Pastor Mike Signorelli, the founder of V1 Church in New York, isn’t afraid to share his passion for deliverance. Signorelli spent years caring for his bedridden mother, consequently dropping out of school in the 10th grade. Signorelli states that despite being raised in church, he hated the emotionalist Pentecostal churches his mother brought him to and felt that Christianity did not meet his “intellectual” standards. He managed to get his GED and attended Indiana University in Bloomington, where he heard a biology teacher proclaim that God did not exist. Convinced by listening to an actual “intellectual,” Signorelli formed a group to discuss other faiths and doubts in order to have “spirituality talks.” The success of the talks led him to be approached to teach an elective class on spirituality while still a junior in college. Signorelli became an atheist, convinced that religion was for “poor, ignorant people.” However, when he moved to an off-campus house, one of his roommates was an Ivy-league-educated theologian who exposed Signorelli to what an intellectual Christian looked like. Finding that reason and faith could be united led Signorelli to faith in Christ. 

Now a pastor at V1 Church, Signorelli spends his time focusing on something that might normally be considered divorced from reason- demonic forces. Signorelli, however, points to the Bible as proof of the real spiritual battle Christians face. Speaking to Billy Hallowell on Faithwire, Signorelli spoke about the reality of demons, referring to Matthew 12:43-45. “[Demons] are personalities without a body that desperately want a body. They even refer to our body in the New Testament as a house. It says that they get removed, and then they come back to their home — and so they think of us as their home. … They want to dwell in our physical body.” Signorelli’s church focuses on “deliverance,” which both he and Hallowell agreed can be a controversial topic, with some saying that the ability to cast out demons is no longer needed since the days of Jesus and with others blaming demons for every imaginable problem. Signorelli pointed to addiction as an example. “Do you always have a demon as a result of addiction? No, but I do believe if you continually and perpetually leave the door open, then just like if I left the door open of my own house, something’s eventually going to come in,” he said. “Many people listening have used Ouija boards, and those are the obvious things,” he said. “But, also, I think that there’s many people listening right now who are addicted to pornography, and they’ve crucified the flesh a million times, and they’ve read their Bible every single day, and they pray every day, and they don’t understand, ‘Why do I not seem to be able to get victory over this?'” He has also previously pushed for discernment with how Christians view media, such as when he criticized Disney Pixar’s Seeing Red. “I believe that every parent — not just a pastor, but a parent — has a mandate actually to screen material. Because every single device you have in your home is a portal, either a window into the things of God or, unfortunately, things that I believe are demonic,” he told Faithwire previously. He warned against Christians becoming “desensitized.” “I think what happens is we’re so desensitized that, over time, things that used to be offensive to Christians, unfortunately, I think that we’ve become accepting of them.”