EVERY LEADER COMES TO THE SAME MOMENT, but not every leader moves beyond it. It’s the point at which you realize your perception of yourself doesn’t align with how you are perceived by others. For Herbert Cooper it was a decade into
planting People’s Church.
In the years after launching, he and his wife, Tiff any, navigated multiple challenges. While preparing to purchase land for their fi rst building program, they met with church members to discuss decisions surrounding the land purchase. Herbert was casting vision for the church’s future, and an influential member who disagreed with his plan spoke up and asked, “How do we get rid of you?”
The person had previously been at a church where the pastor was involved in misconduct, and this experience gave him a negative perception of strong pastoral leadership. However, as Herbert recalls the situation, it “dropped a bomb” on the church, and the member—a big giver— left the church and was followed by another major giver.But Herbert powered through, and People’s Church purchased 50 acres and began construction. Then another bomb dropped when a construction worker died a er falling from the roof of the church.
“We literally had every news station there, not covering this brand-new church, but covering the death of a contractor falling off the roof,” Herbert recalls. “Today, it’s easier to talk about, but in the moment you’re just like, ‘The church is over.’ ”
They survived that crisis and were preparing to launch a third campus when an influential leader on staff had a moral failure. Looking back, Herbert admits the decision to move forward with the third campus while dealing with the moral failure was a bad one, but he powered through, despite reservations.
“That season was probably the lowest one we both experienced together,” Tiffany notes. “I was really isolated, and that was very unhealthy for me. I remember for a stretch of time every day just wondering, What is the bad news today? or, What’s the report we’re going to hear today?”
The accumulated stress of leading the church during the building program and staff crisis became too much for Herbert to bear.
“I was playing God,” he recalls, “trying to carry the weight of the church.”
The crisis exposed areas of organizational weakness, as well as Herbert’s own leadership deficiencies. As the pressure grew, the couple contemplated leaving and starting over somewhere else. Can we do this, or should we go somewhere else? they thought.
The core of the problem, as Herbert sees is now, was a lack of self-awareness.
“I had blind spots that I didn’t know were blind spots,” he recalls. “They were impacting my marriage, impacting my leadership.” Herbert admits he was hearing feedback from Tiff any and his team, but he wasn’t listening. Finally, a persistent staff member said, “Hey, I’m telling you the way that you think things are—it’s not how people are feeling.”
When he met with the staff member and his wife—who are still on staff at People’s Church today—Herbert was broken, and his confidence as a leader was shaken. To his credit, he didn’t fire them and proceed with business as usual. Instead, he looked for help, went to therapy and dedicated painful effort to the task of becoming more self-aware.
“The way that I viewed me is not the way that others viewed me, and the way that I experienced me was not the way that others experienced me,” Herbert explains, noting how a leader can underestimate the power of his or her words. Directness can be perceived of as harshness, distraction as indifference.
“I learned, ‘Oh, those words hit you hard. Oh, that was harsh to you. Oh, you don’t feel loved.’ As the No. 1 leader, my whispers are a roar. It was a massive learning.” Herbert also realized his leadership—and the church—would plateau if he didn’t learn to delegate responsibility and implement systems for organizational development and growth.
“I got a consultant in here and had to really retool my leadership,” Herbert explains. “It was during that season where I became self-aware. God broke me and humbled me to a place where I was able to see those blind spots and to make adjustments.”
As the church had grown, it didn’t develop systems and processes to streamline and scale the ministry—a deficiency Herbert attributes to his and Tiff any’s inexperience. “We were a very large church then,” Herbert explains, “but I didn’t value systems as much as I valued preaching and good services.”
A DIFFERENT BALLGAME
The Coopers had radically different backgrounds. Herbert grew up in the small town of Wewoka, Oklahoma, and was brought up in a broken home. A self-described “heathen” in high school, he attended church only occasionally.
At the age of 13 he experienced sexual abuse and spiraled into addiction, pornography and sexual immorality. Things got worse when Herbert’s parents split up when he was in his junior year. Adept at sports, he found solace in football. His high school football coach invited Herbert to a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting in the team locker room—an event Herbert only attended for the free pizza. Speaking at the gathering was Sooners kicker Todd Thomsen, who served in the Oklahoma state legislature from 2007 to 2018. His gospel presentation was simple and unadorned, but when he gave the invitation, Herbert’s response was immediate. “I was scared, and I didn’t really know what I was doing,” he recalls. “But I knew I needed Jesus.”
That night, surrounded by teammates, tears streaming down his face, Herbert gave his life to Christ. His coach invited him to church the following Sunday, where he was baptized, joined a small group and was discipled. Upon graduation, Herbert headed to Arkansas Technical University with a full football scholarship. During his freshman year, he sensed a call to full-time ministry and transferred to Oral Roberts University.
After one semester, Herbert realized that the cost of college was unsustainable without an athletic scholarship and thought, There’s gotta be a way that I can get a theology degree and play football. This led him to Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri, an Assemblies of God school with a NAIA Division 1 football program. Before his graduation from Evangel, Herbert began traveling and speaking as an evangelist.
While in his senior year he met a freshman cheerleader who also had a heart for ministry. Tiffany had been brought up in a pastor’s home in Wisconsin, and as a child she would hear stories of missionaries who would speak at the church her father pastored.
“My first memory was just having a sense that my life was going to be committed to doing the work of the Lord,” Tiffany recalls. “And I really thought as a young kid that I would be a missionary. I didn’t necessarily envision it as local church ministry, but I just had a real heart for the Lord.”
A VISION TO PLANT
Herbert and Tiff any married and continued traveling and speaking, basing their ministry out of Springfield while Tiff any finished her degree at Evangel. In April 2001, returning from a speaking engagement in Tulsa, Herbert sensed God was calling him to something different.
“It was in the car that—I don’t say this often because I haven’t had it happen often—but it was one of the few times I had an encounter,” he recalls. “God said, ‘I’m calling you and Tiff any to plant a multicultural church.’”
They explored planting in Minneapolis, Kansas City, St. Louis and Phoenix. Oklahoma wasn’t on their list until Herbert was preaching at a youth camp in the state and shared his vision for planting a multicultural church with a youth leader who encouraged him to consider doing so in Oklahoma.
The idea began percolating in the Coopers’ hearts, so when the camp was over, they drove to Oklahoma City, and both had an overwhelming sense they were coming home.
“We saw the Quail Springs Mall as we were driving, and I said, ‘That’s where we need to start the church,’” Herbert notes. “And that’s where we started.”
It was 2002, and the resources for church planters that are ubiquitous today were rare. Instead, they launched People’s Church out of the evangelistic ministry Herbert had started while still at Evangel. Another couple joined them in the venture, and they began gathering for a home-based Bible study, which led to outreaches, hanging announcements on doorknobs, renting billboard space and eventually meeting in a hotel. To cover their living expenses, Herbert continued to travel and preach while Tiff any got a job as a schoolteacher.
“I’d go out and do Sunday night through Wednesday night revivals, youth camps and conventions,” Herbert explains. “It was a grind, but we took finances from our nonprofit, and we funneled it back into the church, so I had staff boots on the ground during the week to lead and to execute the vision.”
He notes that other church planters have asked him to share his model with them. “We don’t share it,” he says, smiling grimly.
“You don’t want our model. It’s a suicide model.” Their first official service was Mother’s Day 2002, and 65 people showed up. “You don’t start a church on Mother’s Day,” Herbert says, laughing, “but we didn’t know.”
He says they expected immediate results for the hard work they put into the launch. Because they were planting alone, they had no
frame of reference for how things should go. Everything was new.
“We thought we would grow. I didn’t realize that we go right from Mother’s Day to Memorial Day and the summer slump,” he recalls. “That
was a very depressing time, questioning, ‘God, are we supposed to do this?’”
As the summer waned, more people began showing up, and by the first Sunday of August,
People’s Church hit the 100-person mark.
“We thought, This is gonna work, and we Jericho-marched all around the AMC Theater. We couldn’t believe it,” Herbert notes. Even though they were not in a part of the country known for progressive social views, their visible presence as a biracial couple began to attract others who shared their vision for a multicultural congregation.
“There were so many people who came to our church that said, ‘We saw that advertisement, and we saw you together and we knew that we would be welcome,’” Tiff any explains. “We’ve just been super intentional that people be represented. Within our leadership, with the people that are leading from the platform, we have made an effort to make sure that the people that are a part of our church are seeing themselves represented in the leadership.”
While this created an environment of inclusion for some, it was new for whites who had limited experience seeing people of color in positions of leadership.
“There were people who had never worshiped with somebody of a different skin color—99.9% of the white people that attended had never been under Black leadership in any setting,” Herbert notes. “I was their first Black leader that they’d ever followed.”
A FAMILY CALLING
As their family has grown—along with the church—Tiff any’s role has evolved. She dedicates much of her energy to staff care, heading up Sisterhood (a women’s Bible study that spans the church’s campuses) and occasionally speaking for Sunday services.
“I meet one-on-one with people, and I really have a heart for our church family,” she explains. “So, if there’s a way that I can provide care, it’s really in my heart to do it.”
The Coopers’ four children were born during the early years of their ministry, and all are involved in serving at the church. The oldest leads the youth ministry at People’s Church’s Midwest City location where he serves under his former youth pastor who is now the campus pastor.
“Because I was a pastor’s kid, I had some understanding of the challenges that pastor’s kids have. So, we were just really careful not to put expectations on our kids simply because they were pastor’s kids,” Tiffany explains. “We just would ask them to do what we ask everybody in our church to do, which is attend faithfully and serve.”
Herbert attributes the family’s health to their commitment to meals around the dinner table, Thursday date nights as a couple and Friday “family date nights” that are rarely interrupted by ministry events. “The investment in our kids has been huge for us,” he notes. “We work really hard not to have a thriving church and to destroy our kids.”
In the years since Herbert’s own personal crisis, People’s Church has grown and thrived. Now with four campuses in the Oklahoma City metro area, one at Mabel Bassett Correctional Facility in McLoud, Oklahoma, and a campus in Indianapolis led by Chris and Jamie Smith, who served as youth pastors at People’s for 17 years and had previously lived in Indianapolis.
“They had the vision to plant a church there,” Herbert explains. “And we were like, ‘OK, you’re our spiritual sons and daughters. Let’s do it!’” Preaching is simulcast across the locations, allowing pastors at all the campuses to share the responsibility. “Some will be live teaching, and some will be video based upon the gift set of the campus pastor,” Herbert explains. Asked if he envisions the campuses ever becoming independent churches, Herbert says it’s unlikely, pointing to the benefits of scale that come with a multisite model with centralized administrative resources.
“There’s great strength in that you don’t have to have multiple video departments, multiple financial departments. It’s all in one, and it really allows ministry to happen at a great rate since they [campus pastors] don’t have to spend their time writing sermons, creating videos, dealing with the financials. That can all be centralized,” he explains. “So, I don’t see that changing.”
As they look to the future, Herbert and Tiffany have their eyes on urban, suburban and rural communities where they hope to plant new campuses. But more importantly, they are committed to raising up and investing in the leaders who will serve those congregations.
“We see 50 campuses—we’re chasing it,” Herbert notes, “and we’re going raise up the pipeline of leaders, the next generation to be able to do it.” In addition to their work at People’s Church, Herbert and Tiffany are members of the ARC (Association of Related Churches) executive team.
In their role with ARC, they mentor planters around the country, and People’s financially supports new ARC plants in the U.S. and around the world. As People’s Church has reached the 23-year milestone since its planting, Herbert notes that growth is not a given. It’s the result of people coming to Christ, being baptized and becoming integrated into the life of the church—something he doesn’t take for granted as a former full-time evangelist.
“We’re seeing more salvations than ever, and we baptized—for the first time in the history of our church—over 1,000 people last year,” he says. “I really do thank the Lord for the forward momentum we’re having.”
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This article was featured in the Summer 2025 AVAIL Journal.
is the editorial director for AVAIL Journal. He also serves as vice president of marketing for Pioneers, a global church-planting organization based in Orlando, Florida. He lives in Central Florida with his wife, Andy. They have four children and one grandchild.
