Wayne & Donna Heins

Pastor Wayne and wife Donna are the founders of Grace United Urban Ministries (GUUM) and serve as President and Vice-President. They have dedicated their lives to ministering to marginalized people and have been on the streets of Oklahoma City with the homeless for over 10 years. Pastor Wayne is the author of “Breaking Free from Addiction: The Journey Back to Father’s Design” and he has a podcast on the Stream Grace Network entitled Breaking Free.

Life is about seasons and their transitions one into another. Pastors Wayne and Donna Heins started Grace Point Church after a season of becoming disenfranchised with traditional church as they knew it. The inside the building vision of the church to get people to clean up and come to you made it difficult to really touch people in need.

Wayne grew up as a teen working in a suburban church bus ministry that brought in 300-350 children each Sunday from the ghetto of Milwaukee Wisconsin. Donna grew up in Lawton, following the old black Saints out into the streets to minister to the prostitutes. This was a divine pairing of two relational and mission minded people not intimidated to bring good news on the other side of the tracks.

In McLoud, Wayne and Donna set out to do “church” differently. They immediately began collecting food, clothing, housewares, and furniture/appliances to give back out into the community for free. Their building was not open just on Sunday morning and Wednesday night but seven days a week. When the young single mothers with children did not have the knowledge or the cookware to make Thanksgiving dinner or the elderly widows/widowers did not have anyone to cook a meal for, Wayne and Donna put on a free Thanksgiving Dinner for the community that continues to this day feeding about 600 people a year.

About that same time, Wayne and Donna began feeding a small group of homeless people in downtown OKC. It did not take long to be bitten by the homeless ministry bug. For over 10 years now, they have been in the streets developing a vision that God has given them. They have a mobile clothes-closet that hands out clothes, personal care products, blankets, tarps, sleeping bags etc. They hand out at least 160 meals every weekend and sometimes as many 400-500 depending on conditions and time of year. People are brought off the street into their homes in small numbers with an opportunity to be mentored and transition to their own living arrangements.

Wayne and his wife Donna, along with their team have run short term Emergency Shelters when the winter weather falls below freezing for multiple days. Housing as many as 30 and up to 50 in extreme conditions. This was the forerunner for Grace Transformation House where the homeless have been taken in to their home as extended family. It is here that the Radical Life Transformation Training & Mentoring Program was developed to help people successfully transition from homelessness and/or addiction back into regular society.

What makes Wayne and Donna different is their work is not about dumping food and a few t-shirts so they can make a feel good, look at me Facebook post. It’s not a 9-4 job where the homeless wait in line to see them only to be told they do not qualify or its closing time you will have to come back and start over with someone else. Wayne and Donna go to the people, they earn the right to speak into the lives of the homeless by serving them with love and compassion. They call the homeless their friends and family and treat them with honor and respect. One of their famous sayings is “Everyone has a name, and everyone has a story, we’d like to know your name and listen to your story”. They do not aspire to be six figure CEO’s of a prominent charity, they desire to be on the front lines face to face, being real people to real people, seeing lives transformed not just getting a roof. They do have the lofty goal of doing homeless ministry with the addition of a dedicated and stand alone Grace Transformation House so that OKC can see the possibility of ending homelessness and that communities from around the country come here to learn how to model our success.

Whoever you are, and wherever you are reading this, Wayne and Donna need your partnership as volunteers, in donations of food and clothing and financially to literally help change the central Oklahoma metro area.