The country's biggest Christian retail chain has launched a new initiative recruiting customers for missionary service.

Good Goers, described as a "joint adventure" of Family Christian Stores and its James Fund charity has announced 16 service trips taking participants to Mexico, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and parts of rural Oklahoma.

Centered on service projects such as building homes and working in orphanages, the trips are being led by Family personnel from the boardroom to the backroom.

Good Goers was established to further the work of The James Fund, which since it was founded in 2003 has sponsored mission trips with staff and given more than $2 million to organizations and projects supporting care of widows and orphans.

"By God's grace, more customers are engaging with the mission," says the new effort's Web site, www.goodgoers.com. "Vendors are graciously helping to raise more funds; even artists are lending their voices to the cause."

The first trips listing runs through October, with teams visiting children at an orphanage in Monterrey, Mexico, building houses in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, and serving at Oaks Indian Mission in the Cherokee Nation in Oaks, Okla. Open to those aged 13 and older, the trips cost from $500 to $900, excluding travel.

Among Family personnel profiled as experienced trip leaders at the Web site is President and CEO Cliff Bartow, who has made almost 20 mission journeys. Good Goers "provides the opportunity to tend to the needs of the less fortunate, share the love of Jesus Christ and have a great adventure as well," he says at the Web site.

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