do you know Jesus?" and "God loves you." Some kneel and pray before opening the store doors for the start of the workday. Many send along a modest percentage of their profits to the church. Others hang religious artifacts from their office walls.

Moreover, some are such good Samaritans that they go out of their way to help financially strapped clients who can't pay the full amount for goods, or who can't make timely payments on their accounts.

"God blesses me enough to be able to do that sometimes," said Paul Stecklair, the owner of Family Carpet and Draperies in La Mesa.

Never mind that some customers have berated him for spreading the Word a bit too aggressively, including using religious symbols in his advertising.

"One guy hammered me pretty good, even though he bought a lot of stuff from me," said Stecklair, whose family has operated the home-improvement business for more than 20 years. "He said I was unethical."

Just how many area companies are actively doing business in good faith is unclear. But several dozen firms boast the fish symbol in their ads in local telephone directories.

Across the country, more than 2,000 businesses belong to the Atlanta-based Fellowship of Companies for Christ International, which counsels owners on how to use the Bible as a workplace guide.

The organization's membership has jumped by more than 140 percent in the last 10 years.

"We bring people together in a peer-group setting to find Bible-centered alternatives to their business problems," said Neal Johnson, FCCI's Western regional director.

FCCI chapters, which meet once a week, may contend with such thorny on-the-job issues as workplace harassment, dishonest suppliers and staffing levels in a sluggish economy.

"We're not in this for networking," Johnson stressed. "But if business happens to occur ...."

Debate over mixing business and Christian interests was renewed by Chevrolet's sponsorship this month of the "Come Together and Worship Tour," which visited 16 cities and featured popular evangelical Christian speakers and musicians.

Although the tour sparked a boycott by the American Humanist Association, Chevrolet said its support of the event was a "logical extension" of the company's sponsorship of other music events and tours.

Studies conducted in recent years by Moody's Monthly, Augusta College researchers, and other analysts indicate that companies that adhere to Christian principles tend to grow in size and profit margins at almost double the rate of their secular counterparts.

Research has also found that Christians gravitate far more strongly to companies that are overtly religious in their marketing, whether a body shop or a beauty parlor.

But some social and legal activists believe that religion and the workplace should be kept as separate as church and state. They cite federal civil rights laws that forbid on-the-job religious discrimination.

Complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission about religious discrimination at work rose to 2,127 in 2001, up 2.6 percent from a year earlier and way up from 1,388 complaints in 1992.

However, the law also requires "reasonable accommodation" of religious practice in the workplace.

Guidelines that the Clinton administration issued in 1997 say employees, at least, have the right to express their beliefs, so long as they do not interfere with the rights of others. For example, employees can keep copies of the Bible or the Koran on their desks.

But it gets more legally tricky with bosses who mix God and the office.

The trouble is that employers don't know what their obligations and rights are, said Robert Fellmeth, director of the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego.

For instance, can an employer who is a devout Christian sponsor a prayer breakfast and make everyone come? Or can he offer price breaks only to customers who are members of his church?

If the presence of religious trappings at a business "implies adhering to higher ethical and moral standards, then I'm all for it," said Morris Casuto, director of the San Diego County Anti-Defamation League. "But it's the height of hubris to believe that one faith is any more moral than another. I would never patronize a business which would make me feel like a second-class citizen."

There have been many cases where companies doing business with the government have been penalized for religious or racial discrimination.

Bob Jones University, for one, lost its tax-free status as a religious college after it refused to drop its ban on interracial dating, citing Biblical references against the practice.

But there have been relatively few instances in which customers or employees successfully sued private independent businesses for practicing religious favoritism, Fellmeth said.

One such case involved the Christian Yellow Pages phone directory. In 1984, a California appellate panel ruled that the directory could not exclude ads for businesses owned and operated by non-Christians.

A civil rights suit was filed against the Modesto-based phone book by a Jewish businessman who was prohibited from advertising his religious tile import company.

In a 58-page opinion, the appeals panel upheld the non-discrimination decision of a lower court, but struck down the prohibition against publication of the "concept."

The ruling, one of several similar court opinions that year against the Christian Yellow Pages, forced the company to close shop in many of its 125 markets.

"We learned that as a business we couldn't restrict our marketing," said Dennis Hammond, national director for the firm.

Christian Yellow Pages now publishes 350,000 books in 20 markets, although not in San Diego County, with many of the listings featuring secular businesses.

The company has also introduced its first Web-based directory in Sacramento, which averages about 31,000 hits a day, Hammond said.

Hammond stressed that non-believers are warned up front that the company "reserves the right to spend any amount of money received for the propagation of the Lord Jesus Christ to buy Bibles and to promote Christianity."

Maybe the biggest hurdle in trying to serve both customers and the Lord is that some clients have higher expectations for the business than they would other enterprises.

They expect a firm with a fish symbol on the door to work harder – and cheaper – than its secular counterparts.

Some Christian companies complain that their faithful attitudes have sometimes been put to the test, even by suppliers who take advantage of them by making late deliveries and filling orders with inferior goods.

Customers also can hedge on making timely payments.

"They don't realize that we have families to support, too," said the owner of a contracting company.

But several owners stressed that they wouldn't feel right going to court to resolve their problems, because the Bible teaches a do-unto-others code.

Thus, some said that they are hurting more than most other companies during the current economic downturn, extra prayers or not.

What irks some businesspeople even more is that competitors who haven't been to church in years are using holier-than-thou marketing tactics to land business.

"There are a lot of business owners out there professing to be Christian who are not," said Stecklair of Family Carpet. "They're the type of people who have the fish symbol on their work truck, but then they run you off the road."

At New Directions Services, a promotional printing company, owner Bob Simmons is striving for a tighter connection to heaven for his business, if in understated ways.

Outwardly, most customers wouldn't know that the company is run on strict Christian principles, all the way down to how it handles matters with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Simmons holds Bible studies with some fellow business owners, and he and vendors often pray together at the company.

"There have been people praying and weeping in my office," he said.

Simmons is also a member of a religious peer group that includes a dozen like-minded associates who approach workaday problems with the question "How would Jesus do it?"

If it's trouble with, say, an employee who isn't attentive to his job, "we'll brainstorm about it and pray over it," he said.

Simmons said he sees his on-the-job ministering as being more important than that of a church pastor because it reaches a wider number of people.

He said he is aware that some of his employees are not believers, but he accepts their positions and finds working alongside them "exciting."

Only occasionally will Simmons approach a customer and, on a hunch, ask "Do you know the Lord?"

"I don't want to be perceived as using" Christianity to further business goals, he said.

Copyright 2002 Union-Tribune Publishing Co., Written by Frank Greene,   Content distributed by WorkLife.org > used for non-profit teaching purposes only.