In 1987, Bart Denny reported to Navy boot camp in Orlando, Florida. Nearly four decades later he pastors a rural church in west Michigan, teaches Christian leadership online for Grand Canyon University, and runs a small publishing house from his hometown. The road between those two points ran through submarines and destroyers, a combatant command staff, seminary, a struggling church in Florida, a bookstore and a hospital.
The Navy
Bart began in the Navy’s nuclear power program, training in electronics and reactor plant operations before going to sea in submarines. After riding USS Daniel Boone in 1990, he stood watch as a reactor operator on patrols aboard the ballistic missile submarine USS von Steuben, then joined the commissioning crew of the attack submarine USS Hartford in Groton, Connecticut, helping bring a new boat into service. In 1995 he came ashore to teach technical mathematics at the Naval Nuclear Power Training Command in Orlando.
In 1998 he was commissioned through Officer Candidate School in Pensacola and became a surface warfare officer. He served in two destroyers, USS Nicholson and USS Deyo, deploying to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. He then commanded two coastal patrol ships: USS Squall, off the California coast and in Puget Sound, and USS Chinook in the Persian Gulf, where his crew helped guard Iraq’s offshore oil terminals alongside U.S. and coalition navies and coast guards.
He finished his career on the staff of U.S. Central Command in Tampa and retired in 2008 after nearly twenty-two years of service. He stayed on at Central Command as a civilian analyst while he completed seminary.
Education
Bart started with an associate degree in nuclear technology from the University of Phoenix and a bachelor’s in economics and political science from Regents College, now Excelsior University, in 1993. Two master’s degrees from American Military University followed: space studies in 2008 and national security studies in 2011. At Liberty University he earned a Master of Divinity in professional ministries, a Master of Theology in homiletics (the study of preaching) in 2018, and a Ph.D. in Christian leadership from the John W. Rawlings School of Divinity. He is also a Certified Church Consultant and a Certified Church Revitalization Specialist through Church Answers University.
His doctoral research studied how pastors develop as leaders while bringing small, struggling evangelical churches back to health. It turned up something he hadn’t been looking for: seven of the eleven pastors he interviewed were military veterans. That finding eventually became his book Reassigned: Military Lessons for Ministry Leadership.
Ministry
In 2014 Bart joined the staff of a Florida church as director of operations and finance. Three years later he became pastor of a severely declined church in suburban Tampa, taking on the kind of revitalization work his research had studied from the outside.
In late 2021 he moved back to his hometown of Saranac, Michigan. For the next few years he bought Bibles, nonfiction and academic books for a Christian bookstore in Grand Rapids, which taught him a good deal about what puts a book on a shelf and what keeps it off. He then served as a hospital chaplain with a Grand Rapids health system before returning to the pulpit. Today he pastors a rural church in west Michigan and teaches online courses in Christian leadership for Grand Canyon University’s College of Theology.
Writing and publishing
Bart is the author of Reassigned (2026), which helps military veterans see what their years of service formed in them and what that might mean for ministry, and Human, Still (2026), a pastoral guide to the questions human enhancement technology is bringing into the church. Strong to Save, a forty-day devotional for men drawn from his years at sea and from naval history, is coming in 2027.
He founded True Bearing Press after years of watching authors with something worth saying get turned away or overcharged. Very little of what he’s learned came from any one of the jobs above. Most of it came from moving between them: from the engine room to the wardroom, from the command staff to the pastor’s study, from the bookstore to the hospital floor. Along the way he kept meeting people carrying stories they weren’t sure anyone wanted to hear. He’d like True Bearing Press to be a place where some of those stories get told well.
Bart and his wife, Jennifer, have been married since 1993 and have three grown children.