What does the Christian adjective mean for products and services?

From time to time along the streets or on the highway billboards the word Christian is prefixed to a business or organization. There seem to be a couple of different meanings in the choice of this adjective instead of something possibly with similar meaning. The are Christian radio stations, Christian schools, Christian counseling services, but a look at the Internet for "Christian products" or "Christian service providers" or "Christian health care" will probably turn up other examples. Here is one from flickr.com "creative commons" https://www.flickr.com/photos/janetmck/1288328208

 Perhaps there are a few common denominators in all these or at least many of them, both for the person looking for a certain type of service or business, and for the person is offering same. In the eyes of the seeker, the word 'Christian' could stand for "I can trust that Worldly gain is not the primary driver" and "the people who will be serving me will take a personal and friendly interest in my welfare, so I can relax my normal cautiousness to trust all will be God's Will" and "I can expect some familiar Christian touch-points or common references such as music, symbols, calendar events, decorations, absence of crude language or personal displays." In such an environment, then, a seeker may feel free to express religious quotations, reasoning, or reflections. And by implication, all the many other competing businesses and services and products can be painted with the contrary brush to characterize them for deficiencies expected of the Christian ones.

Some of the same assumptions and intentions described above may also be in the mind of the provider of services and products where Christian is part of the business name, or is undeclared, but is signaled through prominent religious symbols, names, words, music and conversation elements. It is difficult to know if the balance of meaning is heavier on the heart of the seeker, or in the intentions of the business or professional who openly identifies in the Christian (or Jewish, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Muslim?) label. In other words, rather than equally matching the business person's effort and purposes of living out their Christianity in the workplace relationships with the seeker's desire for providers and spaces where they can be among fellow believers/followers of the Jesus Christ model and redemption, perhaps seeing the label and expecting something different to ordinary commercial ways is more important to the seeker than to the provider; or the reverse, that for the business model and in the owner's eyes as well as those of the workers, perhaps being Christian in action, word, and thought is more strongly motivating than it is among the clients.

How ever far things have come from Jesus' time and place in the world. Now the traditions, teachings, and examples are studied and spoken and sometimes lived out across the planet. Far from being a persecuted fringe, ever since the time of the Roman Emperor adopting the Jesus movement as his own, the machinery and hierarchy has developed. And now in the age of capitalism there is a Christian layer, too. Perhaps Jesus would sign up for a loyalty card at a Christian Coffee House, attend Bible Study at a Brew-Pub, or shop online among places declaring they tithe each month's profit to a given cause. Then again, maybe Jesus would instead head to the hills for 40 days to reflect and cast off the consumer preoccupations and daily cares in order to leave some prime mental space for seeking God's word and will. No celebrity endorsement will likely to be forthcoming.

so many facets reflect in the morning light

At the Tuesday morning Men's Bible Study we pressed onward in the pages of Acts, chapter 2.

Normally we get through a good deal of a chapter each week, but sometimes there is so much tinder that we can start all sorts of fires to see the world by. This week was filled with conversations across diverse subjects: primary purpose of marriage (or is analytical ranking and splitting a legacy of the Greek system of thinking from long ago; whereas the truer grasp of the field of meaning is a totality, not distillable into isolated elements; perhaps marriage is a totality, not something with primary and secondary and terciary meanings or intentions), salvation (a New Testament preoccupation; but where are the analogs in Old Testament; or for that matter among today's Jews? Muslims?), new Christians who can handle 'the milk' but not 'the meat' yet (would it be meaningless to talk about Spiritual Maturity at the earliest opportunity, or just to bask in glory and comfort of the Holy Spirit), intersection of Spiritual Growth models to ones from Freud (ego, id, superego) and Jung (unconscious well of being), the tension of comprehending or even grasping at God's infinity versus the impossibility of doing so by mortals, taking God's name in vain (hitched to one's own purposes or claims). Other tangents escape me, now 36 hours later.

How do you spell Holy?

During college the power of word roots proved itself again and again. Raymond Williams' book, Keywords (middle 1970s) made a big impression, as did an article by the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner in studying ritual process and language. Turning to 'Holy' there are overlapping semantic fields and historical intersections with holy, whole, hale, heal, healthy, hallowed. In other words bodily health (or departure from same) has something to do with wholeness and holiness. There is a mind-body connection that many have seen with their own eyes.
     Taking a same word-root approach to righteousness, there is another string of words that shade from one into the other as they cross adjacent fields of meaning. The words true (as in truth; also as in straight line or in-tune), right, just, good, fair, and beautiful form a chain of meanings that touch on lexical terrain of geometrical angle, justice, aesthetics, morals, and godliness. So, at least in the case of English there is a chain that connects these foundations of human value and aspiration.
     It would be instructive to compare near neighboring languages of Dutch, French, but also Latin, Greek, Persian, Hindi; then jump to languages far from the Indo-European families such as Chinese, Indonesian, Korean, or a Polynesian, Australonesian, or Bantu set of terms.