Missionary to Military Families

The following story is presented in honor of Military Appreciation Month, which is celebrated annually during the month of May.

For most people, the sound of a car door closing is just the sound of a car door closing. But if you’re a military spouse on your own with your kids while your husband is deployed, that sound can stop you in your tracks.

For Megan Brown, the car door sound was followed by something even more terrifying: the thud of her husband’s foot lockers being dropped off on her front porch.

“It was just a normal day,” Megan recalls, “and I got a knock on the door.” Megan and her husband, M. Sgt. Keith Brown, had been married for seven years when he deployed to Afghanistan.

“Keith had been gone about three months, and I hadn’t heard from him in weeks. There was a postal worker at the door, and she had his foot lockers. I looked at her and said, ‘Are you here to tell me my husband’s dead?’ And she looked at me and started crying.”

Megan’s heart sank. She asked the postal worker, “Why are you here? Why do you have his stuff?” But the woman didn’t have any information or any answers—just Keith’s possessions in two wooden boxes.

Confused and afraid, Megan’s only consolation was that there wasn’t a “second slam.” She says, “Every black car that passed my house sent me into a panic. I was always listening for the second slam. One car door closed, one person. Two car doors, two people . . . casualty officers.”

Waiting for an answer

With no news or information from the base, each day that passed felt agonizing.

“It was horrific,” she says. “I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat very well. I was crying for most of it.” At that time, the couple’s children were 5, 3, and 1 year old. “Thank God my kids were young,” Megan adds, “and they don’t really remember this.”

Megan became a Christ follower at age 20, but seven years later she still considered herself a new believer. “I was at a church, but nobody really knew me,” she recalls. She struggled to understand the Bible, and she felt uncertain about her prayers. And if there was ever a time to pray, this was it.

“Not really knowing how to pray, I got even angrier,” she says. “I was talking to God in the air: ‘Is this how we do this? Do I just scream at You? I read somewhere that there’s a plan. This plan is terrible! I hate this plan! I didn’t agree to this plan!’”

It would be three days before Megan got an answer.

“On the third day the phone rang, and it was a weird number, and I knew that was them,” Megan says. “I was pole vaulting over my couch and running through my house to get to my phone, and I pick it up—and I hear Keith! He said, ‘They had to move us. My stuff got sent back because it wouldn't fit on the truck. I hope it made it!’”

In just a matter of seconds, Megan’s emotions ran from “I love you, and I’m so glad you’re okay!” to “You scared the life out of me!” She recalls, “I was so glad and so mad and then so glad again.”

Later, as her emotions cooled and life got back to some sort of normalcy, Megan also recalls thinking something else. “I remember being grateful, and I remember being relieved. But the feeling I remember most prominently was the weight of my own conviction that I had a Bible, and I had no idea what was in it. I wanted to pray, and I didn’t know how. It was the scariest, most lonely, most horrifying three days. I had no peace anywhere. I said to the Lord, ‘You’re not going to find me here like this again. I’m sorry.’”

Discovering hermeneutics—and a new purpose

A decade later, Megan now looks back at that event as the catalyst that launched her into her life’s mission of discipling military spouses. As with most military families, the Browns and their four kids seemed to be constantly moving—five duty stations and 10 different homes in 18 years. What Megan didn’t know was that with their next move, God would open the door to the mission He had for her.

“Keith came home from Afghanistan, and the Air Force moved us to Biloxi, Mississippi,” Megan says. “We landed in a church that made a really big deal about understanding how to read your Bible, which I loved! They taught me hermeneutics from the pulpit. ‘Who is this for?’ ‘Why is this important?’ ‘Why do we study this?’”

Learning to understand the Bible helped Megan to love the Bible. And that gave her an idea.

“I thought, There are so many women like me who don’t know how to do this. I should probably help,” Megan says. “So I posted on our military neighborhood Facebook page, ‘Hey, I’m reading the Bible on Thursday mornings if anybody wants to come.’”

Then she waited.

“The first week,” she recalls, “a handful of women from my street came.” Megan was so glad that the women came to join her, but she soon realized she had a problem. “I was not a qualified Bible teacher. I had no idea what I was doing. I was literally repeating what my pastor had said the previous Sunday from the book of Luke.”

‘What in the world is happening?’

Megan’s lack of Bible teaching experience didn’t deter what soon grew into a movement.

“The next week,” Megan continues, “there were 17 women. And the week after that, there were 25. One Thursday, I looked out of my front window and a woman was dragging a lawn chair and a wagon with kids in it to my house, and I thought to myself, ‘What in the world is happening?’”

Megan was sure that God had picked the wrong person to lead these women.

“I remember having a conversation with the Lord,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Lord, if I’m your Bible teacher, you have an HR (human resources) problem. Have you met me? I don’t know what I’m doing. You don’t want me out here. I’m going to embarrass both of us!’”

What started as a handful of women meeting in Megan’s living room grew into a group that needed to meet in the military base chapel to accommodate everyone. The group found a friend in Chaplain Steven Dabbs. When Megan told him that she was baking cakes to raise money to buy Bibles and study materials, Chaplain Dabbs presented them with a funding gift of $2,000 and gave them regular use of the Keesler Air Force Base Chapel.

For two years, the group met in the chapel for Bible study and fellowship before outgrowing the space, the staff, and the funding. Closing the doors and instructing women to lead from their homes, the study groups went back to where it all began—coffee tables and living rooms.

Military families came, went, and moved across the globe, and Megan began hearing from her scattered groups of spouses.

“I started getting calls,” she says. “There was a group meeting in Korea. There was a group meeting in the UK. There was a group meeting in Germany, in California, in South Dakota, and one in Florida. The Lord was using the military community to carry the gospel through simple hospitality and an open Bible.”

Laura Early, Megan’s friend of five years and fellow military spouse, isn’t surprised that women responded to Megan. “She is just a really dynamic personality,” Laura says. “People flock to her whether it’s in conversation or whether it’s online and virtual. She invites people to community so well and walks alongside people really beautifully.”

Moody training for ministry leadership

As Megan continued to focus on helping military spouses know Jesus and love His Word, she knew she needed more training, and she wanted a biblical education. In 2017, Megan attended the Called Conference for women hosted by Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Coming home from the event, Megan says she was “on fire” to learn more. Her husband suggested she enroll at Moody for a bachelor’s degree. Feeling encouraged but cautious, Megan was unsure about their financial ability. In support of his wife’s calling, Keith transferred his post-9/11 Montgomery GI bill to her, and she enrolled in online classes for the fall term that same year.

Despite a deployment, a one-year short tour, and three more moves, Megan finished her Bachelor of Science in Ministry Leadership, graduating online in 2021. With her Moody degree completed and study groups still meeting across the globe, Megan began to wonder what more she could do to reach into the lives of military spouses. In this community that she loved so much and lived in firsthand, she saw issues that were both skyrocketing up and spiraling down.

“Military spouse suicide is climbing,” Megan says. “Unemployment among military spouses is four times the national average. Women aren’t coping well.”

Laura Early has experienced the stress of trying to hold down a job. She says, “I had three jobs in my first four years as a military spouse because of moving and because I had bosses who didn’t understand military life. I was the primary caregiver for my family, and I didn’t always have notice for deployments and trainings. Military spouse life is very lonely at times. And it’s hard to really know who you are as a person (living in the shadow of a spouse working in the military).”

Military families—a mission field

Along with the practical and emotional needs Megan observed, something else was drawing her to get more involved with military spouses.

“My generation (of spouses) and those coming behind me do not have adequate access to the gospel,” she says. “They’ve been left out by the church.”

Thinking back to her own experience of multiple moves, Megan says trying to find a church and then fit in and make friends can often feel impossible. She feels like military spouses are invited into the room, not into relationship.

While no one in the church says those words directly, Megan says military families are often treated as “perpetual visitors” who are just passing through. For that reason they won’t be called on to teach, lead, or serve. Many in the church won’t seek genuine friendships with people who will likely be leaving in a year or two.

Megan’s passion is to see military families know the truth of the gospel, experience the love of Jesus, and be sent to proclaim them both. She longs to see military spouses not only find community in the church but gain the biblical education and practical experience to become servant missionaries to the military community wherever they travel.

In 2022, Megan founded MilSpo Co., an organization equipping vocational missionaries within the military community. “We recruit, raise up, and release military-connected women as ministry leaders and missionaries,” Megan explains. “We believe in employment. We believe in biblical education.”

After onboarding, MilSpo Co. provides scholarships for a certificate in Biblical Studies and Theology from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

“We train them and pay them to do mission work for the military in the local church,” she says. “The end game is military families in the church.”

Laura Early was so inspired by Milspo Co.’s mission to reach military families with the gospel that she joined the organization and now serves as the board chair. “MilSpo Co. provides an opportunity for military spouses to be seen, known, and heard,” she says, “but also for them to know that they have a heavenly Father who sees them and values them. They don't have to do anything to earn that love.”

Resources for military women

Moody has been part of achieving Megan’s goals for MilSpo Co. Megan says, “We need gospel-centered communicators and Bible teachers. That is just one reason why I love Moody. We’ve used Moody Publishers’ women’s Bible study line, which does a great job at expository study.”

In March 2023 Moody Publishers released Megan’s new book Know What You Signed Up For: How to Follow Jesus, Love People, and Live on Mission as a Military Spouse. The book is part of Moody Publishers’ line of books dedicated to military spouses.

Coming on the heels of her first book, Summoned, an eight-week study of the biblical book of Esther, Megan says she wrote her second book with four women in mind.

“The book is for the new military spouse, lost and lonely, who is just starting to feel the weight of living this life,” Megan explains. “It’s for the ‘seasoned spouse’ who believes all she needs is the right checklist and a positive attitude. It’s also for spouses who have been around long enough to know the cost of this life is often higher than we could have imagined. The fourth woman is a woman in the local church. I want her to get a glimpse of how military service has impacted every aspect of our lives.”

Megan calls Know What You Signed Up For “a field guide for the military spouse who wants to know what it means to be a Christian in the military space. It means we have an active, living, breathing relationship with Jesus. It means that we, through the church and through their support and encouragement, are working toward and participating in the Great Commission.”

Megan’s ultimate mission

Like her foray into Bible studies for military wives and her founding of MilSpo Co., Know What You Signed Up For is another intentional strategy in Megan’s ultimate mission of winning military spouses to Christ.

“It’s an outreach tool. It's an invitation,” she says. “The first thing I’ll do in every book I'll ever write is present the gospel, whole and full. . . . because the Lord is in fierce pursuit of your heart and in the rescue of your soul. Jesus told me to make disciples, circumstances and selfishness notwithstanding. He said, ‘Go! Do it!’”