More than thirty years ago, I was visiting one of my high school classmates. Sitting in his balcony, I saw an old church located on the other side of the street. The street was narrow enough to allow me to see details inside the church through the big antique windows. For reasons that I was not able to determine at that time, the scene has grabbed my attention, and I remembered it more than once, with no specific details, through the following years. About fifteen years after this visit, while my wife, Jackleen, and I were enjoying the third year of our ministry together as itinerant ministers living by faith, I had two prophetic experiences in which I saw the old church again! I started praying about this, and I felt that I should go to this place. A few days later, an old friend called me and said that the Lord had reminded him of me, and that he wanted to serve the Lord with me, as the Lord had told him that I would start a new ministry. I told him that I had no clue about this! At the end of our conversation, I discovered that his grandfather, decades ago, was a pastor of the church that I was seeing in my prayers! We prayed a short prayer together asking the Lord to reveal his will regarding this place to our hearts. A few weeks later, I met another friend in another meeting who told me that while he was visiting a friend of his, he met a pastor who invited him to begin a youth meeting in his semi-closed and outdated church. My friend apologized for he had no interest in this, but he told me that during the meeting, where I was sitting in front of him, the Lord told him to ask me to go and start a meeting in that church. Amazingly, it was the same church that I had seen prophetically and prayed about!
The next day, we went to the church, where my friend introduced me to the pastor. When we entered the church, we discovered that it was in a miserable state. The Lord immediately spoke into my heart that this church should be renovated! The money came miraculously during the next weeks; the church has been renewed, and I started a weekly bible study meeting. My wife and I served the Lord for three years in this place, and our meetings flourished. By the grace of the Lord, the church was restored to its health in the physical and spiritual realms. Then, we left for another divine mission!
About five years later, I started my doctoral studies. In fact, when the Lord led me to focus my research on the history of the work of the Holy Spirit in movements and revivals that had broken out in my country from the beginning of the twentieth century, I never imagined that I would discover that the Lord had used me and my wife to renovate the first Pentecostal church built in Cairo by Herbert Randall nearly a century ago. I also never imagined that the
The journey of writing this material was full of divine interventions. The Holy Spirit guided me to certain places and persons, arranged situations and events miraculously, opened doors, and He even gave me, a few times, dreams to guide me in specific directions for research. The whole journey was a proof of the validity of the renewal studies approach, in which the Holy Spirit is the maestro in the academic endeavours. The journey of this book simply proves what Jamys J. Carter proposed, in his article “The Holy Spirit: A Helper in Pentecostal Research Endeavours,” regarding the ongoing involvement of the Spirit in the selection and process of academic researching.1 It also highlights the pentecostal hypothesis argued by Nimi Wariboko about decision-making and “the capacity to constitute alternate ways of knowing,” in the Pentecostal and Charismatic communities, in which “sense interacts with spirit or humanity interacts with divinity to forge a path toward human flourishing.”2 The indicator of the flourishing of this journey is the success of the accomplishment of this work by God’s grace.
The chapters of my doctoral dissertation presented to Regent University, School of Divinity, in March 2019, formulate the content of this book. I am grateful to the Holy Spirit who has helped and guided me throughout my doctoral journey at Regent University, va. I am also grateful to many people who have supported me throughout my doctoral studies that started in 2013 and lasted for nearly six years. My deepest thanks and appreciation are extended to my advisor, Dr. Kimberly Ervin Alexander, who encouraged and supported me every step of the way throughout this journey. Dr. Alexander’s academic proficiency and deep spirituality have always been a source of inspiration to me. I am also grateful to Dr. Vinson Synan who was the first to pray for me to come to Regent University and begin my doctoral studies. Dr. Synan’s courses and
I am so thankful for the great help that I had from my friend Katherine Gendy in editing my dissertation, which was originally represented in the first draft of this book. I am grateful to Paul and Sharon DuPont, whose sincere friendship has always been a great channel of Divine love, support, and anointing. I am also grateful to ScholarLeaders International, whose generous financial support enabled me to complete my PhD studies. Finally, my grateful thanks and deep appreciation go to my family. I am indebted to my wife Jackleen whose love, support, and sacrifices – over the years – have always been beyond ordinary expectations and ability. I am also grateful to my mother, whose love and prayers have always been a great source of blessing to me. To my wife Jackleen, my mother Tereza, my daughter Tag, and my big family Heaven Upon Earth Ministry in Egypt, I dedicate this work.