REASSIGNED is now available.

 

by Bart Denny

After a lot of writing, rewriting, cutting, adding, checking sources, arguing with sentences, and wondering more than once whether this thing would ever actually be finished, I’m happy to say that my new book is now available on Amazon.

Reassigned: Military Lessons for Ministry Leadership grew out of a question I’ve been wrestling with for years: What happens to everything the military formed in us when the uniform comes off?

For me, the answer became especially important when my own life took an unexpected turn. I spent nearly twenty-two years in the U.S. Navy. I served on submarines and destroyers, commanded two coastal patrol ships, deployed overseas, and eventually finished my military career on a major combatant command staff. Years later, I found myself in seminary and then in pastoral ministry.

Those two worlds can feel very far apart.

And they are.

A church is not a warship. A pastor is not a commanding officer. Church members are not sailors who have received orders to report aboard. Some military instincts translate badly into ministry if we simply carry them over without examining them.

But I also became convinced that military service had taught me things I shouldn’t leave behind.

Mission. Accountability. Preparation. Stewardship. Teamwork. Followership. Developing people. Trusting others with real responsibility. Learning to function when plans fall apart. Understanding that leadership carries responsibility for people, not merely authority over them.

And perhaps most important, the military had been forming me long before I understood what God might eventually do with that formation.

That is really what Reassigned is about.

The book is written especially for veterans who have entered ministry—or who are wondering whether God may be calling them there. But it is also for pastors, church leaders, and congregations trying to recognize the experience and leadership capacity God may already have placed among them.

Military experience doesn’t automatically make someone a good ministry leader. Some things have to be surrendered. Some have to be corrected. Some have to be translated into an entirely different kind of leadership.

But some things are worth carrying forward.

As I put it on the book:

THE UNIFORM COMES OFF.
THE FORMATION DOESN’T.

I’m grateful to finally be able to say that Reassigned: Military Lessons for Ministry Leadership is available now.

You can find it on Amazon here.

If you read it, I hope it helps you look differently at the experiences God has used to shape you—and perhaps at the people sitting in the pews around you who have been carrying years of preparation that the church has not yet learned to recognize.