George Commons keeps returning to a single verse: 1 Corinthians 3. It's the passage about every person's work being tested by fire, with only gold and precious stones surviving the flames. George first heard a coworker describe a dream about that verse at an AT&T Bell Labs Bible study more than 40 years ago, and he's been measuring his life against it ever since. Today he runs the Barnabas Group Kansas City, a ministry to ministries built around Christian business leaders who want to use their strategic skills for something that lasts.
What You'll Hear
- What the Barnabas Group Kansas City is and why Sam calls it a Christian version of Shark Tank for ministries
- How a noontime Bible study at AT&T Bell Labs in the early 1980s shaped George's faith
- The 1 Corinthians 3 dream that a coworker shared in that Bible study and why George never forgot it
- Bob Shank's three tiers of work life: survival, success, and significance
- The two-person confirmation prayer George prayed before launching the Kansas City chapter, and how God answered it
- Calling convergence: the intersection of marketplace skills, spiritual gifts, and life experience
- Why George thinks the next move of God may be through the marketplace, echoing Billy Graham
- The Austin, Texas, RV park community that a faith coalition built for the homeless
A ministry to ministries, and the room that made Sam feel it
Sam opens by thanking George for the Barnabas Group before George even gets to introduce it. A friend had invited Sam to a meeting, he walked into a room full of Kansas City business people and ministry leaders working together, and something about the combination of business and faith under one roof landed with him. He caught the annual banquet, so he saw a full year's worth of impact condensed into one evening.
George then explains the group in his own words. The Barnabas Group is a ministry to ministries. It's made up of Christian business people who believe God gave them gifts of strategy, vision, planning, engineering, business development, marketing, and networking, and who want to use those same gifts for the kingdom, not just for their companies.
The format has been described as a Christian version of Shark Tank. Ministries present. Business leaders in the room invest something more valuable than money: time, experience, and talent. George says a God thing happens at every meeting, and he sounds like he means it literally. He's watched the group touch many lives in Kansas City, and his posture is one of a man who keeps stepping back so he can watch it work.
A Bible study at AT&T Bell Labs and the verse that stuck
Sam pivots away from the usual high school origin story and asks George for his testimony. George was raised in a church but didn't attend often. He had a reverence for God without a deep knowledge of the Bible. After college, his first job was as an engineer at AT&T Bell Labs in the telecommunications space. They held a noontime Bible study at work. He signed up.
That study is where he came to faith and where his life verse found him. A coworker walked in one day and shared a dream from the night before. He'd dreamed he was in heaven, standing before Jesus, with a pile of his life's work beside him. Fire was put to it. Nothing was left. The man was describing 1 Corinthians 3. George says he can still picture the meeting room more than 40 years later.
George eventually led the AT&T Christian Fellowship at an R and D campus in Illinois. Roughly 700 of the site's 5,000 employees participated. They ran Bible studies in every building, prayer meetings, and lunchtime films in the auditorium. George notes that this kind of workplace Christian expression is rarer at large corporations today than it was in the early 1980s. Smaller businesses owned by believers still make room for it.
At one point early on, George told his pastor he needed to quit engineering and become a pastor, because surely that was the only way to really serve God. His pastor told him he didn't need to. Stay where you are, serve God in your work, and other opportunities will open up later. That advice shaped the next 40 years.
Survival, success, significance, and the work that survives the fire
George walks Sam through a framework he learned from his mentor Bob Shank, the co-founder of the Barnabas Group. Picture a pyramid. The base is survival, the work you do to pay the mortgage and keep the bills current. Above that is success, where you climb the ladder, build the bigger business, get promoted, and grow. A smaller group of people reach that tier.
The top of the pyramid is significance. George is careful with the language here. Success can be achieved. Significance can only be pursued. Success gets rewarded in this life, and mostly gets taxed. Significance is measured by Jesus at the threshold of eternity, which is exactly what 1 Corinthians 3 is describing.
George then quotes the verse. Gold, silver, and costly stones survive the fire. Wood, hay, and straw don't. The day will bring every person's work to light. George says too many of us, even believers, spend our time producing wood, hay, and straw, then look around one day and realize we never carved out margin for the jewels.
That word margin keeps coming back in the conversation. George frames it as a stewardship question. Time is the most valuable thing God has given us. Where do we spend it? Bob Shank built his construction company by deliberately training his team to replace him, which eventually freed him to do ministry full time. George did the same thing in a different form. While running global sales for a billion-dollar software company, he put in several thousand volunteer hours building the Barnabas Group before work, at lunch, after work, and on weekends. If God calls you to something, it's probably going to cost a little sacrifice and creativity. That's the deal.
The two-person confirmation and how God sent Rick
Sam asks the question every leader sits with at some point. How do you tell the difference between God's direction and your own ambition wearing a spiritual label? George gives a few markers. The Holy Spirit brings peace. Hesitation or unease is worth taking seriously. Sometimes a friend, a Bible verse, or an explicit answered prayer makes the direction clear.
Then he tells the story. When George and his wife were preparing to move to Kansas City, he started imagining a Barnabas Group chapter there. He caught himself. That was George's idea. He hadn't actually asked whether it was God's idea. So he prayed a specific prayer: God, if this is from you, please confirm it through two people who will not only affirm it but come alongside and help build it.
At his last Kansas City Barnabas meeting in Chicago before the move, he ran into a missionary he knew, home from Pakistan, living in Springfield, Missouri, who happened to be in Chicago that day. George told him about the Kansas City idea. The missionary paused, said he believed God was in it, and volunteered to drive up from Springfield to help build it. He now serves on the board and still drives up for meetings.
Confirmation two came a couple months after the move. A friend told George to look up Rick Box, who leads the Unconventional Business Network Worldwide Ministry based in Overland Park. George met Rick at the UBN annual conference at the Overland Park Convention Center. Rick looked at him and said, oh, you're the guy they sent. I've been waiting for you. Rick had asked the Barnabas Group founders for someone to start a Kansas City chapter more than five years earlier. Nobody had mentioned it to George. George took that as the second yes.
Calling convergence, staying in your lane, and the marketplace move of God
Sam pushes on a real tension. The Bible says much is expected from those given much, but not every opportunity is actually yours. How do you filter? George reaches back to Bob Shank again and gives two filters.
The first is calling convergence. It's the intersection of your marketplace skills, your spiritual gifts, and your life experience. For George, that intersection is connecting Christian business leaders to ministries, ministries to ministries, and one leader to another for the sake of a ministry. That's his sweet spot. He frames it like a batter learning which pitches to swing at.
The second filter is uniqueness of design. God made each person distinctly. Bob Shank once told George that if you're doing a job, in ministry or at work, that the people around you could also do, it's probably not the right job for you. You're meant to operate in the narrow place only you can fill. George uses both filters together. He also borrows a line from Bob Buford's book Halftime, which Buford called a journey from success to significance: launch trial probes. Try things. Dip a toe in. Let clarity dial in like a microscope.
George then widens the lens to the broader moment. The late Billy Graham said near the end of his life that he believed the next move of God would come through the marketplace. George thinks that's the hour we're in. Faith-at-work networks are growing. Christian business leaders are taking responsibility for problems their cities can't solve alone: homelessness, human trafficking, foster care gaps, childhood reading, youth violence. George points to an RV park in Austin, Texas, that a faith coalition acquired and converted into a neighborhood of tiny homes, a hydroponic garden, a jewelry business, an art studio, a hair salon, and a movie theater, all sponsored by businesses. The city was impressed enough that it offered more land for a second one.
He also pushes on the word church. In Greek, it's ecclesia. George argues that there's no real line between sacred and secular for a believer. The work done in the marketplace is ecclesia too. That's why people in the Barnabas Group often feel more connected to their group than to their Sunday congregation. Same faith, different expression, same assignment.
About George Commons
George Commons is the managing partner of the Barnabas Group Kansas City, a ministry to ministries built around Christian business leaders investing time, strategy, and experience into kingdom-focused ministries. Trained as an engineer at AT&T Bell Labs, he later served as Vice President of Global Sales for Business Partner Development at a billion-dollar software company in the AI and IT automation space. He helped launch the Chicago chapter of the Barnabas Group and served on its board for more than 15 years before moving to Kansas City. Barnabas Group