Heartland Church Celebrates 25 Years in Fishers & an Ongoing Commitment to Serving the Community – One Person At a Time
Writer / Ralph Cipriano
Photographer / Madeline Norris
Editor’s note: On Sunday, February 1, 2026, members of Heartland Church past and present will gather at the Fishers Event Center to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the church’s founding. As part of this celebration, Heartland is launching a bold plan to invest significantly in the youth of the city by building a new recreation center. Everyone’s invited to attend.
In this story, Ralph Cipriano, a former reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, who was a religious skeptic, recounts the history of Heartland.
In the winter of 2008, Darryn Scheske, the pastor of Heartland Church in Fishers, traveled to West Africa, to witness first-hand the local water crisis.
In Sierra Leone, more than 40% of the population lacked access to clean water. As a result, one in five children were dying every year from waterborne diseases.
Pastor Darryn watched as a large drill rig was digging a new well, to supply fresh water to the remote village that he was visiting.
“The rig made a terrible grinding, screeching sound,” Darryn says. “And then it went up in smoke.”
The rig was too old to repair. And a new drill rig was going to cost $150,000. So on the plane back to Indianapolis, Pastor Darryn wrestled with his conscience.
At the time, Heartland Church was experiencing growing pains, while running three packed-out Sunday services on the old showroom floor of a defunct computer store covered with folding chairs.
Fundraising was slow, however, because at the time the entire worldwide economy was in a severe downturn known as the Great Recession.
The pastor was trying to raise $300,000, but after six months, he only had $150,000. But that was exactly the amount that the people in Sierra Leone needed to buy a new well-drilling machine.
The pastor called a church meeting and asked his congregation what they wanted to do.
“For us it’s just a delay for a building project,” Pastor Darryn said to his congregation. “For us it is just a delay, But for the people of Sierra Leone, the new drill rig was a matter of life and death. What if we gave this money to some people who just need to survive.”
So that’s how the congregation at Heartland Church decided to give away their entire building fund to people in West Africa they didn’t know, who were more than 5,000 miles away.
A member of the congregation was so impressed that he announced he would match that donation. They were able to buy two drill rigs.
Then, Pastor Darryn and his church decided to partner on the project with the local Rotary Club.
Tom Branum Jr, the president of the local Rotary Club who subsequently became a member of Heartland Church, says the water project changed his life. The project, known as “Water is Life,” is still going strong. In the past 17 years, in a transatlantic partnership between the church, the Rotary Clubs of Fishers and Freetown, Sierra Leone, the Rotary International Foundation and World Hope International, together have built more than 200 new wells, supplying clean, safe water to more than 500,000 people in West Africa.
Traveling around Indiana, on behalf of Rotary, to raise money for the water project, Pastor Darryn learned the meaning of a sign that once sat on the desk of former President Ronald Reagan – “There is no limit what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”
Now that same sign sits on the pastor’s desk. It’s a gift from Lou Gerig, Reagan’s former assistant press secretary, who’s a member of the church.
This philosophy drives the church towards partnerships of scale, instead of trying to create their own ministries. Rather than starting their own food bank, the church supports 43 existing food banks through the Good Samaritan Network. The church partners with local ministries such as a homeless outreach known as Food 4 Souls, Gennesaret, a free medical clinic, the Neighborhood Legal Clinic, and Grit into Grace, a ministry that rescues young women from the sex trade.
“Last year, through the generosity of our members, we gave away $1.3M,” Pastor Darryn says.
It’s been a long journey for the pastor, who’s 55. He grew up in the Caribbean as the son of missionary parents.
I met Darryn in the mid-1990s, when I was a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and he was the assistant pastor of a church near my home in Bensalem, a Philadelphia suburb.
At the time, Darryn struck me, a religious skeptic, as an unconventional free spirit in the often-stuffy church world. Because he was raised in the islands, Darryn walked around during Pennsylvania winters wearing no tie, and no socks. He had a friendly, low-key, no-pressure style that allowed him to chat up perfect strangers.
I remember when we met, the two of us went to an Italian restaurant in Bensalem. While I was checking out the menu, Darryn was making small talk with Raphael, a waiter from Italy.
As I watched, Darryn quizzed Raphael about what turned him off about church and organized religion. Then, Darryn asked Raphael if he thought he was going to go to heaven.
By the time the antipasto was served, Raphael was on his knees in prayer with the pastor.
Pastor Darryn had a dream to plant a church with a diverse congregation that “would look like heaven.” But there was only one problem.
“I didn’t know where it would be,” he said. “Growing up in the Caribbean, it never occurred to me to be in Indiana.”
But in the late 1990s, a multi-ethnic church planting movement called Converge asked him to consider moving to Fishers, because it was one of the fastest growing places in America.
“No way,” was Darryn’s first reaction to planting a church in Indiana. But then he and his wife, Loree, took a trip to Fishers. And both of them came back saying, “This is crazy, but I think we’re supposed to come here.”
A church member volunteered to move the family’s belongings across the country. The trucker strapped all of the Scheske family’s earthly possessions on the bed of his flat-bed semi and threw a tarp over it. “I felt like we were the Beverly Hillbillies,” Darryn recalls.
And that’s how Darryn and Loree Scheske, and their three kids, ages 7, 4 and 1, moved from Pennsylvania to Indiana.
The first six months in Fishers, Darryn just went around meeting people. He knocked on doors and personally invited more than 1,000 people to attend a launch party for the church.
When the day came for the launch party, held in the community center of his apartment complex in Fishers, nobody showed up.
Darryn was crushed, and believed his dream had ended in failure. He spent three solitary days in his makeshift closet office.
When he finally emerged, Darryn felt like he had heard from God. And the message was: “Stop trying to start a church and just pastor people I put in front of you!”
He decided that day to put down roots and buy a home in Fishers. Darryn met a realtor, who introduced him to a mortgage broker, who introduced him to an insurance agent.
In the course of buying a new home, Darryn led all three new friends to faith. When he finally started Heartland Church in his living room in February 2001, the realtor, the mortgage broker and the insurance agent, along with their children, were among the church’s original 17 founding members.
Darryn built his first 4-foot by 8-foot platform himself out of plywood. And he started what would become one of the largest daycare centers in the state. In the first year, the new church baptized 86 people. The next year it was 200, then 300.
The congregation eventually raised the $300,000 needed to renovate the former Elek-Tek computer store.
In 2019, the church broke ground on its current location at the intersection of East 126th Street and Southeastern Parkway.
Today, after 25 years, the church holds four services every Sunday, drawing more than 5,000 people weekly, and thousands more online.
The church also runs a prayer service every Wednesday morning at 6:00 a.m. that attracts hundreds of people, mostly high school students.
“These kids are on fire,” Pastor Darryn says. “They’re dragging their parents out of bed to take them to church to pray at 6:00 a.m.”
The Heartland Church congregation demographically is about 30% white, 30% biracial, and another 30% that’s black, plus 8% Latino, and 2% Asian.
“The thing that is unique to me is that we have a church that has somehow provided a gathering of every walk of life, ethnicity, politically, socioeconomically, denominationally,” says Fishers Mayor Scott Fadness, who’s also a member at Heartland. “It defies all the stereotypes of what people think of church. We have this unique diversity that people can’t explain. That’s what strikes people, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, rich, poor. It didn’t grow by being politically correct. It grew by relating to people where they are.”
If you’re coming to Heartland Church to have your political views validated, Pastor Darryn will tell you upfront to tune in to either MSNBC or FOX News.
Because as far as Pastor Darryn is concerned, the politics of the left and the right amount to “just noise.”
“I found that Jesus offends the left and the right equally,” Pastor Darryn says.
Rather than play politics, his mission remains simple: to point people toward Jesus.
To learn more about Heartland Church, visit Heartlandchurch.com.
