Myron Pierce is pastor of Mission Church in North Omaha, Nebraska, an Outreach 100 reproducing church. His desire is to launch a movement of “hope dealers” in every inner city in America. It’s a multifaceted vision realized through disciple making, coaching, church planting and entrepreneurship.
Outreach editor-at-large Paul J. Pastor caught up with Pierce to discuss how God used his path from being a gangbanger to a disciple-maker of fellow prisoners to an inner-city church planter in order to inspire hope in others, and why despite his many accomplishments he’s come to find the most joy in unleashing the God-given gifts of others.
You have a remarkable ministry at Mission Church. For people who aren’t familiar with the work you’re doing, can you catch us up on the highlights?
Mission Church was launched in September 2017 with the dream of unleashing unprecedented hope in every inner city around the world. We are an inner-city church, but we have a multiplication mandate. As a church, we have a few strategic areas of focus in an inner-city context like ours.
The first is ministry and reentry behind the wall of prisons and jails, helping prisoners transition back into society, discipling them into what we could call “hope builders.”
Secondly, we have an emphasis on the next generation, so we partner directly with local elementary schools to serve them and build friendships with the hope of engaging the students along the way, which we have. We’ve done camps and clubs right there in the school.
Thirdly, we’re involved in community building. That looks like having a monthly presence with some type of social event to get people of all walks of life in the urban context together to just spend time and enjoy one another.
Lastly, we have a focus on entrepreneurship and building an entrepreneurial ecosystem that can become a billboard to the gospel and our good work in our neighborhood. With that we’ve launched an incubator called Shift Omaha. We’ve graduated over 40 participants in businesses over the last three years. In fact, now all of our key leadership for that team are past graduates of our incubator.
We’ve also launched a podcast to help disseminate content that is valuable to our community and for us to get an access point to our community. Additionally, for business owners, we have a business-networking group where people can land to get quality friendships and help scale their business. And this fall we’re starting the On-the-Pond Summit—a business summit right in the urban context put on by us as church leaders. And then next year, we’ll be building out our very first business center right here in North Omaha, Nebraska.
That’s a remarkable list—and I’m sure we could have a fruitful conversation about each of those initiatives. What values are behind all this work?
In terms of practical values, diversity and leadership development are very important to us. Those are behind all our efforts to develop, multiply and grow in a healthy way.
Within six months of our founding, Mission Church launched our very first daughter church. Six months after that, they launched a daughter church. Within a year of launching our first church, we had launched another church. Very quickly, we have become a network of churches. We also just really subscribe to raising up leaders where we are. Initially, we had a whole church-planting greenhouse and an urban track for urban church planters, but the Lord really directed us through COVID-19 that we needed to equip and mobilize ordinary missionaries—we call them “hope dealers”—into what God has called them to do. All the efforts in our community that we do really are like incubators for mission.
Our goal is that people would be catalyzed by serving in some capacity in our church to ignite apostolic imagination. To support that, we now have a missionary training track in our church where we’re just training up missionaries like Linda, who had a heart to serve her neighborhood in the inner city and thus enhance our vision for every inner city. She launched a kingdom expression of church that’s completely autonomous, and yet interdependent in terms of her as a missionary. She calls it Linda’s Closet. She is providing free and affordable clothing and resources for people in her neighborhood.
And people like Brandon Kinnie, who went through our missionary training and now leads an inner-city sports-training ministry program that unites urban and suburban kids for the sake of the gospel. So over the years, we’ve really just said that our mission is to see this happen in every inner city. Consequently, God has given us other platforms to help pioneer that dream of “every inner city” further through coaching and speaking.
That vision and growing reach is beautiful. I understand that this comes deeply from your story. Tell us a bit about where you came from and how your present calling fits with God’s work in your life?
I grew up in the projects. Both of my parents were on drugs. My dad was out of the picture. He spent time in and out of jail. My mom was constantly up and down with her battle with drugs. That ultimately led my siblings and me—particularly me—down the road to gangs, and so I became a part of one of the most violent gangs in North Omaha. That really opened the door to everything that comes with the streets, whether it was selling drugs, gang banging or just committing crime. That ultimately led me in and out of jail.
At the age of 16, I was facing a possible sentence of 100 years in the penitentiary. Somehow the judge was lenient and only gave me a two- to three-year sentence, and all told, I spent about 14–18 months in prison. I was out for about five months, but then went right back, facing more time. So I found myself 20 years ago in a jail cell for my second major offense. I made a few phone calls, hung up, fell on my knees and said, “God, I’m destroying my life, but if you change me, I’ll serve you for the rest of my life.”
I hadn’t grown up in church, but I did have exposure to church through funerals for friends and family, and through going to chapel in jail. I really believe that all of that somehow culminated on March 21, 2002, at 1 o’clock in the morning when I bowed my knee to Jesus. After that, I sat in county jail for months. While I sat, I had an encounter with Jesus over and over, just was on fire for the gospel, sharing the gospel, hosting Bible studies. I didn’t know I was discipling. I just thought that’s what you’re supposed to do as a Christian. And I really saw discipleship happen in jail that year.
Around that time, I was taking a correspondence education program out of Denver. I had gotten a response from one of my teachers, and she put a Scripture verse in her notes back to me. I looked it up. When I read it, the Holy Spirit ministered to my heart and told me that he was going to get me out of prison and send me back to my neighborhood to plant churches and pastor the people.
A month after that, I stood before the judge. He sentenced me to 14 to 30 years in prison without parole plus a new sentence that I hadn’t yet fulfilled because I had committed a new crime while on parole. So, I’m walking out of jail out of the courtroom, with a 16–33 year sentence at the age of just about 19, and as I’m walking out, I hear the Holy Spirit saying again, I’m going to get you out of prison.
So they sent me off to prison for the second time. For months, I simply read God’s Word and ministered to people behind bars. Seven months later, the state of Nebraska called me. They told me that they had changed the law that impacted my sentencing structure, which had opened up the door for me to have an early parole date. I still spent years in prison, but God finally opened up the door, just as he said he would, and I got out in 2008.
Around that time, I met a guy who was planting churches in North Omaha, doing urban mission work. White guy out of Iowa. He had been praying for two weeks prior to meeting me that God would send a person of peace from the actual community. God had clearly orchestrated our meeting, and through that I met the woman who’s now my wife of 13 years. A couple of days after that, I was on staff with this urban mission. With that same mission, we planted our first church—Bridge Church—in the same neighborhood [where] I was a gangbanger. I was out for three months; we planted.
A couple years after that entrance into church planting, I felt that God was saying Go to Colorado. Plant another church. So I left our original church, went to Colorado and planted Passion City Church on the southeast side of Colorado Springs. Did that for a couple of years, until I ran out of money and decided maybe I should start a business. I started a car-detailing business, became insanely successful, with 13 employees. After that, I said, “Wow. Maybe I should start a business incubator.” So I did.
Anyway, there I was, a church planter and entrepreneur who had just started a new nonprofit. And then God calls me back to Omaha after the mayor gives our new incubator a million dollars. I made it back to Omaha because my friends said, “Would you come back and help us promote these church sites in the hood?” What we were trying had never been done before, at least here. So I went back, my main goal being to multiply our efforts to multisite. In six months, we went from one campus to three—about 1,000 people. A couple of years after that, the Lord really wanted us to focus on church planting with a justice bent, which meant continuing to multiply churches but really engaging the culture entrepreneurially. That speeds us up to date with where we are as Mission Church.
Thanks for honoring us with your incredible story. This may be an odd question, but with both your entrepreneurial and gang background, what perspectives do you feel you’re bringing to the work of planting churches that might be unique?
From a Western church-planting vantage point, in all of our church planting efforts (systems, structures, networks) the spotlights and megaphones have been primarily for the larger white churches. You see it everywhere, beginning with the conferences, and that sets the gold standard for what church planting is.
What God has done in a short time here is expand the influence of our church into networks like Exponential, Leadership Network, Discipleship.org and recently the Global Leadership Summit. Consequently, it’s allowed our reach to expand in terms of coaching new urban workers, pastors, church planters and missionaries, and writing books, and doing podcasts, and doing coaching cohorts. It’s really expanded our reach.
From a gang perspective, the Holy Spirit used my experience of gang culture and the idea of mission and organization and strategy and really, war that is present there, and transformed that all to apply to our spiritual war. The big question, you know, is How do you gain territory? When it comes to gangs, and how we understand evangelism and disciple making, and how to train and equip effectively, all of that came naturally to me because of my experience of gang life, of being eight years in the penitentiary, of learning how to disciple largely on my own, of learning how to build the church through disciple making. All of those things set me up to show me that God had repurposed my experiences for his work in an urban context.
What realities do you see regarding church multiplication right now? Obviously there is a lot of uncertainty in the world today. What opportunities and challenges come with it?
One of the things that I think that the church should be leaning into is that typically when you go to a traditional seminary or Bible college, there’s a wealth of knowledge around systematic theology and ecclesiology and all that, but less, obviously, on what to do with it, including church planting. Maybe there are some specialized courses on it, but when it comes to practitioners, it’s a whole different ball game.
The second point revolves around church planters and missionaries really needing to pay more attention to “futurist” disciplines like sociology or social psychology. Futurists are some of the rarest leaders right now in the world, which is why the church should be leaning into that discipline and working to look ahead.
There’s a seven-question framework that I think every church planter, urban missionary and missionary (rural, suburban) should be working through if they’re going to maneuver through the fallout of things like COVID-19, race and politics over the last couple of years and move forward toward multiplication (see list of questions at the end of this article).
In the church in America, we’ve typically subscribed to the metaphor of business, of the church being a business. We know that by the language we use. We call ourselves senior pastors or executive pastors, or we’re counting how many seats, right? Or what our attendance is. All these metrics are pointing back to the assumed metaphor that we knowingly or unknowingly are using to define success. We refer to our team as staff. We’ve embraced the organizational chart and can’t really think how it might look different.
But perhaps we ought to ask, “Where has this metaphor taken us? And what can New Testament theology reveal to us about the metaphors we should adopt?” If we thought much about it, we’d quickly see that the first institution that God created was a family—and not like how a business calls itself a family. A real family. And we think about God creating anything first, it’s symbolic of what he wants us to do next. And then you have Jesus enter in through the new covenant, and overwhelmingly he’s advocating for family as he’s calling his disciples “little children.” I’ve learned that we have to hone in on some of these disciplines that can be helpful to engage people, advance the kingdom and multiply churches. But it will require us to be more thoughtful and faithful with our metaphors.
That’s deeply insightful. Can you tell us a story of someone who comes to mind who is embodying this well?
I think of my friend Ron Smith who, six months into us planting Mission Church, planted our daughter church. Something beautiful about him is the fact that he’s an ex-gangster disciple out of Chicago who planted this daughter church, which is tough enough to begin with, but he did it while fighting what I call the three-headed monster—COVID-19, race and politics. They actually went—like all of us at Mission Church—fully digital. Coming out of the pandemic, they went mobile and digital. So what’s beautiful about that is that they tricked out this 15-passenger shuttle van and turned it into a mission-hope resource center. They show up in inner-city neighborhoods two or three times a week with resources galore, with everything from coaching on how to fill out a job application, to how to apply for food stamps. Through that missional work, people are then invited online to join one of our gatherings.
The thing I love is that it’s innovating without dependence on the idea of what we would call the typical church. People are no longer fully committed to that model. Rather, it seems like what they do want are circles that have gotten smaller, but with a greater quality and depth of friendship. For them to change their trajectory, they’ve become a lot more effective in making disciples.
Along the way, have there been any surprises about what has worked for encouraging multiplication?
Even before COVID-19, I had started writing on this whole idea of digital church. The first book I wrote was Why Social Media Should Be Your No. 1 Strategy. And then, boom, COVID-19 hits, and I came out with Digital Ministry: Pastoring in a Pandemic. And then that third book (DIGICHURCH: How the Church Can Change the Digital World) formed a trilogy on digichurch. So what surprised me as we came out of the pandemic, as we had begun to really embrace this new metaphor of family, is that it shrunk our church. There are a lot of variables to that, but it changed a lot of things. So we changed language. We stopped using the words, “It’s time to worship,” because that has a connotation to it that worship is somehow what I sing to God versus how I live before God. We replaced the idea of worship with, “We’re going to sing, and as we sing, we’re going to express our devotion to our King.”
Also, the second thing is that I cut my sermon prep. I trimmed back sermon prep probably like 80% and used the rest of that 80% to be invested into more disciple-making relationships and friendships. I trimmed my sermon length from 40 minutes to 12 to 15 minutes. Then we moved from rows to tables, with food in the middle and refreshments. When I trimmed my sermon, then I extended conversation around the table and around the text. And we crafted something called the “hope method.”
We ask a set of questions:
- How did you deal hope this last week?
- Based on what we read, how would you summarize what you read in two words?
- What is God saying to you right here in this moment?
- What is he asking you to do with these next 36 hours?
- How can we pray for you?
That stuck with us, so then we said, “Let’s create a ‘hope-dealer’ study journal, so every single person in our church can track their disciple-making progress and time through the Scriptures and relationships with other people.”
What shocked me was how inviting and acceptable and connective this new way of gathering is. I had one person say, “Wow. I can’t just come here and sit—I actually have to think.” And for me, that speaks volumes. I had another person say, “You know, I just love being able to hear what God is saying collectively versus just through one person.”
That’s been a hill to die on. We’ve said, “God is more interested in what he’s saying to all of us versus just one of us.” We’ve really moved away from the one-man band. It’s really just a decentralized family of missionaries that are seeking to unleash hope in Omaha and beyond. I’ve been shocked at how our people have risen to the occasion. And quite frankly, shocked how it shrank our church but yet multiplied our efforts in terms of spinning off new missionaries and new churches, etc.
What are the top two or three practical things a leader should do if they want to cultivate “hope dealers” in their congregations and multiply new churches?
First, I think to keep from killing their existing culture, anything they do differently should be identified as an “experiment.”
Second, we obviously can’t call people to mission, disciple making and mobilization if we’re not doing it ourselves. So we must begin to ask, “Who are we really discipling?” I’m not talking about a program of disciple making. I’m talking about fundamentally the fact that disciple making is about friendship and family. So what rhythms in my life do I need to change in order to fulfill the Great Commission myself?
Third, I would say that it’s time to chart a new future—which might begin with us all asking the seven questions we should be asking ourselves to chart a new future.
Is there anything that you would want to say to your fellow leaders as a word of encouragement?
I was recently with a young leader in Orlando at the Exponential Conference. At one point, we were getting gas, and this sudden realization came to me. I looked over, and I had a little tear in my eye. I said, “I am more interested in your success than my own.”
And it was just like this eureka moment when I thought, This is real, and my life backs that statement up. It was another one of those defining moments for me, and so, what brings me the most joy is, honestly, seeing the success of people transcend my own, and [to see] them really step into their God-given calling to advance his kingdom.
I think, if anything, where I empathize with every pastor and church planter is we aren’t as clear as we want to be about our own mission and calling. And when we don’t feel clear, imagine where our people are. However, I am hopeful that if Jesus was right—[when] he said he would build his church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it—that means we have to stick in there. That means we have to decide not to do what we’ve been called to do alone. That’s why I’m thankful for different tribes and spaces where we can really do this together.
I think the church is moving more and more into a faceless movement where we’re no longer focused on egos or logos but the actual work of the kingdom. Being more concerned about others’ success than our own. I think if we can continue to put our logos and egos to the side (in the words of my friend Rob Wegner), then I think it will give us some resolve that Jesus actually was right, that he is building his church. Even if it looks a little different than it did three years ago.
7 Important Questions for Church Planters
1. What’s been the history of church planting in the West in general?
2. What’s been the history of church planting in my specific demographic, denomination or tradition?
3. What are the fears and frustrations that I have, should the current situation of church planting not change for me and my community?
4. What assumptions am I making about those fears or frustrations?
5. Based on those fears, frustrations and assumptions, what scenarios are likely to happen if nothing changes and momentum tends toward those assumptions, fears and my forecast?
6. What is my preferred future? What three or four events need to happen for us to get there?
7. What’s the inner story of me as a planter, or us as an organization or denomination? What’s the present metaphor that we’ve subscribed to up until this point?
—Myron Pierce