I grew up in a rough trailer park in Northwest Indiana, the eldest of a single mother’s five kids. Life was hard, but my mom was a spiritual powerhouse and made sure we were in church. We attended a small Spanish Pentecostal church in our community, and even though we weren’t Hispanic and didn’t understand what was happening at times, we felt the move of the Spirit, which transcended any language barrier.
I carried the heavy mantle of being the man of the house after a string of abusive men came and went. As soon as I was able to work, I held every kind of job you could think of with the pressure of helping to keep the family afloat.
At age 15, the trauma of my short life was too much to take, and I cried out to God, saying, “If your Holy Spirit is real, I want you!” I fell to my knees and wept in my room, pouring out my
heart to God in prayer. Suddenly, I found myself speaking in tongues, overcome with the power of the Holy Spirit. This personal and private encounter marked me and set in motion a remarkable journey.
A few days later, a woman I had never met approached me on the street. She took one look at me and said, “I know you! I saw you in a dream. You came to my church and preached, and revival broke out!”
She invited me to preach at her church. I reluctantly accepted, even though I was the last person you would ever ask to preach because I was so shy and introverted. I remember my hand shaking in the school lunchroom as I drank my chocolate milk. But I pushed through, and the moment I began to preach, the anointing came upon me. That same woman brought her 4-year-old daughter to me for prayer. The little girl had a decrepit hand, and I laid hands on her. Suddenly, her hand stretched forth, and she was completely healed!
V1 Launches
From the beginning of my ministry, I experienced the supernatural. It wasn’t an option; I needed it to survive. It was never something separate or something I needed to grow into. I read what Jesus did in the New Testament, used His ministry as my model and truly believed it when He said we would do “greater works than these” (John 14:12b). Because of this, my teenage years were marked by powerful encounters with the Holy Spirit.
I graduated high school and became the first person in my family to attend college. I pursued a bachelor’s degree in English at a Big 10 school, and during this time, I lost my faith and became a full-fledged atheist. However, I was “randomly” assigned a roommate who was an Ivy League-educated seminary student, and he destroyed all my arguments against Jesus. God used my roommate to open my eyes, and the Holy Spirit began to remind me of the call on my life that was established before the foundations of the earth.
A few years later at a church conference, I received a prophetic mandate to start a church in New York City. Everyone told me I was crazy, that New York is the place church plants go to die. However, I knew God’s hand was on this crazy vision because people started meeting for our services before my wife and I even moved there. They packed out a home each Sunday for prayer, worship and instruction, desperate for revival in their city. That’s how V1 Church was born. (I tell the whole story in my book, From Chaos to Clarity.)
V1 spread from homes to a movie theatre, to two locations, then to a small building and now to three physical locations across the U.S. (with several more planned in the coming year) and a massive global online community. In the last four years, V1 has attained Fastest-Growing Church in America status from INJOY Stewardship Solutions, breaking all the organization’s records.
Just a few years later, the pandemic hit, and our city was ground zero for the devastation wreaked by COVID-19. My thriving church was suddenly in a holding pattern, driven to online services we recorded in our living room because we didn’t even have a building to broadcast from. Restless in our home, my wife and I would hear the incessant sounds of ambulance sirens as the vehicles ran to and from a nearby hospital carrying people to the emergency room. With each one that passed, the depression set in more.
But God had begun this work, and we were carrying it forward with frenzied momentum as it exploded week after week. Now we were sidelined in a city with some of the strictest COVID policies in the world. How could I pastor people I couldn’t even see?
On one of the darkest days, my wife looked me in the eyes and said, “It’s time for you to go live on the internet and teach. Because when you teach, people get free and break through to the next level.”
I began ministering online every day. And every day, the number of viewers grew. People were at home and desperately searching for hope and light in this time of darkness, and my audience grew to tens of thousands overnight. There was an uncanny anointing for deliverance and healing—even through cell phones and televisions—as I ministered online. We began receiving reports of countless medically verifiable miracles.
Demon Slayers Assemble
As a pastor, I’ve never been known to shy away from tough topics. As I ministered online each day, I touched on subjects such as deliverance, finding freedom from besetting sins and casting out demons. I noticed an increasing interest in my videos on the supernatural; it was as if a large portion of the people watching my videos had never believed demons were real and deliverance was necessary.
People began to report dramatic testimonies as a result of this content, descriptions of being set free in their living rooms, at their work-from-home desks and in their cars. This was how I became acquainted with the Demon Slayers: Vlad Savchuk, Isaiah Saldivar and Alexander Pagani. These men had been teaching on similar topics, and it was a divine convergence when we all connected and began ministering together under that name.
In the meantime, I began to see revival break out in a way I had never personally witnessed. In late 2021, I saw a vision in prayer of a large domino being pushed down in Brooklyn. As we pushed it down, a wave of dominoes began to fall, leading to revival, freedom, healing and deliverance all around the world. This vision sparked the Domino Revival, a 13-city preaching and deliverance tour to specially selected, prophetically significant cities, many of which were sites of old wells of revival.
I’ll never forget the first night of the revival in Brooklyn, New York City. Just one day before the massively publicized first revival night, we received word from city officials that we would not be allowed to meet in the advertised location. The new site they suggested was the very place where, six years earlier when I first arrived in New York, I would sit on a bench, praying and writing sermons while overlooking the city skyline.
Back then, I had no physical church building or office space, but that park bench became my prayer closet. As I prayed, I saw in the Spirit a revival coming to my city. This revival wouldn’t be emotionalism or hype but a genuine proclamation of the gospel, transforming lives and accompanied by the ministry of Jesus through signs, miracles, wonders and deliverance.
Like Cornelius, I had prayed and unknowingly built a monument to heaven (Acts 10). The same park where I showed up six years earlier to pray time and again was now filled with people surrendering to Jesus.
This is how I know revival is here. In a city where evil is praised and righteousness is ridiculed, hearts are turning toward the Father, and the fires of revival are spreading. At each site we visited on the Domino Revival, deliverance was a key part of the ministry.
Breakers Arise
I am no stranger to deliverance ministry. In fact, I began moving in deliverance 20 years ago, before it was popular. As a young teenager at the Spanish church, I witnessed many manifestations of the demonic in our services from people who visited that lived in countries where the practice of witchcraft and santeria were widely accepted.
In desperation, trying to help my pastor, I reached out to deliverance pioneer Apostle John Eckhardt, who lived just 30 minutes away. He probably didn’t know a 15-year-old boy was reaching out, but he sent a team to our church, and they trained us in deliverance.
I believe this ministry is more important now than ever. There is a significant increase in the number of people experiencing counterfeit spiritual experiences. Whether through sage, crystals, tarot, Ouija boards or online horoscopes, people are in search of truth. We also know that drug use, alternative sexual identities and mass confusion are on the rise. In addition, people are leaving traditional churches in droves. That is why we as Christians need to wage an outright crusade against darkness and raise up as many brothers and sisters alongside us as possible to join the fight.
Believers must take seriously the responsibility of preaching the resurrected Christ in this hour. In the midst of false religions and extreme political ideologies, the need for exposing and expelling the devil is great. Deliverance isn’t a niche or a passing trend; it’s an essential piece of ministry, and churches need to realize this.
As demand has increased, I have instituted a regular weekly deliverance service online every Wednesday, open and free of charge to anyone in the world through my trained deliverance team. We also offer deliverance regularly in person at our physical campuses.
We get hundreds of requests for deliverance weekly, far more than we can possibly manage on our own. The ministry of deliverance is not for star preachers or celebrity pastors, and the Demon Slayers don’t have access to a special power that everyone else lacks. Deliverance is something every believer can and should do.
But first, we must train. There is a tremendous need in the body of Christ for equipping and training. Leaders, we must commit ourselves in this hour to make disciples who make disciples. Pastors, we can no longer focus on seating capacity; instead, we must focus on sending capacity.
One way I have sought to address the need for equipping and training is by creating a global community called The Breakers. Breakers are the ones who are committed to breaking generational curses in their bloodline. They are those who say, “It may run in my family, but it runs out with me.”
The Breakers program trains in deliverance, supernatural healing, prophecy and evangelism. Upon completion of the program, Breakers assist me in ministry when I speak across the world. This has become a catalyst for a movement as Breakers fill thousands of movie theaters, city streets and churches to host sustainable revival. As millions slip into deception, it’s encouraging to see tens of thousands rising up to break every chain—in Jesus’ name!
Mike Signorelli is the lead pastor and founder of V1 Church based in New York City. He and his wife of 15 years, Julie, have two daughters, Bella and Everly. Mike and Julie lead their team at both V1 Church locations. The Breakers Conference 2024 takes place Saturday, Oct. 26, in Chicago, visit v1.church for more details.
