Hope Church — Attraction in Fort Worth

I absolutely recommend this place for people with children AND for people that desire more than once a week interaction with other believers.

….you will meet genuinely nice people, and you will meet fake nice people… as with life anywhere….But the sermons are spot on… Great life lessons, if you can weed through the fake people…. mostly church staff, but the higher ranking the leader, the more genuine they are, I can say that. The sermons include handouts where you can take notes, and fill in the blanks on the worksheet they give you on biblical life lessons.

They provide free coffee, tea , honey, sugar, French vanilla creamer, and half-and-half, along with about a half a dozen syrup flavors.

About once every six weeks they provide an enormous breakfast with pastries. To celebrate Mother’s Day they provide a pancake breakfast only to the women and all of the men are so kind and stay back and have only coffee while the entire church celebrates the mothers.

They do an Easter egg hunt every year.

They have an enormous potluck for Thanksgiving that is simply delicious and so much fun to attend and meet people.

Christmas is also a pretty amazing time… honestly, though the very best group to join in my opinion is Ben and Heidi’s group.

It’s absolutely necessary that you join a group for Bible study, (they don’t do adult Bible study at the church on Sundays ) but you can join a group which is offered often and you get to go weekly… and pretty much every group I’ve been in does a potluck every single week so you just bring your favorite dish and share with people or show up and snack on what is right and hear some good news…. this is truly the only way to matriculate well with other people who believe.

They don’t teach from the king James version, which is a little bit annoying, but other than that you won’t find a better sermon unless you’re listening to Joyce Meyer’s, or Robert Jeffers.

Matt is an excellent public speaker, he does not come across fake at all, he is married to the daughter of the man who started this Church. Be aware also, this is a teaching church so from time to time we will see some of the leaders at the pulpit, and they are not as well spoken as the head pastor, but they are trying, and they are going to become pastors, eventually of their church.

The children’s ministry is the number one reason I chose this place… I love the giant windows where you can look in on the children. These windows are about the size of a one car garage door so you can see a clear view of your child and how they interact with other children and the volunteers, teaching them their Bible study and playing toys with them.

Big church and Bible study for children starts at 9:30 AM and the second “big church and children’s Bible study is at 11 AM …..but if you arrive at 9:15 AM your elementary school age child can participate in the morning songs and then go to 930am Sunday school.

I love the stockyard theme of the children’s area, and I love how there are plenty of volunteers around during first and second service in the hallways fellowshipping with one another and attending the coffee bar, the welcome stand, and just overall being there for questions, but also for your security… They have plainclothes security personnel who will walk around, introducing themselves to new people and new faces, and warmly ask how you are enjoying your visit as an opportunity to get to know you to make sure that there is no mischief about to occur, and that you are just sincerely curious about...

Hope was our home church for over a decade. What I share comes from years of lived experience and deep heartache — not a passing offense or one-time disagreement.

Despite what’s preached, this is not a place where the love or grace of God is truly taught or modeled. What you receive instead is a never-ending list of tasks, often packaged in clever acrostics, that amount to legalism cloaked as discipleship. If you don’t follow “The Hope Way,” you’re subtly (or openly) judged as unfaithful, rebellious, or unworthy. The standards set by leadership for being “good enough” are not only unattainable — they are spiritually damaging.

When we finally left — by the grace of God — I began to see the system for what it was: a place of spiritual control and religious performance, not transformation. What I once called a church, I now recognize as a spiritual cult.

What’s worse, the long-standing abuse that occurred under a trusted youth leader — abuse that affected my own daughter — was not only horrific but was enabled and protected by the very staff we trusted. Many of the youth harmed by this individual are now agnostic, broken, and unable to step foot into a church again. That is spiritual blood on your hands. The man who forced teens to do degrading and disturbing tasks, like burning live rats on his farm, remained on staff for years. And those who kept him there? You are complicit.

If Hope staff read this, I challenge you: examine the trail of damage left in your wake. The emotional and spiritual wounds inflicted on many members — especially youth — are real. You taught people to seek God’s approval through lists, performance, and appearances, not through the free grace of Christ. And you did it with pride and a polished smile.

What grieves me most is that the founding families — the true builders of this church — are 99.9% gone. That alone should be a wake-up call. Years ago, we held “Hope Survivor” support groups — and to our surprise, we all shared the same experiences and the same pain.

Bottom line: God’s love is not earned. It is freely given through Jesus. You will not learn this at Hope.

Before joining any church, examine the fruit. Do the actions and character of the leadership align with the heart of God revealed in Scripture? If not — don’t be fooled. Walk away.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence… First clean the inside… that the outside also may be clean.”...

A Church More Concerned with Control Than Compassion

Hope Church presents itself as a welcoming, Christ-centered community, but my experience revealed something deeply concerning. This church cultivates a culture that is, frankly, cult-like in its rigidity and judgment. If you do not conform to their unwritten social and theological codes, you are quietly (and sometimes openly) marginalized. Their message of God’s grace comes with invisible asterisks—extended only to those who live and speak in alignment with leadership expectations.

Perhaps most troubling was the behavior of the former youth pastor, who enlisted young students to perform physical labor on his private farm under the guise of “ministry” and “servant leadership.” The work was often grueling, entirely unrelated to spiritual formation, and absolutely inappropriate for their age group. This was not about teaching values; it was exploitation masked as service. For many, this left emotional and spiritual scars. It’s damaging to a young person’s developing sense of worth to be told that backbreaking labor is God's will—especially when the primary beneficiary is not the church or the poor, but one individual’s personal property.

Also not a complete reflection of the church, but church members views on any type of difference physically or mentally is disturbing. Multiple members chided us on my brother’s Down syndrome being a direct result of my family’s lineage of sin. I thought we didn’t live under Old Testament law anymore?

The church has yet to meaningfully address these abuses, and the broader culture remains one of spiritual elitism and performance-based belonging. This is not what the Gospel teaches.

As Scripture reminds us: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces.”(Matthew 23:13)

I write this not to tear down faith, but to caution those seeking authentic spiritual community. Be discerning. Not all churches that preach grace practice it. Find somewhere else to plug in that’s grace...