After high school, Barnett attended a Bible college in Boise, Idaho, where he met his future wife, Barbara, and was also greatly influenced by the Latter Rain Movement within Pentecostalism, which was at its peak at that time. When he married and was faced with the increasing expenses of family life, he left Bible college, without graduating or being ordained, to take a job at a sawmill in Tacoma, moving his young family there with him. Later they moved to Seattle when he took a job at Boeing as a draftsman.