MOBILE, ALABAMA—Chik-fil-A has an­nounced a new pi­lot study, ti­tled “One More Day”, at three Mobile, Alabama lo­ca­tions. The three se­lected fran­chises will hire part-time athe­ist em­ploy­ees to work one day a week, al­low­ing the fa­mously Christian or­ga­ni­za­tion to re­main open on Sundays.

“This ini­tia­tive will al­low us to serve all mem­bers of our com­mu­nity every day of the week, and still re­tain our con­vic­tions to honor the Lord’s Day,” said Cathy Belmont, Chik-fil-A pub­lic re­la­tions spokesman. “These work­ers of no faith will al­low us to honor our faith.”

Local evan­gel­i­cal pas­tors have been quick to crit­i­cize the move. “I just com­pleted a seven-week ser­mon se­ries on ‘Keeping the Sabbath’”, said Reverend Lincoln Hereford. “We had fi­nally com­mit­ted as a church to only eat canned foods on Sunday, but all of that progress has been erased by Chik-fil-A. How am I sup­posed to keep the flock away from crispy chicken sand­wiches af­ter the morn­ing ser­vice?” Reverend Hereford de­clined to com­ment when asked if he would be protest­ing the change with a boy­cott.

Chik-fil-A sees no con­flict. “The re­al­ity is that Christians like to go out for Sunday af­ter­noon lunch,” said Cathy Belmont. “Would it be bet­ter for them to pur­chase the burg­ers of this world, or to wor­ship God to­gether over a plate of waf­fle fries?”

Local Chik-fil-A man­age­ment is also in fa­vor of the move. “I will of course be on call every Sunday,” said Angus Kerry, man­ager at the Airport Boulevard fran­chise. “It will be a spir­i­tual hard­ship, but Chik-fil-A has worked with my sched­ule and re­mu­ner­a­tion to en­sure that I can shoul­der the bur­den.”

The man­ager does not fore­see any con­flict be­tween the cur­rent and in­com­ing em­ploy­ees. “With cross-train­ing and sched­ule sub­sti­tu­tions, it’s in­evitable that there will be some mix­ing of the em­ploy­ees,” said Mr. Kerry. “But all our full-time em­ploy­ees will go through sen­si­tiv­ity train­ing to learn how to in­ter­act with the new em­ploy­ees. And we will strongly dis­cour­age pros­e­ly­tiz­ing on the job to re­duce turnover in the non-faith-prac­tic­ing por­tion of our staff.”

Chik-fil-A has also faced re­newed crit­i­cism from syn­a­gogues and Seventh-Day Adventist churches. “We’ve held a few ral­lies to de­mand that Chik-fil-A close on Saturday,” said Pastor Bill Miller of Gilmore Creek Seventh-day Adventist Church of Mobile. “So this is def­i­nitely a set­back. But I’m tak­ing it as a sign to re­dou­ble our ef­forts.”

Other Christians see no prob­lem with work­ing on Sundays. Local pas­tor Moses Jones ex­plained, “Well, the Sabbath was ac­tu­ally on Saturday, and it only ap­plied to the Jews. There’s no rea­son a Christian could­n’t wor­ship God and work on Sundays.”

Cathy Belmont cau­tions crit­ics that this is only a pi­lot pro­gram and will not nec­es­sar­ily be con­tin­ued through­out the coun­try. “We’ll look at the num­bers af­ter the trial, and who knows? Maybe we’ll draw some cus­tomers that would never darken the door of a church. To me, that would be a suc­cess.”

I got the idea for this ar­ti­cle back when Babylon Bee took sub­mis­sions. Unfortunately, they now only pub­lish ar­ti­cles writ­ten by their paid con­trib­u­tors.