Barry Rowan encountered God on a mountaintop in 1985. His wife, Linda, encountered God in the trenches of motherhood. They both felt an unmistakable calling from God to integrate and infuse their daily lives with the divine.
The couple met in college. Each had grown up with a Christian faith, and they carried the tradition of regular church attendance into their marriage. But there was always a division between their faith and their everyday work and family lives. God was relegated to the walls of the church. They longed to live integrated lives, one life under God.
Barry’s career in helping to build and sell technology-driven companies was successful by any worldly standards. He served in C-suite roles in eight different companies, four of which were publicly traded. Linda was just as career oriented, if not more so. In fact, Linda’s career in finance was so successful, her paycheck was larger than Barry’s for most of the years she worked.
But, despite all the success in business, God was stirring in Barry a longing for something deeper. He found he could not stop ruminating on a series of big, unsettling, life questions:
Why am I alive?
By what measure will I judge a successful life?
What is a successful life?
That’s when God met him on a mountaintop.
An integrated faith
Over Labor Day weekend that same year, Barry attended an adult Young Life weekend in Colorado. Sitting atop a mountain, looking out at the vast stillness and peacefulness of God’s creation, the harmony of nature revealed an unbearable disharmony inside Barry. “I wasn’t willing to go on living a divided life,” Barry says.
Barry came home from this mountain retreat and spent the next eight months reading all he could about God and Christianity. Then, over the next eight years, he journaled 350 pages trying to answer those big life questions and searching to find meaning in work.
During the same time period, Linda was experiencing success and joy in her career and was surprised to feel the Lord calling her to stay home to focus on raising their sons, Mark and David. God began to reveal to Linda that she could bring her skills as a CPA and a corporate financial leader into this next phase of her life as an active mom, ultimately serving on school capital campaigns, non-profit boards, and in event planning.
When she was in corporate America, Linda would take time off with her team each year to do strategic planning for the next year. “I thought, why am I not bringing the same level of intentionality to raising our sons?” she says.
She left her corporate job and poured all her expertise into the work of raising their sons, even taking time off to spend a strategic weekend away each year. During this intentional time, Linda spent time alone with God, praying and listening. She re-centered on God’s intentions for raising Mark and David and what they needed to be working on over the next year.
Barry admits his process of learning how God wanted him to integrate his whole life into a transcendent faith was less gracious than Linda’s. He came “kicking and screaming into the kingdom of heaven.” But one of the great gifts of their marriage, Barry says, “was coming to a surrendered faith at the same time through very different journeys.”
A holy calling
Through his reading and writing, Barry came to see that God does not define a successful life in the same way Barry’s experience in corporate America had led him to define it. Barry realized success is not in building the biggest company or earning more and more money; success is found (as John the Baptist tells us in John 3:30) in becoming less so God becomes more, and Christ is expressed in all we do.
“God completely transformed my perspective of work,” Barry says. “The fundamental purpose of business is to serve.”
As his perspective began to shift, Barry landed on four major ways God can use business as a vessel for serving his kingdom: responsible value creation, serving customers, creating healthy work environments, and being a good corporate citizen. “I had the input pipe and the output pipe hooked up backwards,” Barry says. “I was trying to derive meaning from my work instead of bringing meaning to the work.”
Barry and Linda got to know NCF’s Kendra VanderMeulen as Barry was helping start the Center for Faithful Business at Seattle Pacific University and invited Kendra to serve on the board. When Barry and Linda had questions about the most faithful way to use shares of their publicly traded company, Kendra was able to thoughtfully walk them through the process of setting up a Giving Fund so they could gift their shares.
Nearly 40 years after those initial steps of faith, Barry and Linda now focus their giving on three areas: the family, alleviating poverty, and Christ-centered leaders called to live fully for God in the world. “Building businesses in ways that honor God is just as holy as bringing clean water to the rural poor in Central America or supporting a local school,” Barry says.
The meaning of work
Like Linda, Barry began taking intentional time away with God. What started with 10 minutes a day turned into an hour a day, then a week-long silent retreat each year. “It started as a discipline and then grew into a craving,” Barry says. “I would describe it now as a responsibility, because if I don’t get that time alone with God, I’m kind of out of whack.”
Now retired and with their kids out of the house, Barry recently went on a month-long silent retreat. He says it was the most profound and life-giving month of his life. “It was far from silent,” Barry says. “I wrote 375 pages during that time. It was a very active conversation with God.”
For Barry and Linda, it started with surrender. They gave their lives, their careers, and their ideas of success to God and gave him permission to do his work through them – in the home, raising their sons, and in business. “As we surrender,” Barry says, “we become less so that he can become more, and, in fact, we become nothing, so that he can pour himself into us and then into the world.”
While some are called to pastoral work or the mission field or serving as doctors and teachers, Barry believes the calling from God he encountered on that mountaintop was to integrate his daily work with the divine, something he and Linda call the spiritual art of business.
“I think it can be just as holy, just as important, and just as noble a calling as any of those other callings,” Barry says. “It’s a matter of bringing the right perspective to every moment in a way that then animates our entire lives and those of the people we work with.”
