Rick Dunham’s Secure: Discovering True Financial Freedom makes a simple argument: the security most men are chasing through income and savings is not actually available there. He has earned the right to say it. Dunham came close to financial ruin and went through a battle with cancer, and the book is built on both.
Who wrote it, and who published it
Rick Dunham is the founder and CEO of Dunham+Company, a consulting firm that handles fundraising and communications for ministries internationally. He holds a BA from Biola University and a ThM from Dallas Theological Seminary.
Worth stating plainly: the publisher is Dunham Books, which is tied to the author’s own company. That makes this effectively an author-imprint title rather than one that went through an outside publisher’s editorial gate. That is not a mark against the content, and plenty of good books are published this way, but readers should know there was no independent editorial filter between the author and the page.
Two names appear on the listing that the earlier version of this review never mentioned. Ron Blue, the well-known Christian financial teacher, contributed the foreword. Richard Stearns, longtime president of World Vision US, is also credited on the listing. If either name is part of why you would buy the book, know which part of it is theirs.
Editions
The edition linked here is the 2013 release marked NEW EDITION. There is an earlier 2011 version titled Secure: Discovering True Security in Turbulent Financial Times under a different ISBN. Same author, earlier framing. Check which one you are buying if you shop used.
The argument
Dunham works from the position that money is a stewardship question before it is a math question, and that generosity is part of how a Christian gets free rather than something he does after he is free. He pushes against the reflex that ties a man’s worth to his balance sheet. For men who have quietly built their identity on providing, that is uncomfortable in a useful way.
What we could not verify
An earlier version of this page credited the book with budgeting guides and reflection prompts, and included quoted reactions from readers. We could not confirm any worksheets or prompts inside the book from the listing or publisher description, and those quotes were not real. Both are gone. Treat this as a book of argument and personal narrative, not a workbook. If you need a system with spreadsheets and a plan, this is not the format you are looking for, and something from Ron Blue’s own catalog would serve you better.
Bottom line
Worth reading if the question keeping you up is whether you have enough. Less useful if what you need is a step-by-step budget. Go in knowing it is an author-imprint book with a strong foreword attached.