 Mike began his involvement with Charismatic Christianity together with the late Russian-Filipino actor-turned-evangelist Ronald Remy who eventually founded the Corpus Christi Community, an Evangelical congregation now known as Lord Jesus Our Redeemer (LJOR) Church.Velarde, having experienced and been exposed to the Charismatic movement, decided to remain within the Roman Catholic Church.In 1984, he founded the El Shaddai movement and it has become an eclectic expression of Philippine folk Christianity, the Charismatic movement and Roman Catholicism.