(Editor’s Note:  Franchise owner Erik Devriendt and his wife, Kate, are members of Grace Community (PCA) in Mechanicsville, VA (Erik is a Deacon) and are – along with their two young children – part of the launch team that is planting a daughter congregation in the city to be known as Northside Church of Richmond.)

As the Chick-fil-A at a shopping center in west Richmond prepares for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day—the newest salvo in a culture-war feud over gay marriage and free speech—some employees, like Jirom, have other reasons to appreciate their fast-food employer.

A native of Eritrea, Jirom moved to the United States in 2008 to be with his fiancée, whose family had left the isolated African country several years prior. Like most of the 60,000 refugees who arrived in the U.S. that year, he had little money and few relationships to land on his feet. But a Christian couple, inspired by their church’s sponsorship of a large Burmese family, decided to open their doors. They gave Jirom a room and one of their cars, helped him and his fiancée navigate marriage paperwork, and enrolled him in a local GED program. And then they employed him: Jirom now works full-time at the Westchester Commons Chick-fil-A, where Spanish, Nepali, Burmese, Tigrinya, and Amharic are spoken to a suburban clientele ordering fried chicken nuggets and waffle fries.

The fast food restaurant of a thousand lands is the work of Erik Devriendt, the owner/operator of this Chick-fil-A since June 2011. Since moving to Richmond in 2006, Devriendt has wielded his vocational skills to address the needs of Richmond’s refugee population: namely, steady and life-giving employment.

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(Editor’s Note:  Franchise owner Erik Devriendt and his wife, Kate, are members of Grace Community (PCA) in Mechanicsville, VA (Erik is a Deacon) and are – along with their two young children – part of the launch team that is planting a daughter congregation in the city to be known as Northside Church of Richmond.   Erik and Kate met at James Madison University working with Young Life and have been involved in a variety of ministries in Huntersville, NC, Athens, GA and now in Richmond.)