Omaha pastor allied with Trump. His church is booming, buying serious real estate

“And so as our hands are lifted, Lord. It is a sign of the victory you have brought at this time to the Earth, to us in the United States of America.”

Massive screens in every corner of the auditorium showed a woman in the crowd wearing a bedazzled red America cap and pumping her fist to the throbbing bass.

The service, a Friday night event, resembled a rock concert more than any traditional liturgy. 

Big names in the evangelical Christian world had descended upon Millard for FlashPoint Next Level, a worship service with a panel of pastors. From the stage, they expressed their gratitude for Donald Trump’s second term. 

They’d prophesied Trump’s victory for years, decried the 2020 election as stolen, and pushed for Nebraska to adopt a winner-take-all electoral system – a change that Kunneman’s Lord of Hosts Church is still advocating.

Kunneman and his network of pastors, once dismissed as a fringe group, have quickly risen to a position of religious and national political power, said Matthew Taylor, senior scholar in religion and politics at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies.

And Kunneman’s Millard-based church has quickly amassed real estate, money and power in the Omaha area, too, building a sprawling multi-million dollar church and buying up an estimated $14.9 million of nearby commercial real estate.

“They are driving the conversation within American evangelicalism, and they have accumulated a great deal of political capital,” Taylor said. “I think that they’re gonna wield that sword … against their enemies.”

On that Friday night in January, hundreds of worshippers, many white and of retirement age, bopped their heads and waved their arms in the new sanctuary. One man pushed a walker down the aisle with an American flag tied to the front. 

Tables lined the hallway outside, selling books written by the Kunnemans and patriotic merchandise, including hoodies with a message emblazoned through the middle of the American flag. 

“It’s God’s turn now.”

The Prophet 

In the year leading up to the 2024 election, Kunneman called Trump “appointed and anointed” by God. He broadcasted prophecies of Trump’s success across social media and his own One Voice Television.

“Who can lead us in this nation?” Kunneman said in August 2023. “God says, look to 45, who has been through the fire that has been turned up seven times hotter. Yet he shall walk out without the smell of smoke, says the Living God.”

This type of talk draws in both local congregants and online viewers fueling the church’s growth.

Brittany Shaw, a church member, said she saw videos of Kunneman preaching online as she was preparing to move to Omaha from Colorado. Feeling oppressed by strict COVID-19 restrictions at the time, she said it was life changing to see the pastor speaking out.

“There’s changes that we see in our country that I’m not OK with,” Shaw said. “And for a while, I guess I could say I floundered and didn’t know how to become involved, how to make a change and make a stand against what I saw that I didn’t like.”

Kunneman at times emulates the classic fire-and-brimstone preacher, raising his voice as he preaches about God’s justice and fury. He regularly wears a distinct high, stiff white collar and an American flag pin larger than his lapel.

His church is part of an independent charismatic sector of Christianity, which evolved out of Pentecostalism, Taylor said, keeping the “spirituality and effervescence” without the supervision or governance.

During the Friday night programming for FlashPoint Next Level, Kunneman spoke in tongues, squeezing his eyes closed and extending a hand toward the congregation.

Pastors later formed a tunnel in front of the pulpit for spiritual healing, laying their hands on stumbling, sobbing congregants as they passed through.

All of this is familiar to people who grew up in classic charismatic churches, Taylor said. As more mainline churches hemorrhaged members during the pandemic, defiant churches like Lord of Hosts grew.

“Evangelicals have really gravitated into these churches because they’re more political, they’re more Trumpy,” Taylor said. “They’re more ecstatic, exciting and they’re preaching the pro-Trump message that a lot of people wanted to hear during COVID.”

Open conversations about political issues as a church are important, said the Rev. Libby Grammer, a Baptist minister who has studied how churches can hold those discussions. But she believes pastors are doing a bad job if they are “partisan politicking” from the pulpit or publicly endorsing candidates.

“What happens is either a church becomes far one side or the other and basically pushes out everyone who disagrees,” Grammer said. “So you’re extremely progressive or extremely conservative, and you’re not welcome if you’re not that.”

That’s a problem, Grammer said later, in part because these churches “don’t have to do the hard work of talking to someone who believes differently, because their church is pretty monolithic.”

The Lord of Hosts Church did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Individual staff members deferred questions to the main office. Six other area pastors, many of them evangelical Christian, didn’t return messages or declined to discuss Lord of Hosts, with some saying they weren’t familiar enough with the church to comment.

This pandemic-era growth has been good for the Kunnemans’ bottom line.

One Voice Ministries, Kunneman and his wife’s outreach nonprofit, reported massive gains in revenue in its IRS 990 filings, from about $648,000 in 2019 to $1 million in 2020 and $3 million in 2021.

Even as that revenue increased, the church received government support.

In 2020, Lord of Hosts World Outreach Inc. took out a Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, loan. Including interest, a total of $175,344 was forgiven.

No Substantial Part

As a church, Lord of Hosts isn’t required to file 990s with the IRS, and is exempt from paying income and property taxes.

But the church’s political activities, particularly Kunneman’s prophecies during Trump’s candidacy, could put its tax-exempt status at risk, said Sam Brunson, professor of nonprofit tax law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. A rarely-enforced, seven-decade-old tax law prohibits nonprofits, including churches, from endorsing candidates for public office. It also says “no substantial part” of a church’s activities can be political.

In April, the church hosted a Turning Point USA rally for Nebraska to adopt a winner-take-all system and increase Trump’s odds of winning the presidency, sparking calls to report Lord of Hosts to the IRS.

State Sen. Merv Riepe, a Republican whose district includes the church, said he hasn’t met Kunneman, but would advise the church to be careful that its political activities don’t jeopardize its status.

“I-R-S are the three letters he should be watching out for,” Riepe said.

The IRS appears to be “gun shy” to enforce the law, even as groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom have tried to bait the agency into investigating churches and spurring a lawsuit that could strike down the Johnson Amendment, said Lloyd Mayer, law professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Very few churches have been audited under the law, Mayer said, and only one has lost tax-exempt status after running full-page newspaper ads declaring that voting for Bill Clinton is a sin.

As the nation has grown more polarized, there’s been a significant increase in pastors who believe it’s part of their mission to support a candidate from the pulpit, said Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University. Often, the congregation agrees and sees endorsements as an expression of their faith.

For pastors like Kunneman, Mayer said, defying the restrictions can project a rebel image.

“You can look like you’re opposing the powers without real risk, and often raise money with that sentiment,” Mayer said.

In his FlashPoint Next Level sermon, Kunneman directly referenced the Johnson Amendment twice, calling out other pastors for avoiding politics out of fear.

“I think it would be very, very difficult to be at a church like the Kunnemans’ and be anti-Trump,” Taylor said. “If you come to these churches, and if you do kind of embrace that kind of MAGA spirituality, then this just feels like a warm bath.”

Shaw, speaking with the Flatwater Free Press at a Nebraskans for Founders Values legislative workshop hosted by the church, said she found encouragement in the Lord of Hosts community when coworkers and family members opposing her views had her feeling down.

Robbin Hays isn’t a member of the church, but she also said she comes to events like FlashPoint Next Level and legislative workshops to find community and learn how to take political action.

“I want to learn how to share my values and make an impact,” Hays said. “I’m a grandparent, and I want them to have the freedoms that I had as a child, and so I’m trying to learn the best way to make changes in the Legislature and our schools.”

State Sen. Kathleen Kauth, Republican from Omaha, spoke at the workshop. She told a Flatwater reporter days before the workshop that she views the church’s political advocacy as comparable to other clergy members, like the Episcopal and Methodist pastors who recently testified against Kauth’s bill that would restrict transgender people to bathrooms, locker rooms and sports teams matching their sex assigned at birth. The Nebraska Catholic Conference testified in favor of that bill.

Churches and other nonprofits are allowed to testify and lobby for specific policies, especially those relevant to their missions, Brunson said, so long as it is less than about 15%-20% of their total activities.

The Flash Point

Though Lord of Hosts operates independent of any denomination, Kunneman often works within a network of megachurch pastors who appear well connected to Trump.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump brought in his friend Paula White, an independent charismatic like Kunneman, Taylor said. White then introduced Trump to the televangelist pastors then willing to meet him.

Several of these pastors already had big followings but were seen as “low brow” outsiders within the evangelical elite, Taylor said. Now American culture has shifted and they’re inside players.

Prophecies about Trump grew by the hundreds in the lead-up to the 2020 election, with pastors often comparing him to Biblical figures.

Kunneman was one of those pastors, regularly mentioning Trump from the pulpit.

In the fall of 2020, televangelist network Victory Channel created FlashPoint, a news commentary show that blends prophecy and politics. Kunneman became a regular panelist.

The program launched with about 50,000 total views across broadcasts. By Jan. 6, 2021, those views, Taylor said: 32 million.

Now, FlashPoint is a major player in the Christian media space, Taylor said, though it’s a “fairly extreme” expression of Christian ideology. Trump himself has started to lean into the FlashPoint hosts’ prophetic language, particularly after a Pennsylvania man attempted to assassinate him.

FlashPoint served as a mobilizing force in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Taylor said. While Kunneman himself didn’t appear to be there, Taylor said he identified more than 60 independent charismatic leaders in the D.C. crowd that day.

Violent right-wing rhetoric has blended with spiritual warfare, Taylor said, its messengers promoting a struggle to take back American culture and government from opponents they call demonic. 

“I don’t think it’s too far to call it propagandizing Trump,” Taylor said.

The Tabernacle

As the Kunnemans’ One Voice Ministries revenue tripled through the pandemic years, and the number of people watching programs like FlashPoint grew exponentially, the Millard church launched a physical expansion plan, too.

In January 2023, Lord of Hosts World Outreach Inc. bought a section of Millard Plaza for $1.8 million, according to Douglas County assessor records.

They tore down the old building and built a sprawling new facility, called the Tabernacle, that opened this past October. The 1,500-seat main worship space is packed with lights and speakers, huge screens and at least two large camera cranes stretching over the audience’s heads.

During FlashPoint Next Level, young staff members walked the floor with hand-held cameras, zeroing in on emotional displays in the crowd and broadcasting them across multiple networks.

It’s unusual now to find a conservative Christian pastor who doesn’t invest in video production so that they can get their message to spread, said Hemant Mehta, an author and atheist advocate who critiques religion.

“If you want to reach a wider audience, and it’s very easy to get the money for that too, because you can honestly tell the congregation that if you give me a certain amount of money, it can reach a wider audience,” Mehta said. “And isn’t that what Jesus wanted?”

Three days before the Lord of Hosts’ real estate purchase, another entity called Global Quest LLC spent $8 million on another section of Millard Plaza, including the building that holds the local family favorite Amazing Pizza Machine. Then, in September 2023, Global Quest spent another $5.1 million on a nearby office building.

That LLC is registered to the same address as Lord of Hosts. Both organizations are co-defendants represented by the same lawyer on a lawsuit to take over a small section of access road called T Plaza, and Kunneman took credit for purchasing the second building during a sermon weeks later.

During a January 2023 service, Brenda Kunneman said that construction on the Tabernacle would cost around $16.2 million. If that’s true, it would bump the group’s estimated total spending on Millard Plaza-area real estate and construction to more than $30 million.

Omaha City Councilman Don Rowe visited the site when it was under construction, he said, and learned that the church was connected to Heartland Hope Mission, known for its food and clothing pantry. Rowe said his district, which includes the church, has many people who rely on Heartland Hope for meals and essentials.

Heartland Hope Mission did not respond to requests for comment on their work with the church.

“(Lord of Hosts) is obviously meeting needs in the community, because people are attending there, and they’re growing,” Rowe said.

Rowe also supported the church’s social media manager Terri Blackburn when she applied to fill Vinny Palermo’s vacant city council seat, though the council did not appoint her. Blackburn declined to comment, directing all questions to the Lord of Hosts main office, which did not respond to multiple requests.

Several other area politicians and other local churches said they aren’t familiar with the Lord of Hosts Church. If they are, it’s often because of those real estate purchases.

“He’s a big fish in a small pond, but if you’re not part of that pond, you could very easily not be aware of what’s going on there,” Mehta said.

That pond isn’t expected to stay small, though. With White in charge of the Trump administration’s faith office, experts expect to see pastors like Kunneman’s power expand.

“This is the fastest growing part of American Christianity, as far as we can tell, and it is growing leaps and bounds in terms of its political influence,” Taylor said.