Leading the devotional time Wednesday morning at CBA’s two-day NEXT training event in Atlanta, Mark Hutchinson—president of the Canadian chain Blessings based in Chilliwack, B.C.—encouraged Christian retailers in their “business-enabled ministry.”

With ministry in mind, Hutchinson reminded retailers to be careful of “too much Christianese.”

“We must be able to engage and relate to the person on the street,” he said. “People buy people before they buy any product or service.”

Along with maintaining integrity “at all costs,” Hutchinson recalled the importance of courtesy in customer service.

“Kindness will be remembered for a long time,” he noted, emphasizing the point that “your service is the only thing that your competitor can’t copy.”

Hutchinson also offered a word of encouragement and affirmation to retailers: “Sometimes we focus so much on our weaknesses that we forget about our strengths.”

Conducting business in a systematized way is also important, he said, because God is not a God of confusion (I Cor. 14:33): “The devil is in the details, but the success is in the systems.”