The Justice Reform & Mercy Culture the Heart Behind the Vision an Exclusive Interview with Heather Schott
There are few interviews that shift atmospheres, where words of vision for the future carry the weight of prophetic declaration. In this exclusive conversation with Heather Schott, we experience just that. For even the unbeliever who would tune in, the stir they would experience in their spirit is a byproduct that is undeniable. It is as deep calls unto deep. Her heart for people is something that all would agree must be inspired by more. She does not present her faith as a concept. She presents it as the reason she is alive, the reason her family is whole, and the reason she cannot look away from the places where darkness still tries to enter.
Before Heather Schott became a pastor, author, and leader whose voice now carries influence across cities and states, her life began in a very different place. Her childhood was shaped by two radically different worlds. Her mother had been raised in what Heather describes as “a religious cult, very extreme,” while her father grew up under “a godless father” and fell into addiction early in life. Their marriage quickly unraveled after her mother discovered he was dealing drugs out of the basement of their home. After a violent incident left her mother hospitalized, the family separated, and Heather spent her childhood moving between two opposing environments. “The problem is the courts gave 50 percent of the time to my dad,” she says. “So I was raised half the time in a Christian home and the other half of the time in a house with drugs, alcohol, pornography, partying, all of it.”
By her teenage years the tension between those worlds surfaced in rebellion. By sixteen she was deeply immersed in drugs, alcohol, and partying as a way to numb the pain. “A lot of the anger of everything I dealt with in my childhood, and not understanding, my outlet was drugs and alcohol and partying,” she says.
Her life reached its lowest point after a night of heavy drug use that ended in an overdose. “He leaves me in an abandoned apartment complex for dead, like trash on the floor,” she recalls. When she was finally taken to the hospital, the doctor delivered a sobering reality. “You’re a walking dead woman. You shouldn’t be alive. You have more drugs in your system than what should kill three grown men.”
Only months later she met Landon Schott, a pastor’s kid who invited her to church. What she encountered there was unlike anything she had known before. “I closed my eyes,” she recalls of that first service. “I felt this peace like a wave wash over me. It was the first time I’d felt peace like that in my whole life.” That moment marked the beginning of a complete transformation. “God supernaturally delivered me of all addiction, drugs, alcohol,” she says. “This is why I live for freedom today, because I experienced God’s freedom.”
That personal deliverance is not just Heather’s history. It is the engine behind Mercy Culture, the church she and Landon Schott launched in 2019 in Fort Worth, Texas. “The vision of Mercy Culture is taking people from corporate encounters with God to daily personal encounters with God,” she says.
The Justice Reform is one of the house visions closest to Heather’s heart. Through Mercy Culture’s Justice Reform initiative, the church steps directly into the criminal justice system and the human trafficking crisis with a focus on restoration rather than abandonment. The scale of the problem is staggering. The United States holds roughly 5 percent of the world’s population yet nearly 20 percent of its incarcerated people, with more than 2 million individuals currently in prisons and jails across the country. At the same time, human trafficking remains one of the fastest growing criminal industries in the world, with countless women and children in America trapped in cycles of exploitation.
For Heather, those numbers represent far more than statistics. “When you start to look at the numbers, it should break your heart,” she says. “These are real people, real families, real children growing up without parents.”
The Justice Reform also mobilizes people through an initiative called Justice Run. Heather explains that the idea was born during one of her own runs when she felt the Holy Spirit give her a powerful picture. “I saw a sea of runners,” she recalls, “but instead of race numbers they had children’s faces on them.” In that moment she felt the question rise in her spirit: what would keep you running no matter what? Her answer was immediate. “Lord, I would run for them.” What began as a personal moment of conviction eventually grew into Justice Run, an event designed to raise awareness and resources while inviting ordinary people to physically participate in the fight against trafficking. Through the run, participants symbolically carry the faces and stories of those still trapped in exploitation, turning movement into advocacy and awareness into action.
Mercy Culture’s response goes even further than awareness. In Fort Worth, Texas, on the Mercy Culture property, the ministry is constructing the Justice Residence, a large scale restoration home designed to house up to one hundred survivors of human trafficking at a time. Women will be able to live there for one to three years while rebuilding their lives through counseling, mentorship, life skills training, and deep spiritual discipleship in a safe and stable environment. “We will help them heal and grow through discipleship programs and long term housing,” Heather explains, describing a process designed to restore women physically, emotionally, and spiritually after years of trauma. The goal is not simply temporary safety but lasting freedom and stability. “We want to help them get established so they don’t go back and end up exploited again, even pulled back into human sex trafficking,” she says. For Heather, the mission reflects the heart of the gospel itself. Jesus did not simply announce freedom; He walked directly into places where people were bound and restored them, and she believes the church is called to do the same.
Her vision for California is equally bold. At Pirate’s Cove, a place marked by revival history and baptisms, Heather says she saw the state not dead but dormant. “All of a sudden it was like waves of grain, like a harvest for God,” she says. That conviction helped lead Mercy Culture to Orange County. While on a prayer run along the beach she asked God for a clear sign. “I saw the Macedonian man from the book of Acts waving us in,” she says. Moments later a rain- bow stretched across the ocean. “I’m like, ‘Landon, it’s a sign. God spoke. I asked for a sign.’”
For Heather, moments like that confirmed what she and Landon had been sensing as they prayed for clarity. Mercy Culture Orange County will open on Pentecost Sunday, May 24, 2026.
When asked why she believes revival is beginning in California, Heather points to something happening simultaneously on the opposite side of the country. “There have been two previous revivals that started in California,” she says. “Pastors from Washington, D.C. heard about the revival fires in California. They flew to Southern California to catch what was happening. Then they flew back to D.C., and revival broke out there.”
“It’s like a stretching across the nation where God is going from the West Coast to the East Coast to bring revival.”
Heather’s story, both personally and through the Mercy Culture ministries, is another testimony that the supernatural is more common than it is rare when people allow God to move and partner with Him through obedience to His call. From a broken, lost, and nearly dead teenage girl she has become a woman empowered by God and now leading others to do the same. She often shares a simple truth born from her own life: if He can do it for me, He can do it for you. For those with eyes to see, her story stands as a reminder that God has not finished with America, and that when a united people respond in obedience, faith is igniting across the nation.
