A Spiritual Art of Business

By Barry Rowan, September 6th

As the executive director of the Center for Faithful Business, I am grateful for Barry Rowan’s deep commitment to live out his faith in business through multiple senior executive roles in public and private companies, and for his decades-long engagement with the work of our Center. Barry served as a Trustee of Seattle Pacific University from 2000-2009 and was a founding investor and Chair of the Board for our precursor, The Center for Integrity in Business, from 2008-2011. He is now one of CFB Fellows. Today Barry reviews his just-released book “The Spiritual Art of Business: Connecting the Daily with the Divine.” He writes:

I am honored to have The Center for Faithful Business showcase our book during this week of its launch. This book was birthed out of my own struggle to find meaning in work after coming to a surrendered faith out of a crisis of meaning in work. A steely will and a deep longing for God lived under a fragile treaty within me since my earliest years. Over nearly twenty years and hundreds of pages of scrawling in my journals, I came to realize I had it backward: I was trying to derive meaning from my work rather than bringing meaning to our work. And having God’s perspective of our work is the source of its ultimate meaning.

We long to live a life of significance including the approximately 100,000 hours of work we will engage in throughout our careers. The good news is that God uses our work to do his work in us. As we submit the clay of our souls to the strong and loving thumbs of the Potter, we are transformed by him, allowing God to transform the world through us. God wants to empty us of our selves so God can fill us with God’s self and pour himself, who is love, into the world.

This book of forty guided meditations is not so much a book to be read as an invitation to enter into a conversation with God. The short chapters include myriad examples of where I had it so wrong for so long. Through the reflection questions, I hope you, too, can develop a life-giving perspective of your work as seen through the eyes of God. Starting with surrender as the gateway to freedom, our work lives will be animated by his presence as our work is transformed from drudgery to gift. For we are not what we do. What we do is an expression of who we are. If you’d like to learn more or engage directly, please contact me at https://barrylrowan.com. Enjoy the journey!