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Showing posts with the label organizational turnaround

REASSIGNED is now available.

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  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...
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A Rust-Bucket Ship and a Struggling Church: The Leadership Development Imperative in Two "Turn-around" Stories

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 The Ugly Baby made pretty: a sea story. by Bart L. Denny, Ph.D., Th.M. As I stared into an aft storage locker crammed full of apparently useless detritus and surveyed a ship’s fantail cluttered with more junk—a rusted-out barbeque grill, alleged spare parts that didn’t seem to belong to any of the ship’s installed equipment, and big sealed metal cans of who-knows-what. Rust covered the deck and all the deck fittings and equipment I surveyed. In the background, I could hear Miguel Rivera, our crew’s boatswain’s mate first class petty officer, whistling the theme song of “Sanford and Son,” a 1970s television show where Red Fox played the owner of a junkyard. Pretty appropriate. How could a commissioned U.S. Navy ship have gotten like this? Just two days before, Petty Officer Rivera and I, along with the rest of our California-based crew, had been assigned to a slick, fast, and well-maintained coastal patrol ship. For the past year, I had been proud to be the captain of that ship...
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