4D Impact: Smashing Barriers Like a Smart Church takes a critical and inspirational look at four aspects of 21st century church ministry: Technology, Hospitality, Worship, and Systems. Each of these aspects is key for developing vital churches and healthy church leaders. The author uses real life lessons from the 11-year journey of Impact Church, which is currently #5 out of the 100 fastest growing United Methodist congregations in the United States, and examples from churches and the market place, to inform, equip, and inspire the reader.

4D Impact offers:

From the 4D Impact Introduction:

"I have been blessed to serve as the founding and lead pastor of what one of [the] original twenty-five leaders called a 'movement.' Twelve years ago we didn't set out to plant another United Methodist church--we envisioned a movement...I have learned a few things about church health and growth from my own experience as a church planner and from the many churches across the country that our team has supported and consulted with over the years. I have learned that the capital-C Church is full of grace, and I've learned that hard work and sacrifice are necessary for a local church to be vital and growing...

This book is for all churches and church leaders seeking to become vital and growing, or to remain vital and growing. This book may challenge you--I hope in a healthy way. It centers on four key principles for developing healthy and growing churches that smash barriers: Technology, Hospitality, Worship, and Systems. I am a living witness to these principles. As we say at Impact Church, you aren't called to lead an ordinary church; you are called to lead a movement."

Learn the "Big Picture" approach that will aim your congregation at the mission field in your back yard, or around the world.

Many churches want to make the transition from an inward to an outward focus, from catering to the needs of members to reaching out into the world to make disciples of Jesus Christ. Too often they try to accomplish this radical change by taking half steps and partial measures, initiating a new program here or adding a new staff members there.

Yet this kind of change requires more. To succeed in changing its core focus this way, a congregation must learn strategic thinking; it must commit itself to seeing the big picture, and to taking the steps necessary to paint that picture afresh. Everyone, including pastors, lay leaders, key teams and groups, and the congregation as a whole must be involved in a process of transformation. Paul D. Borden, author of Hit the Bullseye and Direct Hit, knows that this transformation will not be easy. But if the target is bringing more people into saving relationship with Jesus Christ, what could be more worthwhile?

Current approaches to congregational leadership are dominated by a kind of group think. Certain assumptions, ideas, and even phrases appear so often in the literature about church ministry and mission that they have achieved the status of conventional wisdom. For example, how many times in recent years have you read about ministry in the postmodern era?The problem with conventional wisdom, says Dan Dick, is that it sets our thinking down a particular path, blinding us to other possibilities and insights. At its worst, conventional wisdom is a cheap and easy substitute for figuring things out yourself. In this book, Dan Dick both explodes false assumptions about congregational leadership, and offers readers the tools they need to lead congregations in the real world, not the wishful thinking world of conventional wisdom.

Nuggets of conventional wisdom debunked include:
- The modern/postmodern myth
- Contemporary North American culture is highly similar to the culture of the New Testament world
- We live in a period of accelerated change unlike any other before us.