The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
Reinhard Bonnke
1940–2019Pentecostal-evangelical
Preached to African crowds of more than a million under a tent he had built for exactly that purpose.
Summary
- Lived 1940–2019.
- Stood in The Church Under Fire & Into All the World (1930–today).
- Hangs on The Revivalists and The Missionaries.
- Read first: Evangelism by Fire: Igniting Your Passion for Evangelism (1990).
- Tradition: Pentecostal-evangelical / Healing-evangelism / Mass-crusade / Christ for all Nations / German-Lutheran-Pentecostal heritage.
The life
Reinhard Willi Gottfried Bonnke (April 19, 1940 – December 7, 2019) was a German-American Pentecostal evangelist, the founder (1974) and longtime president of Christ for all Nations (CfaN), and one of the most influential mass-crusade evangelists of the 20th–21st centuries. Born in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), the son of a Pentecostal pastor, Bonnke was converted at age 9 and reported a clear missionary call to Africa before his teens.
He attended Bible College of Wales (Swansea) under Samuel Rees Howells and was ordained in the Free Pentecostal Mission of Germany. He pastored a small German congregation until 1967 when he and his wife Anni began missionary work in Lesotho. In 1974 he founded CfaN in Johannesburg, South Africa (later headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, then Orlando, Florida), responding to a recurring dream of "Africa being washed in the Blood of Jesus."
His Great Gospel Crusades across Africa from the 1980s onward drew historic attendances, Lagos 2000 single-service of 1.6 million, five-night Lagos crusade total of 6 million, with similar but smaller-scale figures across Sub-Saharan Africa. CfaN reports 79+ million decisions for Christ across his 50 years of ministry. He preached his last crusade in 2017. In 2009 he appointed Daniel Kolenda as successor; Kolenda continues to lead CfaN.
What was happening while he lived7 moments · 1930–today
- October 1945The Stuttgart Declaration of GuiltGerman church leaders, Niemöller among them, admitted before the world that they had not resisted enough, not prayed enough, not believed enough. It is one of the rare times a national church has said plainly that it failed.
- 1948–1964Richard Wurmbrand's fourteen yearsA Romanian Lutheran pastor of Jewish descent, converted at thirty, was seized off the street in February 1948 and spent fourteen years in communist prisons, about three of them alone in an underground cell where he kept his mind by preaching a sermon every night to no one. He was released in 1964 under Romania's general amnesty for political prisoners and left the country in 1965, after Western Christians paid for his exit.
- 1949–1955China's long night beginsAfter the communist victory, foreign missionaries were pushed out within a few years and churches were pressed into a single state-supervised body. Wang Mingdao, a Beijing pastor who had refused Japanese pressure a decade earlier, refused this too, and was arrested in August 1955. He signed a confession under interrogation, could not live with it, took it back, and served roughly twenty-two more years.
- 1958The widows go backElisabeth Elliot, with her toddler daughter Valerie, and Rachel Saint, Nate's sister, went to live in the Waorani settlement, among the men who had done the killing. Years later two of those men baptized Nate Saint's son and daughter in the same river.
- 1966–1976The Cultural RevolutionRed Guards closed the last open churches, burned Bibles, and sent pastors to labor camps. Watchman Nee, imprisoned since 1952, died in a camp in 1972. Public Christianity in China effectively ceased, and the faith moved into kitchens and back rooms, where it was never counted.
- July 1974The Lausanne CongressAbout 2,700 Christians from 150 nations met in Switzerland at Billy Graham's invitation. The Anglican John Stott drafted the resulting covenant; the missiologist Ralph Winter's address put "unreached peoples" on the map; and Latin Americans like René Padilla and Samuel Escobar pressed the point that preaching and mercy are not rivals.
- Autumn 1989Candles in Leipzig, and the wall comes downMonday peace prayers had gathered for years at the Nikolaikirche under pastor Christian Führer. On October 9 about seventy thousand people, the figure the city's own contemporary reports give, walked out of that neighborhood carrying candles past armed police, and not a shot was fired. The Berlin Wall opened a month later, on November 9.
In their own words
“Christ had a human experience from God to show what the perfect human experience should be. He was the first of multitudes. He was the first Holy Spirit-baptized man on earth.”
Holy Spirit: Are We Flammable or Fireproof? (7-day study, YouVersion) · on John 1:33
“I myself did not know Him, but the One who sent me to baptize with water told me, ‘The man on whom you see the Spirit descend and rest is He who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’”
“Please note: NOBODY LEFT THE UPPER ROOM WITH TWO FLAMES ON THEIR HEAD. Just “one sat upon each of them” (Acts 2:3). But this one flame represents the whole fire of God—its authority, power and glory.”
Holy Spirit: Are We Flammable or Fireproof? (7-day study, YouVersion) · on Acts 2:3
“They saw tongues like flames of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.”
“The emperor himself was the chief guardian of all the gods, yet the apostle of Christ challenged the whole ancient world and rejected the strength and impressive array of a cruel world empire. Instead, Paul knew his God “always leads us in triumph” (2 Corinthians 2:14).”
Faith: The Link with God’s Power (CfaN Bible study series) · on 2 Corinthians 2:14
“But thanks be to God, who always leads us triumphantly as captives in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of Him.”
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
- Evangelism by Fire: Igniting Your Passion for Evangelism1990
Bonnke's articulation of the evangelistic methodology that drove CfaN.
- Living a Life of Fire: An Autobiography2009
Bonnke's life story; documentation of the call, the formation, the African ministry, the crusade evolution.
- Mighty Manifestations: The Gifts and Power of the Holy Spirit1994
Bonnke's articulation of the gifts and power; standard classical-Pentecostal pneumatology.
- Time Is Running Out1999
Bonnke's articulation of the eschatological urgency motivating CfaN's mass-evangelism.
- Now That You Are Saved
The standard CfaN follow-up discipleship resource; basic-Christianity primer for new converts. Distributed in tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.
Search Reinhard Bonnke at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this voice is honored here
Bonnke is named in the Tier 1 Contemporary list as the principal contemporary mass-evangelism healing voice of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. His value for MannaFest is the demonstration that signs-and-wonders evangelism in a continuationist Pentecostal frame can produce documented mass-conversion fruit at scale beyond what Western secular-evangelical methodology produces (Bonnke's CfaN tracked 79 million decisions for Christ across 50 years; his 2000 Lagos crusade drew 1.6 million attendees in a single service). Bonnke is also a unifying voice, the rare 20th-century evangelist who maintained relationship with both classical-Pentecostal AOG-stream and broader charismatic-renewal voices without compromising doctrinal integrity. His successor Daniel Kolenda (Tier 2 list) continues the ministry.
Standing beside himThe Church Under Fire & Into All the World · 37 on this stretch of wall
Hid Jews behind a false wall in her family's watch shop, survived Ravensbrück, and went back to Germany to forgive.
Stepped out of the Auschwitz line and asked to be starved to death in place of a man he had never met, who lived another fifty-four years.
The Oxford atheist who came in kicking and struggling, then explained the faith to a whole century.
Signed the confession his interrogators wanted, could not live with it, took it back - and paid for that with twenty-two more years.
Gave up his best Olympic event rather than run on a Sunday, won a different one in world-record time, and died in a prison camp teaching other people's children.
Built China's house churches, then spent the last twenty years of his life in a labor camp for it.