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A Knoxville pastor takes Christ to the marketplace in a big way

by Barry Henderson

Paul Cowell is a preacher who created his own church. He’s also an entrepreneur who started and built up his own businesses. He is a charismatic in both his pastoring and his business dealings. And he put much of his effort into those businesses, two of which became Knoxville success stories and made him millions of dollars. Those successes, Book Warehouse and Shop At Home Network, are still flourishing without him, but he made them go and grow on what now seems sheer force of will.

At 63, he’s approaching retirement age, and he’s living out a dream to put the money those businesses earned him into a retreat for ministers, missionaries, and anyone else who needs to get away to relax and be pampered in a peaceful, comfortable setting.

That setting is Whitestone. It’s a lodge, a bed & breakfast, a church-sized chapel, a stable, a restaurant/dining room and a resort. It overlooks an expanse of Watts Bar Lake in the tiny Paint Rock community in Roane County. It’s a world-class resort he and his wife founded on Christian principles on 360-plus acres that they acquired with the proceeds of 14 businesses he bought and sold, mostly in Knoxville, over the past 25 years, It has earned four diamonds in the AAA ratings for such resorts, one of only six such AAA recommendations in Tennessee. It’s a minor miracle, although its creation was hardly miraculous. Cowell sees it as the product of lots of hard work, divinely inspired. He’s still working hard at perfecting it, and it’s why no one who knows Cowell expects him ever to retire,

How it came into being is a story that goes back to Cowell’s childhood, and it’s a story worth retelling.
 

He grew up on a West Tennessee dairy farm in the 1940s. He was a spiritual kid in a spiritual family, he says. “I grew up in a church that preached against everything,” he says with a gleam in his eye, “so I didn’t do much, but I thought about a lot.” A Sunday-school teacher in his early teens, he came from a family that expected him to become a minister of the Gospel, and he did. After two years at Union University in nearby Jackson, he went on to Conquerors Bible College in Portland, Ore., and was ordained a Pentecostal minister there in 1963. The church returned him to Tennessee as interim pastor of a church in Parsons, a community along the Tennessee River, where he lasted about six months.

“They threw me out,” he says. “I wasn’t conservative enough for them, and they knew it, and I knew it. But I already had plans to start an interdenominational church in Knoxville.” He moved his family here and founded and pastored Christ Chapel on Cedar Lane in Fountain City, where his first congregation grew to about 400 people in his 17 years there. “Without denominational support, I had to pay for everything,” he says. “I worked for Lowe’s, bought school buses, ran a catering truck, selling lunches to the folks at Plasti-Line in Powell, and I put a little printing press in our basement and began printing items for people who needed short runs and couldn’t afford a big printing bill—pizza boxes, bags and menus and so forth.”

He bought a bookshop at 18th and Clinch in Fort Sanders in 1971 and moved it to the Cumberland Avenue strip in 1975 as Logos, a Christian bookstore. That brought him into contact with many University of Tennessee students and faculty members. Once there, the popularity of his non-denominational pastorate led him and his congregation to buy a former Methodist church at 16th and Highland in 1980.

Leaving the Fountain City church intact, he affiliated with the Chicago-based International Council of Community Churches and later changed its name to Bethesda Christian Fellowship. The Fort Sanders neighborhood church is called Christ Chapel, and its membership of about 500 includes a number of UT students and faculty. He continued to dabble in business, investing in an accounting software company in South Knoxville and a firm called Tennessee Door Co., producers of hollow metal doors. He also bought a small shopping center on Merchants Drive in a deal in which its Dutch owners wanted out of it so badly they let him take it over for no money down, he says.

Through his bookstore, which he sold in 1982, he made contacts with publishing houses, including religious book publishers in Nashville. He became a partner in that business with Dugan Publishing in 1983. Then, in a deal with a secular publisher, he was involved in a trade of Bibles for a shipment of remainders, hardback books that are sharply reduced in value once their paperback versions come out, and the sale of that shipment made him more than $25,000 in a single month, more than he’d ever made in a year. That was the first of many such deals in which he bought and sold remainders and returns. He had to rent additional space to warehouse and retail those books, and by 1986, Cowell had opened a separate company called Book Warehouse, Inc., which had its first big outlet in a building on Casey Drive just off Weisgarber Road in West Knoxville.

That company took off like wildfire. He was buying remainders from the major New York publishing houses—Harper & Row, Simon and Schuster, Random House, Doubleday—by the pound. A 42,000-pound tractor-trailer load cost him $13,500. And the retailing would bring him several times that amount. The biggest costs to him, other than renting the space to store and sell the books, was in sorting and labeling them for resale. But there was a catch to the trade. It was going so well that others started trying to get into the business, approaching the publishers he’d been dealing with. To keep the remainder business going full bore, he had to agree to take all of the publishers’ remainders and returns. The pace of the business grew frantic.

At one point in the early 1990s he was opening a new store a month or more, up to 15 in one year, and was leasing vacant “big box” stores, like former groceries or discount department stores, for short-term, advertised sales of a month or so. His company was doing 100 of those temporary arrangements a year, along with maintaining 600,000 square feet of warehousing and 300,000 square feet of more permanent retail properties.

One who shared that hectic pace was Dean Winegardner, whom Cowell brought into Knoxville from Florida, where he managed one of Cowell’s bookstores, to do projects for the company here.

Still in Knoxville, Winegardner owns American Book Co., a remainder company with warehouses on Bell Street. “I never met anyone like Paul Cowell. He is a pied piper. If you meet Paul, it takes about five seconds and you are drawn to him,” Winegardner says. “I loved working with him,” he says. He says he left the company to go out on his own to satisfy his own entrepreneurial spirit, “[Paul] understood that.” Winegardner says he owns several retail stores, but the bulk of his business is now in wholesale.

Cowell plunged on ahead in the retail sector. “By 1992, I had 68 company stores and 33 licensed stores in the Book Warehouse chain,” he says. It employed 550 people and was doing $30 million in sales that year. That’s when he sold the whole business to a silent partner in New York who had provided the publishing contacts that built it up, Cowell says. But by that point, he was already heavily into retailing-by-television business.
 

In 1988, a group of East Tennessee investors who had started the Shop At Home Network were looking to recover their investments. The business was going badly, and Cowell was asked to look into it, he says. He and a partner, the late Outlets Ltd. founder Dan Mendenhall, another early book remainder dealer, put together a proposal to buy 51 percent of Shop At Home for $100,000, Cowell says, but Mendenhall backed out at the last minute, after Cowell had signed the contracts. He borrowed the $100,000 to gain control of the company, and immediately tried to sell it to recover his own investment. “I was asking complete strangers, people I ran into on elevators, if they wanted to buy it. Nobody did,” he says. At the time, Cowell says, the network had annual sales of about $3 million, with expenses way beyond that. Once he thought he had it sold for $200,000, but the prospective buyer died before the sale closed, he says, and he decided to try to save it himself.

It was not on cable television at the time, and its C-Band satellite dish receiving position was on an obscure satellite, positioned between the Playboy Channel and Extasy, soft porn stations. He says a Shop At Home market study showed 86 percent of sales were to men, but that the study failed to note the odd positioning on the satellite. “I’m sure men were sitting watching Playboy when their wives walked into the room and they hit the channel change button and said, ‘Honey, I’ve been thinking of buying you an oriental rug,’ or something,” Cowell says. He knew the network needed better and different exposure, and he began scouting for another satellite. He found one.

The popular G-1 satellite had a vacant channel that was held by ESPN and was right between ESPN and ESPN News. The sports network kept it for broadcasting sold-out sports events that were released to television at the last moment. Using a friend as a go-between, he secured an appointment with the ESPN executive who controlled its satellite arm. Cowell convinced him that Shop At Home would be able to sublease time on that test-pattern channel and be off the air in five minutes if ESPN needed it for a game broadcast. He gave ESPN a small percentage of Shop At Home sales to close the deal, which saved Cowell’s investment and more, much more.

The network made a million dollars in the first quarter on the G-1 satellite, and by 1995 its annual sales had increased more than tenfold from 1988’s. Cowell sold control of the company to a group of Nashville investors in 1993 and resigned as chairman, but he retained a block of stock and stayed on the board. Continuing conflicts with the new owners’ selected president of the company led him to resign from the board in 1998, after which he sold all his stock at up to $29 a share. “I made $10 million on that stock,” he says. He says his original investment amounted to about a third of a cent a share. When his accountant asked for a “basis” on which to compute capital gain, Cowell told him, “No basis,” he says.

The network has since been sold to Scripps, the newspaper and cable TV media giant that owns the News Sentinel and several specialty cable channels here. Cowell says he still consults occasionally with Shop At Home, which had sales of about $250 million last year and anticipates $300 million this year.
 

The 1993 sale of control of the network was a critical moment in bringing a family dream to fruition. Cowell’s eldest son, Brian, a 24-year-old sporting goods dealer, had been killed in a hunting tragedy the year before, and Cowell and his wife, Jean, had been thinking about their vision for a retreat for ministers and missionaries seriously since then.

Jean was the daughter of a Pentecostal minister in St. Louis when they met at a church function there. Cowell, a motorcycle enthusiast since he was able to ride, had gone to St. Louis to buy a Harley Davidson from a dealer there. He’d told his parents, who weren’t crazy about his motorcycling, that he was going to a church meeting there, so he looked one up to fulfill his pledge. He didn’t buy the Harley, but his friend did, and Cowell came away with a lifelong relationship and a future bride. The couple married when Cowell was in divinity school, and they had an epiphany of sorts at a religious retreat in the Adirondacks a couple of years later. They spent a week at Camp of the Woods, and they left with a vision of what it would be like to form such a retreat to allow ministers and missionaries of all denominations of the Christian faith to get away from it all for a relaxing vacation. That week was his first real vacation ever, Cowell says, explaining: “My dad’s idea of a vacation was the time between when Sunday church let out and the 4 o’clock milking.”

That dream of Paul and Jean Cowell to make a retreat possible was nurtured steadily through the years of his pastorate. “I learned that I needed millions of dollars to do what we wanted to do,” he says, and the pastorate alone would never provide it.

“Pastoring never came easy for me. I was a good public speaker, but the work never really appealed to me. I had a calling, but the calling was to take Christ to the marketplace,” he says. He once told a fellow minister, “I think God is leading me to make money,” and that statement became prophetic. Still, it’s not the money itself that was important, he says. “If you don’t have a vision of what to do with wealth, you don’t need it,” he says, and he says it often as a motivational, inspirational speaker who’s been called all around the world to talk with churches and other religious groups about the uses of wealth “in the service of God’s kingdom”.

For him and Jean, the principal use of the wealth he earned is in Whitestone, so named for the chapter in the Book of Revelation (2:17) that says, “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth [it].”
 

A veritable mountain of a man with dark hair and imposing eyebrows, Cowell is still a motorcyclist. A Honda Goldwing is the latest of several he has owned and ridden for pleasure over his lifetime. Jean says she halfway expects him to ride off to Florida with friends any day.

As he looks over the campus-like setting of the Whitestone retreat today, Cowell’s vision hasn’t dimmed. The B & B and the lodge are sparkling white Victorian structures containing 21 guest rooms in all, done up with antique furnishings and decorative items Jean has collected for the purpose. Suites have fireplaces and baths have spa tubs. Six have elaborate “waterfall” showers. They are showcases of luxury. Those rooms are available to the general public, but Christian ministers and their families get a deep discount on the rates. The public can reserve tables for meals in the dining room, which seats 200, but the staying guests have preference.

The chapel, modeled after the Victorian-era church at Rugby, Tenn., that was built by the utopian group that first settled there, is painstakingly pegged together, not a nail in its framework. It has pew seats for 175. The old-style drivethrough barn that he had built to become the entryway straddles the road, giving visitors the feeling they’re entering a peaceful time from the past. Eight miles of trails wind through woods and along the lake. And Cowell’s joy, besides meeting and greeting and chatting with all the visitors he can, is riding the tractor mower that keeps the broad expanses of grass trimmed back.

It would be enough to keep most men busy just looking after Whitestone and keeping tabs on those who are enjoying the retreat or attending the conferences or celebrations or just taking meals there. Whitestone hosted 126 weddings last year alone. But Cowell has other things on his mind as well.

For the last two years, he has arranged for retreats for missionaries on other continents who would have been unable to come to Whitestone itself. He booked resort properties in Brazil last year and in Thailand the year before, soliciting sponsorships for missionaries and their spouses from Southeast Asia and Latin America to spend a few days in luxurious retreat, sharing what he calls “the Whitestone experience” abroad near their work. He has a resort in Ghana lined up for a hundred missionaries in West Africa this November. This year’s sponsorships are to support the missionaries on four-day retreats at $220 per person.

It’s styled the GetAway program, and Cowell will be the host. He takes along a medical doctor, a chiropractor, an attorney, a professional counselor and “others who will pay their own way just for the privilege of providing services at no cost to these missionaries,” its brochure says. Massage therapy is included. The agenda is rest.

Cowell is also a founder and president of Christian Hospitality Network, an alliance of more than 1,000 lodging properties in the United States and other countries that give discounts of 25 percent or more to pastors and missionaries. That organization is a GetAways co-sponsor. “I’m awfully proud of what we’ve been able to do with GetAways and CHN,” he says.

In his spare time, Cowell helps build homes for poor families in Mexico, a focus of a worldwide organization based in Nashville called Youth with a Mission that he chairs. That’s according to Steve Tackett, a YWAM volunteer who lives in Columbia, S.C., and who has worked with Cowell in youth projects since 1992. “He’s forgotten a lot of what he’s done,” says Tackett. “He’s an unusual man, always willing to reach out and impact people in a positive way...always.”

He’s had quite an impact on Roane County, where he is a member of the chamber of commerce board and chairman of its tourism committee. In many ways, Cowell’s put Paint Rock on the map. But to Sam Furrow, the Knoxville businessman who grew up in Paint Rock and is probably its most noted product around here, that wasn’t necessary. Furrow, who’s known Cowell for years and is duly impressed with the addition of Whitestone to the Paint Rock community, says, “It’s always been the center of the universe to me.”
 

What’s next for Cowell? Well, he has 40 lots he’s developing for homes on the upper reaches of the Whitestone property, where he and Jean have their own home and have built one for son Kevin and daughter-in-law Vicki, who have the Cowell’s three grandchildren, with another on the way. Kevin, an accountant, keeps the Whitestone books, and Vicki runs the resort’s gift shop, in a replica of a little red country schoolhouse, and edits wedding videos taken on site. “You can’t imagine how nice it is to have your grandkids right here where you can spend an hour a day, at least, with them,” Cowell says. But he isn’t ready to retire. His friends and associates don’t think he’ll ever be. He won’t have time.

June 24, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 26 © 2004 Metro Pulse