Missionary to Military Families

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 said.

“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 recalled, “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.”

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

“The next week,” Megan continued, “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?’”

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. 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 said. “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.”

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 said. “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. “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,” Laura said. “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.”

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 said. “They’ve been left out by the church.”

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 explained. “We believe in employment. We believe in biblical education. We train them and pay them to do mission work for the military in the local church. The end game is military families in the church.”

Moody has been part of achieving Megan’s goals for MilSpo Co. “We need gospel-centered communicators and Bible teachers,” Megan said. “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. Coming on the heels of her first book, Summoned, an eight-week study of the biblical book of Esther, Megan said 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 explained. “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 called 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.”

Like her foray into Bible studies for military wives and her founding of MillSpo 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 said. “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!’”

Megan called 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.”