Though Pastor Demeko Bivens is 33 years old and looks like a teenager, he still manages to bring that old soul vibe to the ministry to which he has been called—church planting.
Though the term may be foreign to many, the act itself is not. Church planting is literally the act of founding (starting) a church. It’s what Blackfolk have been doing for eons, including in biblical times.
What may be unique about church planting is, that individuals who found a church tend to pastor there for years, decades and even lifetimes. However, church planters start a church, pastor it for a while and then leave to plant more churches after a new leader/pastor has been developed.
Bivens’ commitment to ministry is a testimony in and of itself. As he readily admits, when he was an impressionable youth, he had many charismatic people “showing him the right way to do all the wrong things.”
Despite several men in his Mississippi family offering him solid examples of work ethic and righteous living, he was lured in a different direction. Still, Bivens eventually found his way to the profession (ministry) so many of his Mount Mariah Missionary Baptist Church family in Stateside, Mississippi saw in him at an early age.
Road to ministry
Bivens, a bona fide people person and committed family man, is open about his indirect road to ministry.
“I graduated high school in 2009, and started selling drugs in ninth grade, partying, using drugs, not appreciating women in a way that a man should be, then I graduate high school, then I go to a junior college in Mississippi playing football, defensive back and I’m there for like a year and a half,” he recalls.
After dropping out of school, getting a job and getting back into college, Bivens remembers an important drive in his 1984 Cutlass G-body, two-door.
“I was kinda like, ‘Lord, if you’re real, show me,’” he said while driving to his mother’s church. There a guest preacher from New York, Vincent Ross, delivered a word that changed the trajectory of Bivens’ life.
At church that day, when Ross made the altar call, Bivens, a longtime sufferer of sleep insomnia, moved down the aisle.
“I walked down to him and he tells me — a man who had sleep insomnia in high school and college–just between him and I, he tells me, ‘No more sleepless nights,’” shared Bivens, who hasn’t had a sleepless night since that 2011 moment. “And so, for me, a person who was restless, it was like that day I found rest for my soul.”
Shortly after coming to his faith, Bivens “felt like the Lord was calling me to be a leader in the church.” And for Bivens, being a leader meant being a servant leader.
“Since then, I’ve just been serving the local church, so if that includes setting up, breaking down, parking cars, working with college students, working with youth and teens, for me, no job is too big or small. I never want to get too big for my britches,” said Bivens, who didn’t learn about the form of ministry that would define divine service for the years to come.
“I didn’t learn about church planting until around 2017, 2018. It was a new term for me,” recalled Bivens who at the time had just taken the GRE (the test required for entry into many graduate school programs) in preparation for applying for his doctorate in physical therapy.
Mind you, after becoming a self-described “disciple of Jesus” in 2011, Bivens started doing ministry in 2023 in tandem with one of his best friends, Raph Peters.
“So, we’re doing college campus ministry, youth ministry,” Bivens recalled. “Then around 2017, he was like, ‘Man, I feel like the Lord’s calling us to plant a church.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll pray about it.”
And the rest is history that’s still in the making.
Houston church planting
The duo moved their families to Houston six years ago, as they were called to plant churches in a large international city. But for many Black people, church planting sounds like a foreign concept, or “a white thing.”
But Bivens grew to learn something different.
“Church planting is something that Black folks have been doing for a long time. Black churches, by and large, started because of pioneering efforts from our ancestors. The Black church exists in large part because of racism. Whenever Black and white folks were trying to worship together, by and large, white folks were like, ‘We don’t want you here. So, the Black church started… They needed a place to gather, to worship,” shared Bivens, who, along with his wife of 10 years, recently welcomed their third child, making them the parents of a 7-year-old, 5-year-old, and a newborn. “So, those leaders, those elders of those communities were starting churches, planting churches. That’s something we’ve been doing for a long time out of necessity.”
Biblical response to brokenness
Bivens appreciates the fact that church planting allows him to live his commitment to being a neighbor in the truest sense of the word to his congregants.
“We get to practice this incarnation ministry where we’re present with our neighbors. And that’s something that’s probably unique about our ministry. I live in the neighborhood that I serve. So, if my neighbors live in a food desert, I live in a food desert. So, that’s my problem. If my neighbors heard gunshots last night, I heard gunshots. So, that’s my problem,” he said. “And, one of the ways that we kind of do this incarnation ministry is by being present where our neighbors are, and just loving and serving where we are.”
That immediate proximity gives Bivens a front-row seat to the good, the bad, and the ugly of his South Union community.
“Church planting is especially essential to be able to engage the brokenness and the darkness of these communities that we love,” said Bivens. “When I think about where I live, OST South Union, south of the Greater Third Ward, there’s just a lot of needs to engage, a lot of times in the darkness, whether it’s single-parent households, alcohol addiction, drug addiction, there’s just a need for us to kind of step in and, first of all, listen to our neighbors’ stories.”
OST/South Union ministry
Bivens and his partner in ministry planted and co-pastor Southside Fellowship Church (5202 Griggs Rd, Houston, TX 77021), with a serious vision for growth.
“So, we started the church together, and we have folks in a leadership pipeline,” said Bivens. “The prayer, though, is to start new churches. We have a brother that we’ve been walking with. He’ll be planting a church in Sunnyside. We’ll be indirectly helping serve him as he plants the church. But we also wanna plant churches nationally, here in the United States, but also globally.”
DN VIDEO: Bivens talks about church planting’s biblical roots as an example of radical hospitality.
