When Bishop Neil Ellis started to become hoarse in the spring of 2007, he attributed the sudden change in his voice to the effects of aging.

“I had no pain and that’s why I didn’t respond to the warning signs quickly. I thought I’m getting older now so I guessed I’d get a little hoarse periodically though I’d never been hoarse in 20 years of preaching.”

Ellis’ voice was critical to his ministry. Mount Tabor Full Gospel Church, the 13-member church he helped create in 1987, had grown to more than 8,000 becoming the largest and most influential church in the Bahamas.

Ellis’ fiery, passionate sermons made him a popular guest speaker at churches across the Caribbean, North America, Africa, and Europe. He would also serve as a mentor to scores of pastors in the Bahamas and United States, many of who would call Ellis on Saturday nights for guidance before they gave their sermons the next day. So when his voice did not recover after a month, his wife Patrice urged him to get checked out.

A subsequent examination provided news that would rattle Bishop Ellis to his core and put his days as a teacher of God’s word in jeopardy. Acid reflux disease had burnt out one of his vocal chords and there was a chance that surgery to repair the damage would cause irreversible harm to his voice. Ellis would not know the extent of the damage until after a grueling two-week period where he was not permitted to talk.

The prospect of permanently losing his voice caused Ellis to question God’s motives.

“I had not only a difficult time with the apprehension and the uncertainty, but I had a difficult time with the Lord because I felt I’d been dealt an unfair blow.”

“As a preacher I thought I was doing most of the right things. —living the kind of life that would have been pleasing to God. Anybody who knew me knew I was a stickler for walking in obedience.”

The long process of recovery contributed to Ellis’s animosity towards God.

“I’d never been sick outside an occasional flu,” Ellis states. “I didn’t know what it was to be out of the loop or in a situation where I needed people to assist me, because right after the surgery for about 2 or 3 days I was off-balance and couldn’t walk a straight line.

“My wife had to guide me to the rest room and the bedroom. It was a mess and  I have to be honest and say it was not a good period with me as it relates to my relationship with the Lord.”

By the time the two week period was up, he realized his attitude wasn’t going to win him any battles against God.

“Once I settled down, I surrendered my whole situation to him. Then He had my attention, and that’s when He spoke to me. ‘I am very pleased with your work for the kingdom,’ He said. I think you’re doing a great work for Me, but I missed you.”

“The way I interpreted it was that I was all over the place preaching and I was not giving the kind of quality time to Him that I had been accustomed to giving. That’s why my colleagues knew me to be a certain way because they knew the kind of time I committed alone with the Lord.”

“The second thing he said to me was to lead the way in getting His Glory back into the church. He said, ‘I have been taken off the agenda at many of the churches. They now want what I have. They don’t want me’.

Ellis began to immerse himself in the study of “glory” and within five to six weeks, wrote 43 sermons—14 of which were exclusively on the subject matter of the Glory. The 50-year old pastor, it seemed had found a new calling and life focus.

“I really felt that in the second half of my life, this is what God is calling me out to do,” Ellis says.

The next step for Ellis was to direct his own congregation to the next level, a feat that his leading by example made easy.

“Right now, in my ministry, my life is stronger than my sermons. I changed because my congregation is watching me. Not that I was a bad person before, but they’ve gone to another level as well,” Ellis explains. “People will go where their leader or pastors will take them. I’ve gone there and I want everyone connected to me to go there.”

In his new book “Pursuing The Glory,” Ellis seeks to define the Glory for readers and give them a roadmap like the one he has followed to a closer relationship with God.

“The glory of God can be summarized in the term, “the manifested presence of God”. While He’s omni-present, He does not revel His presence everywhere, and in every environment.

“If you continue to break that down, the glory of God can mean the character of God—His majesty, His brilliance, His excellency, His splendor, His authority, His power, His beauty, His wealth, that’s God. Everything God is really is encapsulated in His Glory.”

Ellis also wants to demystify the common belief that the glory of God is an unreachable experience for the majority of believers.

“Jesus died for all of us. I don’t have to die again to lead you into a salvaic  experience. It was one death. Out of that one death came life for so many. So maybe this is the price I have to pay for the assignment I have to the kingdom. People don’t have to be speechless. They just have to understand.”

Ellis believes his teaching is part of the prophecy God revealed to him on his sickbed. According to the bishop, God said that darkness would cover the earth when he started spreading the Glory message. That darkness, which Ellis says is the current economic recession, would drive people to the church and to God.

“Haggai prophesized that God will one day shake all nations,” Ellis states. “And He will shake the nation by choking their economies. This is Haggai, chapter 2. He will choke their economies. While He’s doing that, He’s going to be filling His house with His glory, as the church.”

Getting believers to stay in the church during the economic downturn has been especially critical for Ellis. The recent emphasis on the prosperity movement drove church attendance during the past decade. Now, Ellis believes people are hurting spiritually as their economic fortunes have dwindled.

“People were made to believe that the level of your spirituality had to be connected with what you were able to obtain in life materialistically. Now people are losing a lot of stuff, so they’re forced to redefine their spirituality. They’ve fallen away because they can’t reconcile it.”

Ellis believes that enemies of the church have used the economic downturn as well as the recent rash of scandals within the church to cut down the body of believers who eventually receive the Glory.

“It is now the intention of the enemy of the Creator to keep a picture painted about the church with stuff like that so that those who are out, stay out.  And some of those who are in, get out. He wants a smaller group in there when the glory comes. That’s what we’re fighting. This is not flesh and blood. This is a war of principalities.”

Fighting this important battle for God has empowered Ellis as he travels around the world, spreading the importance of obtaining God’s Glory with the belief that no one can put a stop to the growth of God’s church.

“What excites me about this assignment is that God didn’t tell me ‘tell them to pursue my gifts, my blessings or my stuff.’ He says ‘pursue my glory”, which means he’s saying ‘pursue me’.

“This is a major contradiction against the war that has been raised by Satan and the forces of hell. When the glory of God hits your life, it supersedes the power of any other domain. So if Satan is holding the hand of a preacher, he will not go through to the next level.”

“My assignment is not to spoon feed or shove glory down your throat. You still have to read your Bible and verify what I’m saying as truth or error. My assignment is to make you aware of what it is and how it’s available to you. That it’s within your reach.”