In this episode Gina has a conversation with Mark Barlow about family, legacy and his journey trusting and learning the delight of obedience. Mark is a singer/songwriter and the Worship Pastor of Isla Vista Church in Santa Barbara.
Check out Mark’s music and ministry https://www.barkmarlow.com
Check out Isla Vista and the Jesus Burgers ministry https://islavistachurch.org
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Building Legacy
Gina:
Mark, thanks for joining me, and coming on this podcast. It’s very nice to meet you. This is the first time we’ve met. As I said before we started recording, I have been a fan of yours. I discovered you through Isla Vista and the Soul Hymns Project, and then your solo project after that Hymns and Souls. I really appreciate your ministry. I took a risk and reached out to you through Instagram, and you responded, and I so appreciate that. Thanks for being here.
Could you share a little bit of your journey? You are now with Isla Vista Worship in Santa Barbara. I would love people to hear the vision of that ministry, and the things that God’s doing there. I listened to a couple of podcasts that you’ve been on. You were sharing a story about you being one of seven, and then your dad was one of fourteen. There’s some lineage and legacy going on in your family.
Mark:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be here. Legacy would be a fun place to start. For me, family is the thing that gives music its purpose and meaning in my life. Because the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been family for all eternity, and then they adopted us in.
I guess to start, my grandparents on my dad’s side met in college. They met and they knew they wanted to change the world. They knew they couldn’t do it just the two of them, so they decided to have 12 disciples. They had a couple more, and ended up at 14.
They had two requirements of each of these kids and one of them was, “You’ll pay your way through college.” And the other one was, “You’ll learn guitar.” Every one of the 14 accomplished those two goals out of the vision in their heart to change the world. All 14 of those kids became world changers and so have the descendants in so many ways.
My mom and dad met in college as well, and I won’t go into a whole lot of their story. Basically this idea that family can change the world has been passed down and now I want a lot of kids one day. That would be incredible. My dad always says, “If you want to change the world right now, do something. If you want to change the world in a hundred years, have kids or write a book.”
Probably having kids is the most impactful way. My parents had all seven of us with that same intention that family can change the world. A couple things in our upbringing is that my parents legislated love. They said, “It doesn’t matter what comes between you guys, you guys are going to be best friends, and that’s that.”
Now all of us are best friends and we’re all really close and we don’t allow anything to come between us. We’re actually too adamant about clear communication for anything to turn into the silent treatment. My family is my favorite part about who I am.
I could talk about them forever and all of the amazing things that they’re doing, the things that they’re called, the way that they love people. They’re my heroes. I’m so proud to be associated with my family. For me, growing up a pastor’s kid was an incredible experience. All of my siblings would say that my parents did a really good job in covering us really well. They are no longer pastoring.
My mom and dad, as of last November, they passed off the church to my brother-in-law who had never seen himself becoming a pastor, but it was really clear that the grace was on him and that he was to be the next guy. The Lord actually spoke to my dad a really strong word after 16 years of pastoring. The Lord said, “I need you to step out of the way, so that I can do the impossible.” Because of his relationship with his dad. My dad responds to very fatherly words like that from the Lord.
Gina:
That’s a big deal. There’s a lot of people that I think would fight that. That speaks a lot to who he is.
Mark:
For a couple of years, a lot of us had been telling him, “Dad, I think you should move on from pastoring, because you need your heart to be fully alive.” But he stayed there out of faithfulness, and then the Lord spoke those words to him, and then he jumped out. When the people who you love and trust the most are all saying that the Lord is saying something and then you continue to sit tight until the Lord speaks it directly to you, there’s something to be said about that in specific situations.
There’s other situations where maybe we should pay attention to all the signs earlier on. But the fact that he was willing to lay down a vocational ministry career and financial security into a bunch of uncertainty and just trust the Lord with what’s next, “I’m not going to tell you where you’re going, but you’re going to leave.” But God has been faithful and has continued to provide and I’m standing in a place of intercession for what’s next for my parents, because both of them are so equipped for ministry, and they’re both 60.
I actually want them to come on tour with me, on my next tour, to be like an undercover ministry team. They came to one of my shows in Nashville recently and they just started loving people and blessing people, and they invited some of my fans out to dinner, and these people got totally impacted by getting to have my parents at my show.
That’s a dream in my heart, speaking back into the fact that family is everything. It brings so much purpose and passion to my music, and none of my albums would’ve been possible if it hadn’t been for the people who God has placed around me as family, supporting me, and loving me, and throwing down, in so many different ways for me to see these dreams in my heart come to pass, which really are just songs.
I just want songs from heaven to be poured out through my life. If the Word says that the streets in heaven are made of gold, that means that there were streets in heaven before there were streets on the earth. I just wonder what else is there? It just opens me up and wonder to like, is there new technology in heaven? Is there new songs in heaven? Is there wisdom in heaven that will answer the problems of the earth? Is there the key to every human heart?
I want to be somebody who listens. That’s one of my hopes and dreams for my life. I would say the biggest directive of my life is I really want people to see the Father for who He really is. I’m so thankful for my earthly father, we’re so close and there isn’t anything that I wouldn’t tell him. That open heart communication and status of trust has been built over a very long time.
I’m really thankful for him. But in the end, I know even his goal is to connect people to the Father. My dad actually told me recently, he said, “Mark, when I die, if people miss me, they might have missed the point of my life. Because the entire point was to connect them to the Lord.” And I thought, “Oh my gosh, that’s heavy.”
Gina:
Music was obviously big in your home.
Mark:
Yes, it was passed down from all of my aunts and uncles learning how to play guitar.
Gina:
Do all your siblings play or sing?
Mark:
Yes, we’re all musical. I would say I’m the only one who took the DNA and developed it into a career. All of us would’ve been capable of that. When I was four, I started learning piano because my dad was getting ready for work and then I said, “Dad, could you teach me a song on piano?”
He just sat down and played this little song and then he went to brush his teeth and he heard me plinking out the notes by ear, and then he was like, “Oh, something’s going on now.” Since then my relationship with piano has just been built through quality time and minimal training. Although the training I did get, I’m so thankful for, from Elsa Harris and Hayden Ashley.
They taught me a bit about close cord inversions, which really just helped me understand the key bed and get to know it better. But really, it’s just been quality time with the piano and building relationship with it.
Piano’s been a really close friend to me and that’s where the Lord has met me in so many unidentifiable negative emotions in my childhood that I didn’t know I needed help processing. I didn’t know that I was maybe low-key depressed at certain points and didn’t really have language for it, but the music did.
Growing up, we would all sing together as a family and learn multipart harmony. All of our Christmases and Thanksgivings and holidays are just all of us, and the extended family, all just singing and dancing together. Music is definitely in my blood and in the culture of my family. Then we went to this church in downtown Chicago called Living Word Christian Center and that’s where my dad was trained up for pastoral ministry and ordained.
It’s a big black megachurch with like 18,000 members, and my family was one of two white families there and that was our home for six years. That’s where my love for gospel and soul music came from. A lot of early soul and gospel forerunners, even to this day, there’s so many classics I have not heard, all of my heroes in that church that I was growing up in, were the ones who were in touch with that history.
I was just getting it on Sunday mornings in the form of an incredible world class band and a gospel choir. That seed was planted then and now it’s really one of the two or three genres of music that I’m really passionate about and find a lot of delight in.
Finding Family
Gina:
Most of your family’s in Chicago. How did you end up in California, especially with the significance of family in your life? The depth of legacy that you have, to choose to step away from that. And not that you’re stepping away from the family, but to go so far. What was that call? How did you connect with Isla Vista Worship and what was that journey like?
Mark:
I like that question. My parents, as we grew up, they always saw us as arrows and that one day would be launched. That was understood, and their hope and desire has always been that we would go further than they could ever reach. Let’s see, when I was 17, I had seen my mom, my dad, my sister, and my brother all go to this Bible College called Charis Bible College, and it was an extension school in Chicago, but the main campus is down in Colorado Springs.
I saw them all go to this Bible College post being ordained, and all of them wanted to just spend more time soaking in the grace of God. I saw Andrew Wommack teaching on the grace of God, transform my family in front of my eyes. All of a sudden there was more fruit of the Holy Spirit being born, left and right in our whole family culture.
Strife was always a really big deal in our home, and after going to Charis, strife started getting weakened and pulled down and that blew my mind. I thought, “I need this fruit in my life.” I decided to go and they had a two year program that I went to and graduated in 2014. For the first time in my life I looked at my calendar and I was like, “God, you can do whatever you want with my life and my time.”
September of 2014, I got a job offer in California, because my oldest brother was out here in Santa Barbara at the time, and had been here for 12 years. He offered me a job at this tech company that he was working at. He said, “If you want the job, we need you out here in three weeks.”
I moved out here and looked around for family and couldn’t really find a community of believers who saw the Father the same way, and believed that the Holy Spirit is real and is working in the earth through the gifts. A lot of people believe the fruit is real, but the gifts are not. Six months into my time in Santa Barbara, I got connected through random divine connections to Ryan Ellis, who was one of the Isla Vista worship leaders at the time.
He invited me over to the Jesus Burger’s house where he was living at the time, for the following Wednesday. I was like, “Okay!” It’s really hard to find parking here, and I walk up to the house, I knock on the door, they answered and let me in. Everybody was looking at me weird because I had knocked on the door. Apparently you just walk in.
It’s a very tight knit community, with an open door policy, like really strong neighborhood vibe here. That’s one of my favorite things about this place is how tight knit it is. Within 10 minutes of meeting all these people in that living room and worshiping and praying together, and praying in the Spirit and prophesying over one another, I thought, “This is my tribe. These are the people I’ve been waiting to meet my entire life.” This place has continued to be that home for me for the past eight years now. I’m so thankful.
The city is so cyclical and people move in and out all the time, and so it’s been a process of learning to hold people with open hands, friendships, ministry, partnerships, and expectations for the future. Everything is just open hands and there’s so many opportunities that have been offered to me here, but really I’m here on assignment from the Lord, and I can tell you about that in a second.
Check out the rest of this conversation: Does God Trust me?, Give Away My Love & Come Away With Me
Check out the Dwell Meditations
