Growing up, both Jason and Jacob Piland played the piano and baseball, but Jacob, the younger Piland, is quick to point out what makes them distinct.
“I played oboe and drums, and liked digging in the dirt. [Jason] was more techie and played video games.”
But to even the most casual observer, it is clear that Jason and Jacob Piland are brothers. Both wear glasses and have fiery red hair, leading many to ask if the men are twins, even though they are separated by a couple of years.
The Piland brothers also share a heart for church planting, and they are working to establish sister churches around Akron, Ohio.
Jason and Jacob, along with their younger brother, grew up in a faithful Christian family. Jason recalls how his father came to faith at a Billy Graham Crusade and his mother discovered the PCA while studying at the University of Virginia.
“Our parents were remarkably involved … in a really genuine way,” says Jacob. “I never felt like we were putting on a show going to church.”
Most of their childhood was spent in western North Carolina where the family attended Presbyterian churches for a time and then later attended a Southern Baptist Church.
“I never had a sense of call to ministry growing up,” says Jason, who studied music at Belmont University after high school, and then went on to law school. His goal was to become the very best Christian lawyer he could be.
While in high school, Jacob grew to love the church and helping people grow in the Lord. After studying architecture at Virginia Tech for a while, he transferred to Covenant College in Chattanooga where he began studying philosophy. It didn’t take him long to realize that he didn’t really like philosophy.
Rather, “I just like the gospel,” he says.
He switched to biblical studies at Covenant and then went on to study at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary to become a teacher or professor.
Crisis and Faith
In 2014, Jacon and Jason’s mother, Kim, died of ovarian cancer.
“I was devastated,” Jason says.
At the time, Jason was working as a small business and nonprofit lawyer in Nashville and attending Covenant Presbyterian Church. As he processed through the grief of her death, it became for him a catalyzing moment to consider shifting away from law to the ministry.
“The role of the ministry is to prepare people to die. That is the mantle that I carry. My mother died with such hope.”
He processed this possible change in calling with his pastors and his wife Erika, who, at the time, was hesitant about her lawyer husband entering the ministry. Eventually, everyone agreed for Jason to join the staff of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Nashville in the summer of 2015. He started seminary at Reformed Theological Seminary Charlotte in 2016.
Meanwhile, Jacob’s grief looked very different.
“I got angry,” he says. “I finished seminary and was angry. Didn’t open my Bible for six months after mom died. It was hard for me to want to care about this God if he was willing to be so cruel.”
Still, he continued on the path he had started down to become a teacher. After seminary he moved to Ohio to take a job as a high school Bible teacher at Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy.
While there, he discovered Redeemer Church, a PCA congregation in Hudson, Ohio. It was at Redeemer that he began to heal from his mother’s death.
“I remember at times sitting there in church … [knowing] the Lord wants to meet me,” he says. “I know what I did this week, and he wants me anyway. Healing moments that came through ordinary means of grace. Historic, boring, simple worship. But boring it is not. That’s when I returned to sitting at the Lord’s feet.”
Spreading the Gospel in Ohio
When Jason graduated from RTS in 2019, Jacob told him that Redeemer was looking for an assistant pastor. Jason applied, was offered the position, and moved with Erika and two children (they now have four) from North Carolina to Ohio.
Meanwhile, Jacob was still happily working as a Bible teacher and had recently married Anginette, who also worked as a teacher. While visiting North Carolina in 2020, he was unofficially offered a job at the church he had attended in high school. Jacob and Anginette were committed to staying in Ohio, so he declined the offer. Still, a question began percolating in his mind: Should he also become a pastor?
“What the world needs right now is not more politics, not more riots, not more humanistic technologies; the world needs Jesus Christ … And that was imprinted on my heart—I want to preach the gospel,” he says.
After speaking with Jason and Scott Wright, the senior pastor at Redeemer, Jacob was taken under care of Ohio Presbytery to prepare to plant a church near Kent State University, an area of the state that Jacob describes as “a hard place with hard soil; not a place where people flock to hear the gospel.”
Despite the harder soil, Christ Presbyterian Church started meeting regularly in February of 2022. And this past spring, Redeemer announced that Jason would be spearheading another church plant—Western Reserve Presbyterian Church to launch in early 2026.
Brothers and Partners
“When I see them together outside of church, there’s always laughter,” says Mark Van Drunen, one of the elders at Redeemer. “It’s obvious that they care deeply for one another, they pray for one another, and their families get along well.”
As Jason begins the work of planting a new church, he’s grateful for the chance to exchange ideas with his brother.
“We’re closer now than we’ve ever been,” says Jason. “We get to sit and talk ministry and preaching. It’s one of the greatest privileges. … We can be partners in the gospel. As I’m planning to launch out, I’m constantly asking [Jacob] for his thoughts and ideas.”
“They are two men who really trust in prayer, Bible reading, expository preaching, not trusting in hobby horses or works of men, but being faithful to the Scriptures,” says Van Drunen.
As for Jacob, he constantly looks back to the example of their faithful mother.
“We both look back and realize how much Mom influenced us. There was not a day we didn’t see our mom reading her Bible. She would often ask me for forgiveness. Our love for ministry and the gospel is so deeply rooted in our mom’s legacy. She had this quote: ‘My life is not about me. If it is, I don’t know the Lord. My life is about serving the Lord.’”