Daystar will be celebrating our 8 year anniversary as a church this year! We are continually amazed at God’s fingerprints throughout this journey. This local fellowship originated in the heart of God as a desire He had for a place, actually a people, who would welcome Him into Atlanta and provide a place for believers to gather in His name and seek His face, carrying His presence into the harvest field. Johnny and Elizabeth Enlow, the Pastors of Daystar, anticipate great things for the Church in Atlanta and feel privileged to serve in the house of the Lord during such a pivotal season in the Body of Christ. Here's a bit of their story...

Johnny and Elizabeth were married in 1988 and have four daughters- Promise, Justice, Grace, and Glory, ages 15 to 5. (They currently home school and are grateful to have that extra time with their girls because ministry keeps them so busy.)

Johnny was born in 1959, one of eight children, and was raised in Peru because his parents were missionaries there for over 40 years, until his father recently died. His parents originally went to Peru with Christian Missionary Alliance. As they labored on the mission field, their hunger for more of the Lord increased and they were eventually removed from their CMA affiliation because they received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Soon after this, their relationship with an experimental Christian "community," informally known as "the Move," began to grow until they moved to one of their remote farms in the jungles of Peru. Johnny lived there with his family throughout his teen years as his father served as a traveling apostle/minister within their international structure. While there were many blessings in Johnny’s experience with The Move, there were definite problems with the teaching and practice of errant theology (a lot of focus on holiness without grace, little honor of the family unit, extreme legalism, and elitism). The Lord used a very long season of illness during that time in Johnny’s life to open his eyes to truth. On the community farm, they were not permitted any entertainment so, when he was sick in bed, he spent much of his time reading through the Bible. The Holy Spirit was faithful to lead him into a greater understanding of Christianity than he was observing around him. When he turned 18, he moved back to the States and began a journey of breaking away from that legalism into his own relationship of freedom with the Lord. As Johnny’s reality of freedom in Christ grew, he broke away from The Move and wrote a booklet called "The Move Examined" in which he explained in depth what was wrong with the theology under which he had been raised. When his parents read it, they too decided it was time to leave and end their leadership commitments. This proved to be quite a preparation for the ministry that God called Johnny to in later years. Also, despite the mixture of truth and error that they were exposed to, the Enlow family remained close and all walk with the Lord today! His parents are definitely part of a pioneer generation who paid quite a high cost in order to see our generation walk in things of the Holy Spirit and, for that, Johnny is grateful! (His mother now enjoys visiting Peru and her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren all over the United States.)

Elizabeth was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1967, but was raised here in Atlanta. Her mother died of cancer when she was 12 after their family fought it for five years. She was an amazing woman with radical faith and died believing when there were even fewer then than there are now who would understand. Her father continued walking with the Lord, but soon left the "word of faith" church that left them feeling it was their fault that she had not been healed. Elizabeth encountered redemption and restoration at a level only God could have given when her father remarried. For those of you who know her second mom, you can easily see that she was just as hand-picked by God as her first mother! (In recent years they have become an integral part of Daystar.) While her parents were looking for a new church, Elizabeth ended up going to a different church with a dynamic youth group. She eventually went off to college at Auburn University and, when she came home one summer, Johnny was the new face in the crowd at church. Johnny and Elizabeth have one of those unique stories in that they both basically heard the Lord tell them that they were the ones for each other before they even dated and their feelings easily caught up with the Lord’s direction!

Johnny and Elizabeth both have walked with the Lord since their earliest memories, received the baptism of the Holy Spirit when they were very young, and have never strayed from an intimate relationship with God. They are grateful to their parents and the Lord’s grace for this heritage!

After they married, Elizabeth finished her college degree in Psychology at Georgia State University. For years, Johnny had been a painter and, before they married, he decided to start his own painting company. The Lord gave him tremendous favor in his business and he really enjoyed running the company with his brother as his partner until he went full time as a pastor at Daystar (known then as The Refuge) in 1999.

The church where Johnny and Elizabeth met ended up having some extremely evil theology/heresy being secretly practiced among the leaders. Johnny prophetically confronted it before he even really knew what was going on. It’s quite an involved story, but they ended up being sued by the church for 24 million dollars! The church claimed that they had conspired with others to cause the church to lose thousands of members and, therefore, millions in potential offering. Many women, teens, and even children were basically molested by several of the pastors there. Johnny and Elizabeth ended up trying to help them be heard by an outside, neutral party who would handle it in a Biblical manner, but ended up getting seriously burned in the process. The word “Pastor” became a dirty word in the Enlow house and they were so saddened by what they had experienced that they just couldn’t go anywhere to church for three years. They still desperately loved the Lord, but weren’t too sure about His people anymore! Johnny and Elizabeth explain that they kind of felt sorry for God because His Bride, at least the part they’d seen, seemed to be such a harlot. The lawsuit was eventually dropped because it had no merit (and the Lord miraculously covered the Enlows financially since they didn’t have 24 million dollars to cover the lawsuit!)

Then, Johnny began to hear about what God was doing in the Toronto Airport Vineyard in 1995 (now known as the Father’s Blessing) and decided to go check it out. Johnny says that God did, in moments there in His powerful presence, what counseling for years could have never done. His faith was once again stirred as he saw that just a few “drops” of the manifest presence of the Lord could transform a person and that maybe He didn’t need to feel sorry for God after all! Maybe God could handle the evil he had seen in His Church better than they realized whenever He was ready. They ended up going to the Atlanta Vineyard and then Northeast Metro Christian Fellowship and came alive again with hope for the Body of Christ. During this time, Johnny also began to allow the Lord to give him a heart for the nations, now understanding that all he’d have to do was take that same tangible presence of the Lord with him. Over the next several years, as he began to travel to speak in other nations, he found a favor he’d never seen before. Not only did the presence of the Lord manifest in amazing ways in the meetings he would speak at, but the teams he hosted on the short trips were seeing God use very ordinary people like themselves to do extraordinary things! They soon became “ruined” for anything else than to be a part of seeing God’s Kingdom come to this earth!

After several years of taking teams on short term mission trips and running a painting company, Johnny and Elizabeth began to see a need for fellowship with like-minded believers who had a heart for the nations. So, they founded Refuge to the Nations Church. The Lord surrounded them with family and friends, as well as David and Stephanie Palusky (as co-pastors), when they began hosting meetings in their home. (The Palusky’s now host meetings at “The Barn” in Social Circle…if you’ve never visited, you’ve got to check it out!) These meetings quickly grew to services at a school building in Lawrenceville. In time, the Enlows and Paluskys bought a large home together in Monroe where the church met for a year until they outgrew the great room. At that point, they relocated the church (again!) to a store front on Main Street in downtown Loganville where they remained for 4 years. Toward the end of that time and through many growing and maturing pains, the Lord began to give the leadership clear direction to “come out of hiding and relocate inside the perimeter of Atlanta.” As Johnny and Elizabeth look back on that time, they realize it was a very hard transition even though it was clearly God’s repositioning. During the years prior to the move to Atlanta, Johnny and Elizabeth often fought discouragement as they would return home from trips to other nations, wondering why they did not see the same signs, wonders, miracles, and favor that they saw when they were out of the country. They began asking God if He would want them to focus more on the international aspects of ministry rather than on the local church. They even had a hard time having a vision for The Refuge until God began to stir their hearts for the city of Atlanta; rather than just the small town of Loganville. In retrospect, they see how the Lord hid them as He tested them in many ways; preparing them to embrace a destiny which would include the nations as well as the international metropolitan city of Atlanta. Through the faithfulness of the Lord and with a great fellowship of believers, the church was re-planted as Daystar International Christian Fellowship in October of 2004 in its current location in Chamblee/Atlanta. Understandably, many of the members who helped make the relocation possible were unable to continue the long commute from the Loganville area and beyond. Many also had to reevaluate the sudden change of vision and focus that Johnny and Elizabeth were also learning to walk in. So, Daystar soon lost half the people who had previously been attending. However, God has been faithful to draw those, perhaps like yourself, who have a desire to be a part of a fellowship like Daystar.

The Enlow Family - Johnny, Elizabeth, Promise (15), Justice (12), Grace (9), and Glory (5)