Dennis Bickers, Intentional Ministry in a Not-So-Mega Church: Becoming a Missional Community. Beacon Hill Press, 2009.
Referenced in: Small Church Leadership
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
Bickers focuses on creating missional vs. maintenance congregational cultures in small-membership churches. He provides three special values for the small church leader. First is the insistence that small church leaders must courageously challenge their churches out of a safe, cocooned mentality toward a missional devotion to their communities. He calls them to transformational, visionary leadership. Second is his experience-tested and theoretically sound advice on facilitating change, covering two of the nine chapters. Third is the insight on how small churches conceive of their place in the current culture. He helps them understand the major cultural shifts affecting all ministry, and how small churches may position themselves to offer a unique contribution in the current setting. Anything Bickers writes is worth reading by small church leaders. See also his volumes, The Healthy Small Church and The Bivocational Pastor.
From the Publisher
Change is rapidly occurring in almost every area of our society. However, the one notable exception to this is often found in the church, especially in smaller churches. Instead of responding to the changes around them, these churches have adopted a maintenance mentality, which is primarily interested in survival and risk-free ministries that are inwardly focused and fail to meet the needs of those outside their church community. If our churches are going to have an impact on today’s culture, we have to move from a maintenance mindset to a missional one.
Intentional Ministry in a Not-So-Mega Church is designed to help leaders of smaller churches guide their people in making their primary focus ministering to and meeting the needs of those outside their church. Drawing from more than twenty years of experience as a small-church pastor, Dennis Bickers explores the qualities of transformational leadership and explains what it takes for leaders to create a climate in their churches that promotes and facilitates necessary change. From willingness and vision to risk-taking and commitment, Bickers challenges leaders to become the agents of change their churches need as they seek to answer and act on the question: Who are we here for?
About the Author
Dennis Bickers has spent more than 27 years working with smaller churches. For 20 years, he was a bivocational pastor and currently serves as an Area Resource Minister with the American Baptist Churches of Indiana and Kentucky. He is the National Project Director of BivoNet, a ministry to the bivocational ministers of American Baptist Churches USA, and also serves as an area resource minister for ABC of Indiana and Kentucky. Bickers is a member of the advisory board for the Bivocational Ministry Center at Campbellsville University. He is the author of four books including The Bivocational Pastor and The Healthy Small Church (Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City). Bickers has an MA in Religion and is pursuing a DMin from Liberty Theological Seminary. He frequently leads workshops on bivocational and small-church ministry for various denominations and serves as a coach for both bivocational and fully-funded ministers. He lives in Madison, Indiana, with his wife, Faye. Bickers maintains a website and a blog on bivocational ministry.
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