60 Years of God’s Incredible Grace

Doris and Ken Bickel did not plan to support men and women rebuilding their lives. They discovered it the same way most meaningful callings arrive, through years of small faithfulness that pointed them toward something bigger. Their first steps into ministry came through their own church, teaching, and simply showing up for people in hard seasons. Along the way, doors kept opening into harder places, Doris walking into a detention center and Ken mentoring a man named Matthew. What drew them in and kept them serving was the same belief behind every gift they have given: that no one is too far gone for a second chance. 

A Love Story That Started Young  

Doris and Ken Bickel had their first date at sixteen years old and got married at eighteen. Sixty years later, they are still serving side by side and giving their time to the people society has forgotten. When they describe their six decades of marriage, they do not talk about luck or timing.

They call it something else entirely, "sixty years of God's incredible grace to us." 

That grace has carried the Bickels through a lifetime of richness and fullness. It carried them through Ken's years in the Air Force, through raising two children, through watching three grandsons grow into men, and through a season when they walked away from faith altogether before finding their way back. Today, at seventy-nine years old, Doris and Ken are still showing up. They are still loving, teaching, supporting, and praying with people who need someone in their corner to cheer them on. 

Finding Their Way Home  

The road to the life they live now was not a straight line. For the first nine years of their marriage, neither of them truly understood what it meant to have a personal relationship with Jesus. Doris had been baptized at twelve years old in a small, conservative church, but there was no discipleship and no follow up. Her family was the poorest in the congregation, and church wounds ran deep. By the time she reached high school, walking away felt effortless.

When Ken joined the Air Force, it became easy to drift even further from faith. Things were not always easy, especially during the year they lived apart while Ken was serving in Japan.  

Grace has a way of pursuing people, even when they are not looking for it. For the Bickels, it took a daughter. Their daughter was invited to church by a friend from school. After going, their daughter came home and wanted to keep going to church. Ken told her that if she was going to go, she would not go alone, and that they would go with her. Following that, it took an entire year of a faithful pastor showing up, having conversations with Ken, and simply not giving up for Ken to accept Jesus. For Ken, the turning point came through the words of Josh McDowell's book on the evidence for Christianity, as his lack of belief was originally intellectual.  

Not long after, Ken began sensing God calling him away from his career as a bank mortgage administrator and toward ministry. He brought it up to Doris with hesitation, unsure how she would respond, and she surprised him. A year later, Ken left banking behind and enrolled in seminary in Indiana, stepping out in faith.

He went on to pastor for eleven years, later returned to teach at the seminary, and eventually earned his doctorate. Afterwards, they moved to South Carolina, where Ken continued pastoring until retirement. What began as two young people going through the motions became a mature marriage grounded in a real and living faith.

Today they say it is essential to "build on a foundation, that's God, there is no other foundation to build on that's going to get you through this life." 

Living Lives That Are Well Lived 

Retirement has never meant slowing down for the Bickels. Doris continues to work as a women's minister at Grace Church, where she oversees women leaders, teaches through Scripture, and sits with women walking through divorce and some of the hardest seasons of their lives. She volunteers with Jasmine Road, an organization serving survivors of trafficking and exploitation. Twice a month, she teaches a Bible study inside the county detention center, a ministry she now calls her favorite thing to do. 

The first time Doris walked into the detention center, she moved through one locked door after another, listening to each one shut behind her. Guards instructed her to stay near the window at all times so she could be seen. She stepped into a room lined with bunk beds, sixty-four women watching a stranger walk in, and she was overwhelmed. For the first two visits, fear nearly won until Doris made a decision. As a longtime first-grade teacher, she could not stand still while she taught, and she refused to let fear box her into a corner. She stopped watching the window and started moving freely among the women instead. 

One day Doris admitted to the women how afraid she felt walking into prison that first time. They told her not to worry and that they would not let anything happen to her. On warmer days, the group is sometimes allowed into a small outdoor area with open air above the walls, and Doris goes out with them, walking and talking in the sunlight. At the end of every Bible study, Doris and the women stand together in a circle, hold hands, and take turns praying out loud.

"It is the most touching, wonderful thing you could experience to be in that circle, praying with those women," she says.

Something she was once nervous to do has become the favorite part of her week.

Ken's calendar appears just as full. He preaches roughly every third Sunday at their church's nursing home ministry, and he often leads the singing himself, because he knows the old hymns by heart and believes they still speak to the older generation in a way nothing else does. He volunteers alongside Jasmine Road doing hands-on repair work around their properties, and over the years he has recruited two other men to join him, because he says the work goes faster and further with a few extra hands. Right now, he is helping build a deck for a single mom, one more project on a long list of ways he shows up with a hammer and a willingness to work. 

More Than a Mentor, A Friend  

Ken's connection to JUMPSTART SC began years ago through volunteering at a nearby correctional facility. When the pandemic closed the doors of that facility to outside volunteers, Ken did not walk away from serving. He simply found a new way to keep showing up, and that search led him to Restoration Village. Matthew was Ken's first mentee, and their friendship never stopped even after Matthew graduated. The two are still friends to this day. Matthew has become part of the Bickel's story, and they have become part of his. Ken has since walked alongside four or five men through our transitional program, showing up week after week, building trust one conversation at a time. 

Your Past Does Not Define You  

Doris and Ken's compassion for the men and women they serve is rooted in something deeply personal. Doris was pregnant when they married, a fact the couple kept hidden for decades out of fear that a conservative and judgmental church community would define them by that one mistake. For years, even while Ken served as a pastor, no one knew.

Doris carried the weight of that secret as a kind of shame identity, believing on some level that her past defined who she was, even though she knew she had been forgiven. When she finally found people safe enough to trust with the truth, she discovered something freeing in transparency. This is why, when she looks at the women in her Bible study, women in jumpsuits inside a cell block, she refuses to see them as defined by their past mistakes.

"Your mistake is not your identity. That is not who God says you are," Doris says.

She sees beloved daughters of God, women whose worst moments were never meant to be the end of their stories. 

From Statistics to Real People 

Doris and Ken did not grow up around incarceration or addiction. Coming from their backgrounds in Pennsylvania and Indiana, the men and women cycling through prisons and detention centers were simply numbers on a page, statistics they read about but never encountered. That changed the moment Doris walked through the doors of Jasmine Road and began hearing the women's stories firsthand. As she got to know them personally, sat with them, and mentored a few along the way, something shifted. Ken experienced the same transformation through his years with Matthew and the men who followed.

"These have gone from statistics to brothers and sisters in Christ, real people with faces and names that I care about personally," she says.

Generosity That Goes Beyond a Check 

Ask Doris and Ken what generosity looks like, and they will not point to a bank account. They will point to a deck being built for a single mom, a nursing home hallway filled with old hymns, a circle of women in a detention center holding hands in prayer. For this couple, giving has never been a once-a-year decision. It is a daily posture. 

Owning things, Ken says, only brings joy for a small measure. New purchases fade fast, and the moment the excitement wears off, something else is needed to fill the space it left behind. Serving, on the other hand, does not run out. Ken has found that helping someone rebuild their life gives a kind of joy that accumulating possessions never could, a joy that does not fade the way a new car or a bigger house eventually does.

It is why he and Doris drive older, reliable cars instead of chasing status symbols, and why they would rather spend a Saturday building a deck for a single mom than spend it shopping. Those same values carry into their financial giving. Doris and Ken support the ministries closest to their hearts, JUMPSTART SC among them, because they have seen what God restores. Their giving is not distant or abstract. It is rooted in relationships, and that is what makes it so powerful.

When Doris and Ken give, whether it is an hour, a skill, or a dollar, they are giving out of a life fully surrendered to the belief that no one is beyond a second chance.

"God has never, ever not blessed us over and above what we gave. It's like He's telling us, 'You cannot outgive me,'" they say.  

Spending Time Wisely

When asked about their eagerness for what comes next, Doris and Ken do not hesitate. They long to go home and be with their Lord. But until that day comes, they are determined to use every remaining year, month, and week wisely. Ministry has not felt like an obligation to them. Instead, it has added richness to their lives.

"We have to use this time wisely and use whatever God gave us to leave behind something worthwhile," they say. 

Second Chances Need You Too 

Doris and Ken Bickel remind us that generosity does not retire. At seventy-nine, they are still giving their time, their hands, and their resources to people rebuilding their lives, and they do it because they have seen what a gift, however small, can multiply into. Their story is proof that faith, when it takes root, gives rather than holds on. 

Every gift Doris and Ken have made to JUMPSTART SC has helped provide the housing, the mentors, and the community that turn a second chance into a new life. Their giving did not wait for a perfect moment or a large sum. It started with a willingness to say yes, the same willingness we are asking you to consider today. 

Will you be the reason someone finds hope today? Join Doris and Ken in giving toward restoration. A gift to JUMPSTART SC becomes part of the same story of second chances that has shaped their lives for sixty years. 

Interested in Learning More?

Maybe Doris and Ken's story has stirred something in you, a quiet nudge to give the way they have given. 

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Every person needs to know they are wanted by a loving Father. Your gift could be the reason someone finally sees it.