Pastor Heath Mooneyham takes a giant pull from his pint of Miller Lite and drops his dinner order on a buxom young bartender. “Get me some badass cheese fries,” he says, earning a few laughs from his buddies flanked beside him at the bar.
It’s 10 p.m. on a Saturday 20 miles outside of Joplin, Missouri, where Mooneyham helms a church for dudes by dudes called Ignite, with a core mission to win over men, ages 18 to 35. An hour earlier, the 36-year-old pastor had wrapped up his spiritual work for the evening by leading a group prayer—set to heart-thumping Christian rock riffs—in Ignite’s blackened auditorium. With his big Sunday sermon tomorrow morning, Mooneyham is taking the edge off at the Indigo Sky Casino, a weekly ritual that consists of pounding beers with his bros in Christ and—at least tonight—hitting on waitresses.
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