NEW YORK, NY December 07, 2003 — Despite Sunday sermons urging Americans to exchange shopping at the mall for rest and reflection, fewer and fewer people are taking a break. Recently, the country's largest Christian retail chain began opening its doors on Sundays. WNYC's Fred Mogul went shopping.

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While a VCR plays Biblical cartoons in the corner of the Bronx outlet of Family Christian Stores, customer Myrta Saez browses for inspirational literature. It's Sunday afternoon, and until recently, she wouldn't have been able to shop here at this time. She says the old policy never made sense for her lifestyle.

Saez: Sunday's the day you go to church - and then you go to shop.

While more and more retail shopping occurs seven-days-a-week, one expert estimates that fewer than 10 percent of Christian religious stores operate on Sundays. Having that day off was one of the things sales clerk Jennifer Lopez liked about her job at Family Christian Store.

Lopez: I honestly feel Sunday is a day for church only. So I didn't get fed today, normally, the way I would if I was in church.

Corporate officials in Grand Rapids, Michigan, anticipated receiving criticism for the move - and possible objections from employees. The company produced a video for workers.

Hi, I'm Dave Browne, president and CEO of Family Christian Stores God truly wants us to be both a world-impacting ministry and a world-class business.

In the video, Browne - the former CEO of LenseCrafters -- describes praying and fasting over the decision to open Sunday afternoons. He introduces a theologian who explains that while the Fourth Commandment does enjoin believers not to work, the Christian Bible effectively supersedes that commandment. Dave Neff, senior editorial writer at Christianity Today, says he's no theologian, but he thinks a holy day of rest is more important than a holy day of commerce.

People are gonna be a sort of seduced into going in and not just buying something that might be essential but looking at Christian greeting cards or Christian table games or Christian video games or any number of things that really are not about essential Christian ministry.

Christian Family Stores Executive Vice President Hal Bailey says the company only wants to minister to its customers. Many of them used to say they wished the stores were open on Sundays.

Bailey: They hear about a book or some type of a story related to music or whatever the case may be, and they want to go out and get it now.

Bill Anderson, president of the Christian Booksellers Association, says the retailers he represents are seeing increasing encroachment from stores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble.

Anderson: Some of their prime customers are going from church to restaurant and from restaurant to shopping, and some of that shopping is taking place in some of the big-box stores and discount stores and so forth, and it certainly does prompt the question in the Christian retailer's mind: Are we not missing the opportunity to serve our prime customers better?

Family Christian Stores says employees who don't want to work on Sunday for religious reasons can formally request an exemption. None of the workers in the Bronx store were aware of the option. Corporate executive Hal Bailey hopes they'll come to see this shift as serving spiritual needs - the same way ministers, also, don't get to take Sundays off. Then, perhaps, there will be more scenes like one in a Kansas City store, where on a recent Sunday a woman Bailey calls an unbeliever stopped in to buy a Bible and soon sought counsel from the sales manager

Bailey: and she was able to just kneel right there with her in the Bible department and pray and she accepted Christ and bought a Bible and those kind of things just confirm that we're doing the right thing.

Bailey says the new hours have not proved financially profitable yet, but he hopes they will in the future.