Paul Owen counsels Samaritan toward next 30 years of ministry

New Samaritan lead attorney arrives with both industrial and nonprofit experience, including the Christian health ministry Mercy Ships

Paul Owen doesn’t run from challenges. In his three decades of being a lawyer, he’s proven that he faces problems head-on.

His work in highly regulated industries like energy and health care equipped him for God’s call to come work as Samaritan Ministries general counsel in August 2024.

Paul works closely with the Board of Directors on strategic issues and the future of Samaritan and health care sharing. He also has a general overview of all contracts, litigation, public policy, and internal governance within the ministry. Paul works alongside Samaritan’s other attorneys, including Brian, to help with other legal matters.

Paul figures his biggest challenge in his first year at Samaritan will be finding how he can assist in a way that complements the work lead counsel Brian Heller has already done and builds on that solid foundation.

“Brian is literally the world’s expert in health care sharing law,” Paul said. “He has personally written a lot of the legislation and regulations governing health care sharing and has given us the privilege of operating in the U.S. after the Affordable Care Act (ACA).”

Before coming to Samaritan, Paul was not familiar with legislation about health care sharing that is in the ACA or with the safe harbor laws in 33 states. Brian, who pioneered much of the legislation surrounding health care sharing ministries and even helped to write the health care sharing exemption for the ACA, has helped Paul understand this area of the law better.

“He’s been very open and engaging with me about the big issues facing health care sharing and the small issues involved in building the specific Samaritan health care sharing ministry over the past 30 years,” Paul said.

From success to significance

Paul believes God gave him gifts of discernment, wisdom, and teaching. Those talents inspired him to choose a career in pursuit of truth.

“I got into law because I liked the precision of it,” he said. “I liked the idea of searching for truth, particularly the ultimate truth as revealed in God's Word.”

There were no lawyers in Paul’s family before his generation. He earned his undergraduate degree at Texas Christian University and then attended law school in New Mexico. The first 10 years of his law career were in private practice as a partner in a law firm in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Paul, his wife, Shirley, and their three children, Erin, Rachel, and Dan, moved to Texas when Paul took a job with one of his clients in the oil and gas industry. He worked with Chevron and then Equinor, spending time each month traveling to places like Europe, Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Overall, his work in oil and gas litigation and regulation lasted about 25 years.

“I kind of felt like I’d done what I could do. God had really blessed me, given me favor, and I had a wonderful career,” he said.

At a pivotal point in his career, Paul felt called to do something else.

“There’s this whole phenomenon around mid-career inflection points,” he said. “There’s a book by Bob Buford called Halftime, and there is a whole genre of books, and there are conferences that I didn’t even know existed. There’s a concept of going from success in the first part of your career to significance in the second part of your career.”

At the beginning of 2020, Paul left the oil and gas industry. “I didn’t have a plan. I wanted to see what plan God had for me,” he said.

Through a series of providential arrangements, God led Paul to Mercy Ships, a ministry that reaches coastal communities in sub-Saharan Africa with medical care and surgeries onboard ships. Paul worked with Mercy Ships for four years, helping the ministry through restarting operations after COVID-19 lockdowns, major organizational restructuring, and other challenges, including the delivery of one ship and lining up donations and arrangements for another.

Redeeming health care

Paul was immediately impressed by how Samaritan engaged him about his faith and spiritual leadership during the hiring process. He has also been impressed by the strong spiritual walks of the ministry’s senior leadership.

“It’s been spiritually enriching for me and very encouraging that the leaders at Samaritan, both on the Board of Directors and at the leadership level, see themselves first as servants and Jesus followers and second as businessmen,” he said. “Everything is covered in prayer and Scripture and asking if this is indeed what the Word has called us to do.”

With the foundational work of Brian Heller and with faithful leaders steering the ship, Paul’s focus is to keep the vessel moving forward.

“Brian has put Samaritan on such firm footing in the way that it is operating and in the way that it operates legally with the existing regulations,” Paul said. “I need to figure out how to build on that foundation with the new regulatory and litigation and legal challenges that we’re going to be facing in an increasingly secular world.”

Challenge accepted.