HONORING
GOD WITH CHICK-FIL-A

Topics: Business; Character; Giving; Integrity; Ministry; Obedience; Sabbath; Work

References: Matthew 25:34–40; James 1:22

Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A restaurants, is a successful businessman, but many know and respect him more for how faith guides his work.

For example, Cathy’s restaurants have been closed on Sundays since 1948. The seventy-nine-year-old CEO of the nearly one thousand Chick-fil-A restaurants doesn’t mind losing millions of dollars of business to honor the Lord’s Day.

Also, at his first restaurant in 1948, Cathy hired Eddie J. White, twelve, an African-American. This was an unpopular choice during a time of segregation. Cathy also mentored an orphan, Woody Faulk, from the time Woody was thirteen. Woody eventually became vice president of product development at Chick-fil-A.

Cathy also developed a successful foster home system called WinShape Homes. There are now eleven homes in the United States and one in Brazil. His daughter Trudy and son-in-law John were Southern Baptist missionaries at the Brazil home for ten years. His Camp WinShape and the WinShape Foundation provide scholarships for kids and college students.

One of Cathy’s favorite sayings is “It’s easier to build boys and girls than to mend men and women.” So Chick-fil-A Kids Meals don’t come with promotional toys from the latest popular movie; instead, they offer VeggieTales books, audiocassettes of Focus on the Family’s “Adventures in Odyssey,” and other character-building materials.

Woody Faulk gives a good summary of Cathy’s character: “A lot of people look on Truett as Santa Claus, but he’s not. He’ll meet you halfway so that you can learn a lesson from the process. He’s the personification of James 1:22: ‘Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.’ I sincerely owe my life to that man.”

—Tom Neven, “A Doer of the Word,” Focus on the Family Magazine (September 2000)