The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Church Under Fire & Into All the World
Reinhard Bonnke
1940–2019
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.
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.
Go further
Read them yourself — the works below are the next step, and the public-domain ones are free to read in full.
- 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.
Why this voice is honored here
*Founder note pending.* 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 continues the ministry.