Lord of Hosts Church

Lord of Hosts Church is the Omaha, Nebraska, congregation pastored by Hank Kunneman and Brenda Kunneman. In the book, it is more than a place where services are held: it is the institutional setting in which persistent prayer, prophetic teaching, worship, healing testimonies, and collective responsibility are joined together. Its decisive significance lies in the claim that a church becomes powerful when prayer is not an auxiliary department but the shared practice of the whole congregation.

Identity and Setting

Lord of Hosts Church emerged in the narrative as a developing church whose founders had to secure and enlarge a physical meeting place. When services began, the congregation leased space in a strip mall and planned worship with drums and guitars. The thin walls between the church and a neighboring weekend business created a conflict, and the property manager announced that the church would have to move immediately, only days before a Sunday service. The crisis made the church’s location a test of its dependence on prayer rather than a settled background.

The church eventually moved from one small bay to three bays and later expanded to seven times the area of the original space. The book interprets this enlargement as an unexpected blessing produced through persistent prayer: what initially threatened the congregation’s ability to meet became an occasion for a larger vision. A respected business professional who did not know Hank Kunneman and had never attended the church intervened, negotiated with the parties involved, and helped open the way to the replacement space.

Ministry and Organization

The church is described as having captivating praise and worship, prophetic teaching, a solid leadership team, and an organized style of ministry. Its services are presented as rich with the presence of God, while its broader work addresses the everyday needs of people and raises up strong believers. The book also places the congregation within a wider ministry network associated with Hank and Brenda Kunneman, portraying it as one of the more innovative and rapidly developing churches in the United States.

Its organization is not presented as an end in itself. The church’s departments, leaders, services, and teaching are meant to support a culture in which believers learn to pray both corporately and individually. The author acknowledges that even a church with many impressive activities can allow prayer to become less important than other departments. When programs consume the available time, collective prayer disappears; the resulting institutional imbalance is treated as a loss of spiritual purpose rather than merely a scheduling problem.

Prayer as the Church’s Center

Lord of Hosts Church is repeatedly defined by its refusal to let prayer lose its place. The book contrasts the biblical “house of prayer” with a “den of thieves,” arguing that churches can allow busyness, preferences, meals, teaching programs, and other activities to steal the time and attention that belong to prayer. The congregation is therefore urged to attend prayer meetings and to support its pastors through a shared commitment to seeking God.

This emphasis is collective rather than restricted to a specialist group of intercessors. The author argues that creating a house of prayer requires the whole church to participate, because united prayer can affect cities and nations. The early church in Acts is offered as the model: its leaders gave themselves to the Word of God and prayer instead of allowing functional demands to displace those priorities. Lord of Hosts Church seeks to reproduce that pattern by training members to respond quickly in crisis and to regard prayer as the foundation of Christian life, both individually and corporately.

Crisis, Worship, and Testimony

The congregation’s identity is reinforced by stories in which its members pray through emergencies. When a child from the church fell from a window, the church’s established practice of corporate and individual prayer enabled it to respond immediately and stand against what the author believed the devil intended to steal. The child was found to have only a slight concussion, with no internal injuries or broken bones, despite the seriousness of the fall. The account presents the result as angelic protection joined to the persistence of the family and church.

A similar pattern appears in the story of a newborn girl whose platelet count was extremely low and whose incurable disease attacked her liver and blood. Doctors reported that her liver was failing and gave her only an 11 percent chance of living. Lord of Hosts Church prayed while the condition continued to worsen, and its members kept speaking God’s promises of healing rather than treating the lack of immediate improvement as a reason to stop. The author presents the eventual miracle as the fruit of a congregation that decided it had to pursue God’s power and would not abandon the child in prayer.

The church’s worship theology is also illustrated through biblical models. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are interpreted as falling prostrate before the Son of God in the fiery furnace rather than bowing to a man-made statue, while Paul and Silas’s prayer and praise at midnight are associated with an earthquake that opened the prison doors and loosed the prisoners’ chains. These stories establish worship as a form of spiritual resistance and deliverance. Within the book’s framework, the church’s services are therefore not decorative performances: praise and prayer are practical acts through which believers hold their ground in moments of bondage, danger, and apparent defeat.

Narrative and Religious Significance

Lord of Hosts Church functions simultaneously as a congregation, a training environment, and a source of validating testimony. The author’s experiences of prayer, crisis, healing, and expansion are repeatedly returned to the church community, where personal conviction becomes shared practice. Its story moves from the threat of losing a meeting place to unexpected enlargement, from emergencies involving children and newborns to communal declarations of faith, and from concern about declining prayer meetings to a demand for renewed participation.

As a location in the book’s religious argument, the church embodies the difference between a building occupied by religious activity and a genuine house of prayer. Its success is measured not only by size, organization, or reputation, but by whether its people remain committed when answers are delayed, circumstances deteriorate, or fear invites retreat. The church’s defining image is thus a praying community that refuses to leave God alone until it has pursued healing, protection, direction, and blessing through persistent worship and prayer.