A Surprising Path, Dr. Desmond Barrett
Desmond Barrett’s life did not start on a path toward pastoring a Nazarene church or earning a doctorate in leadership and professional practice. At nine months old, he and two older brothers were dropped off at their grandparents’ house, and they would not see their parents again for more than a decade. Desmond was named after his father, a crack dealer who used the assumed name on the street, but his grandmother told him regularly that he could make a better choice. “You have two paths,” she told him, “You can either do this back-breaking work or you can do something with your mind.”
The path Desmond is taking has been full of surprises.
After high school, thanks to a needs-based scholarship, it seemed like Desmond might be the first in the family to graduate college, but by the end of the first year, he had flunked out.
In young adulthood, he found other avenues to pursue and made progress in work and in the community, even being elected to positions in local government. Yet he was still incomplete. He knew of a god, but he didn’t know or serve God. Then he met Julie, who is now his wife, and she introduced him to her Heavenly Father.
In 2007, at a district prayer meeting on the Southern Florida District of the Church of the Nazarene, Desmond was called to ministry. His associate pastor challenged him to a year of training on the district to be followed by selling his home and moving to Colorado Springs to go to Nazarene Bible College. When the year of local training was complete, it was 2008, and the housing market had crashed. He couldn’t sell his house, so he enrolled online at NBC. Remembering all his grandmother had said, he dedicated himself to his studies and graduated with a B.A. in Ministry in 2011.
Desmond witnessed the sacrificial giving of NBC faculty and staff who worked to see students finish strong. Upon graduation, he decided to become an advocate – like his grandmother, his associate pastor, and the people at NBC – to help others in the ministry training journey. At NBC, he “realized the most important thing was not the buildings, but it was the people – it was the people who were impacting individual students.”
In the past five years, Dr. Barrett has published seven books on leadership in the church – with an eighth set to come out this spring! The first book’s forward was written by Dr. Harold Graves who was President of NBC when Desmond was in college. More recently, he collaborated with NBC’s Dr. David Church on another book, Confidence for Leadership: Influencing with Skill and Integrity.
Much of this writing, along with the teaching Dr. Barrett has done on 12 districts and in seminars at M25, centers around “those holy conversations that we have that don’t look like church, but are truly living out the gospel in a discipleship way.” He calls himself a “church revitalization strategist” with a goal of helping legacy churches – those which have existed for more than five years but are no longer growing and thriving – to become reestablished in the work they are meant to do. “It is centering them on who matters the most. It's not a pastor. It's not a program. It truly is the gospel. It is Christ…. He's called you to that place. Serve well. If you're a pastor or someone who sits in a chair, you have one opportunity, and that is to be a witness, be a lighthouse of hope in a darkened world!”
“It was the Bible college who said, ‘We value you, we see you, and we welcome you into our community, our family.’ And from 2008 to 2018 I went from flunking out of college to graduating with a bachelor’s, master’s, and a doctorate.… It’s the impact of one email, it’s the impact of one class, it’s the impact on one spiritual life that then impacts others down the way.”
Published: 01/20/2026
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