When we began our quest for the spirituality of work and commerce, our question was: Why for heavens sake had we—and most everyone we knew—conceded this unnatural separation of spirituality from business? We had to consider the possibility that we were wrong . . . maybe there was a natural division . . . . We decided the only way to know was to read the Bible from cover to cover in search of some thread connecting the two. If it wasn’t there, fine. We would know we were on our own. But what if we did find a thread of spirituality in work and commerce? What then?

The thread was there alright, and it wasn’t hard to follow. We could only conclude that we had overlooked it because we weren’t looking—or we had depended on others for our spiritual formation and they weren’t looking. Either way, we missed it and we were determined to take responsibility for our own progress going forward.

What followed was the shocking discovery that our lives—and the lives of most of our friends—were thus lived in voluntarily compartmentalization: work, worship, family, friendship, health, wealth, intellect, sex…all siloed.

This was a blinding insight. One day someone connected the root meaning of disintegration with the “loss of integrity”—dis-integration—and BAM! The lights came on for all of us at once. Several of us worked in industries where integrity was reduced to regulatory compliance minus whatever the company could get away with. Ethics? Spirituality? You gotta be kidding…

None of us chose to do business that way because none of us wanted to do business that way. But there we were, surrounded by others who either surrendered their integrity or, like us, often felt like they were holding on for dear life. We craved integration, full and complete, so no part of our lives would ever again seem detached from the rest. So, having come that far together, we decided to gather four times a year to study the biblical texts and tell our stories and share our lives. We pledged to create a safe place where each of us could describe where we truly were in our work and relationships and spiritual health (as distinct from where we thought we should be).

The process was transforming. Our companies didn’t suddenly emerge as industry leaders, our relational difficulties weren’t instantly ironed out, the money didn’t flow like water but we were changed just the same by the re-integration of our lives. And bit by bit we went deeper than we’d gone before in relationships, in intimacy with God and in business spiritually engaged.

The farther we travelled, the more evidence we saw that others longed to set out on the same journey.

It seemed only natural that we would organize our insights on spirituality and work in some kind of guide that others could follow—not a lot of hand-holding; just pounding stakes in the ground and planting flags here and there so people could follow (and improvise around) our trail.

None of us quit our day jobs, so our writing about all this stretched over several years. It was tough going. Most of us came from religious backgrounds of one sort or another. Now, having examined the Bible from the position of people in business we had to fight the impulse to reduce what we were learning about spirituality and work to…we might as well say it: Sunday School lessons. Not that there’s anything wrong with Sunday School, but these were the hard won insights of businesspeople searching out meaning where we had assumed there was very little for people like us. What we were finding out in direct encounters with the biblical text bore little resemblance to our experiences in conventional religious education. Perhaps that’s just our experience; maybe you go to a better Sunday School than we did.

In any event, we did our best to stay honest to the context of business and commerce as we developed (and continue to develop) what came to be called the Scriptural Roots of Commerce and the company we call InsideWork®, where we continue to prove in a business context what we have come to embrace with our minds and believe in our hearts.

If any of this rings true, I hope you’ll join us on this great adventure in the spiritual roots of work and commerce.

Allan Lunsford is co-founder, chairman and CEO of InsideWork®. He is also President of Lunsford Group, a privately held investment holding company consisting of a series of privately held, independently owned entities in real estate, software, media, demographics, health care and the Internet. All is a speaker at the More Than Money conference, July 17-19, 2009 in San Francisco.