When God spoke a prophetic word into Cathy Coppola’s life years ago that she would “preach and teach” but also “be known for signs and wonders,” Coppola hesitated.
“Oh no!” she responded. “Lord, I would like a respectable ministry like Joyce Meyer.”
She rebuked that response almost immediately, Coppola says. Today, God floods her services with demonstrations of the power of the Holy Spirit in signs, wonders, healing and deliverance. Through her ministry, the physically sick find healing, the emotionally hurting find restoration, those bound by demonic spirits find freedom, and families are reconciled to their heavenly Father’s original design.
“When God spoke that word to me, almost immediately the fear of man and the possibility of ridicule came to my mind,” says Coppola, the founder of House of Glory Church, Cathy Coppola International Ministries, Mighty Wind Broadcasting TV Network and Fired Up Conferences and the host of the Apostolic Fire podcast with Cathy Coppola on the Charisma Podcast Network.
“Immediately, I repented.” Coppola says. “I’ve been a Christian long enough to know that, when God tells you you’re going to do something, the No. 1 thing for you to do is to obey. One of the biggest things in my life is obedience. Just obey God because you know that He has our best interest at heart.
“So immediately, I knew what a lame response that was,” she adds. “I knew I just needed to say, ‘Lord, forgive me, I repent. I want what You want. I trust You.’ I knew that meant I had to get rid of all the fear of man. I had to be completely delivered of that fear of man because I knew where God wanted to take me, that fear would limit me.
“And so I did get rid of it,” Coppola says. “Honestly, I was just focused on the mission; just standing on the Word and just sitting in prayer. God eradicated the fear of man through His own encounters. He would encounter me with His love and really started to teach me how to walk in the Spirit.”
 Moving to California
But discovering that glorious walk carried a cost. Raised as a Catholic, Coppola says she was taught to fear God but never really had a relationship with Him, nor had she ever heard the true gospel message about being born again.
Although Coppola loves her family, she describes it as a “controlling situation” where oppression was the rule and “you were seen but never really heard.” That made hearing a life-changing message from God in her early 20s all the more surprising.
Still an unbeliever, she married another unbeliever at 19 and had a child soon afterward. With her marriage in trouble and her daughter only 6 months old, Coppola had what she calls her “Abraham experience.”
“I heard the Lord say, ‘Move to California. I’m doing a new thing, a new generation,'” Coppola says.
“What?” she asked the Lord.
“At that time, I was very broken,” Coppola says. “Then I told my husband that I just heard the Lord say this, and he said, ‘Why would God talk to you? You’re not even close to God.’ He was Catholic too, and he took his religion seriously. He believed in going to confession and all this other stuff. I loved God and wanted to be obedient. I just didn’t know anything about Him.
“So again, my husband says, ‘Why would God talk to you?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I just know that He did.’ And I said, ‘I know we need to be obedient.’
“OK, let’s wait and see,” Coppola’s husband told her.
“I knew we just needed to be obedient, and so we did [move to California]. God totally sold our house, and my husband totally got a job.”  
Despite the opposition of Coppola’s parents and other family members, the young family packed up and moved to California.
“I told my mom, ‘I don’t know why, but I know we just have to obey,'” Coppola says. “Tell me that wasn’t the Holy Spirit talking. You know it was.”
Preparing for Her Calling
A year and a half later in California, in 1989, Coppola and her husband both got saved—but her life with Christ was more stagnant than alive, she says. Going to a Baptist church left her unfulfilled, and reading the Bible was “like pulling teeth,” she says.
The first time she ever heard about the Holy Spirit was when she overheard someone in the church parking lot talking about His power moving in another church, Coppola says.
Coppola says she knew immediately what the family had to do, and once again, she encountered resistance, this time from her husband.
“I told my husband we had to go to that church,” Coppola says. “He asked why. I told him, ‘There’s more.’ He said we had everything we need here; we have Jesus. I told him there was more, and so we went. I had gotten baptized in the Baptist church, but I did it for everyone else but me. I had also gotten baptized as a child in the Catholic church.
“But now, three years into my walk, I’m really being drawn by the Holy Spirit and to the Father’s love,” she says. “I didn’t even really know what The Father’s love was.”  
In 1991, after an invitation to a backyard service in a heated pool, Coppola was baptized again. But this time, things were different, she says.
She was instantly filled with the power of the Holy Spirit and the joy of the Lord. She was taken upward into a vision, where she felt God’s love for the first time. In the baptismal waters, she saw heaven open, and the supernatural realm became real.
The Lord then began healing Coppola from years of emotional pain. He spoke to her again, verbalizing Psalm 51:17 and telling her, “Cathy, a broken and contrite heart I will not despise.” He brought healing and deliverance from spirits of death, suicide, eating disorder, fear, shame, worthlessness and timidity.
“There was something that happened to me in the baptismal waters. I know it ties into the Holy Spirit,” Coppola says. “I received my gift of tongues. I saw heaven. … I came out of the water, and the clouds parted right in front of my eyes.
“I saw this essence that came down from the clouds,” she adds. “I didn’t know what it was other than I was feeling pure joy. I used to be severely depressed, and I felt pure joy. I got filled with the Spirit, and I knew it was the joy of God.”
This joy of the Holy Spirit—and a vision she received from the Lord—gave Coppola the boldness to found Cathy Coppola Ministries in 2009.
In the vision, the Lord gave her a vivid picture of how she was to begin her ministry. But she wouldn’t understand its kingdom impact until years later.
Jesus visited her and took her to the third heaven, Coppola says. There, she found herself in a beautiful garden with Him, and He showed her a flashback of her life—of what He had rescued her from. God’s grace and will had kept her from suicide at the age of 16, keeping her alive to prepare for her calling.
“You are an injustice breaker!” Jesus said. “Break the injustice off my people.” In bold white letters, Coppola saw the words, “Reconciliation and Restoration Prayer for Families, 10 a.m., Thursdays, Hope Room.” Jesus gave her the names of two people to invite.
“Will you go for Me?” Jesus asked her. “Will you be My mouthpiece for the nations?”
“Yes, Lord, I will go wherever You call me,” Coppola responded. “I am Your handmaiden. Let it be done to me according to Your Word.”
She initiated a prayer meeting in January 2010, and it grew despite what she calls “massive demonic attack” upon her family. As she ministered, she contended for her family and the others God brought her way. Before long, they outgrew their meeting room and moved to a larger one.
Again, the Lord spoke to her, telling her to bring a message before the prayer meeting each week. And again, Coppola obeyed.
Walking in Miracles
Before long, altar calls became a regular part of the meeting, and God brought freedom and deliverance to many. The prayer meetings soon turned into what Coppola says the Lord told her are “miracle services.”
In 2015, her obedience became even more evident when she cried out to God, saying, “Lord, bring me the homosexuals, the prostitutes, the drug addicts—the ones the church doesn’t want and doesn’t understand.”
God answered that prayer in miraculous ways, Coppola says. One by one, those she had prayed for came to her miracle services and found freedom. God then equipped her for other aspects of the ministry to which He had called her.
He taught Coppola how to fight for the lives of her children and take authority over the enemy with her anointing. Out of this warfare, she wrote her second book, Devil! Get Your Hands Off!: 6 Strategies to Snatch Your Kids Out of Deception. She was ordained as a pastor under The Holy Spirit Apostolic Association of Churches in 2017, and later ordained as a prophet and apostle by the same association. God then showed her a vision of planting a church called The House of Glory that would become a reality on a significant date—May 6, 2017—her biological and spiritual birthday.
The church holds two services each week, at which miracles, signs and wonders are the norm.
“During the prayer meetings and eventually when we planted the church, the anointing of God really started to flow,” Coppola says. “I would feel myself shaking, the power of God flowing. I knew I needed to lay my hands on these people. I just knew it. How did I know? It was just the power of God, the inner witness.”
A man from Africa who was blind and had cancer came to a service at The House of Glory one night after a friend told him he should go. When Coppola learned of his medical issues, she extended her hand toward him although he was not sitting nearby.
“I just started to command healing,” Coppola says. She walked toward him, still extending her hand, as he flipped out of his second-row chair and threw himself into the third row.
“The power of God was flowing through my hand,” Coppola says. She walked toward the man, and he stood up.
“And finally I laid hands on him, and I’m commanding the cancer to leave and commanding the eye to be opened,” she says. “He received his sight. He went to the doctor to get his testing, and they verified that they couldn’t find cancer in this man. He was healed of his blindness. And so he went back to Africa knowing the real power of God. But that was my first healing—a blind eye opening and cancer being healed.”
Since that time, Coppola has seen God use her to bring about many other miracles of healing, including a deaf, mute 5-year-old boy who can now hear and speak. She has witnessed eight medically documented cases in which people who were either legally or partially blind can now see through the healing power of the Holy Spirit.
“To truly walk in the Spirit—being so connected with the Holy Spirit that you’re in agreement with what heaven is doing—you bring it down here to earth,” Coppola says. “That is how I move in the realm of the glory, and that’s why I believe there are so many healings in our services.
“It was like God was trying to give me something so beautiful and powerful, but at the time, I was allowing fear to grip my life,” she says. “Once I was delivered from the spirit of fear and the fear of man, I became consumed by His fiery love. And once you are consumed, you walk empty—empty of self and full of His glorious, abundant, rich and weighty presence and power.
“From there, God healed me, and He showed me how to really walk in step with the Holy Spirit,” Coppola says. “And now, throne room encounters just continue to happen. But during my healing period, God just took me into this place that is really unexplainable. By ‘the throne room,’ I mean I’d see Jesus come onto His throne, and He could come and dance with me, I had all of these encounters—on and on, and on, over and over—where my heart was being healed. I was being strengthened for the walk that He had set apart for me, the walk that He has for me now.”
Jesus says in John 14:12, “Truly, truly I say to you, he who believes in Me will do the works that I do also. And, he will do greater works than these, because I am going to My Father.”
Had Coppola given into the fear of man and not believed in those powerful words of Jesus, her supernatural ministry would not exist today. “I know I have the gift of faith, and I’m just trying to bring everybody along,” she says. “Part of that gift is that I’ve been through so many things. God has raised me up through those things. I’m trying to just bring everybody to a place of believing.
“As I’m walking back and forth in my services, I tell people to just believe God,” Coppola says. “Come with expectancy because there’s the power of God that wants to flow. I know the power is going to flow through me, but will you receive it? It’s just like what I went through years ago. If you have faith on the other end, then you’ve got a connection that the power of God will flow to you, and you will receive all you need.”
Shawn A. Akers is a content development editor for Charisma Media.
Read articles like this one and other Spirit-led content in our new platform, CHARISMA PLUS.