Bonnke, Reinhard (1940—2019)
Country of Origin
-
Germany
Countries/Regions of Ministry
- Africa
Traditions
- Evangelical
Ministries
- Evangelist
If you were plotting a good career path for a white evangelist, you’d most likely advise him to start on friendly turf with well-heeled donors, such as in America. Once his media programs and sizable constituency were in place, he could then begin reaching out to other nations.
Such was not the case with Reinhard Bonnke. His beginnings in childhood peril under Hitler’s Third Reich (he with his mother and siblings fled to Denmark while his father served in the Wehrmacht) gave no hint that he would someday preach—in English, not his native German—to massive crowds across Africa for more than forty years.
Once World War II was over, his father was able to rejoin the family and soon became a Pentecostal pastor. Young Reinhard was born again at age nine, and not long after sensed God’s call to ministry himself. He experienced baptism in the Holy Spirit and eventually enrolled at the Bible College of Wales, founded by the renowned intercessor Rees Howells.
Back in Germany, he was ordained, began to preach, and met his future wife, Anni, at a gospel music festival; she impressed him with her gracious handling of a wrongly pitched accompaniment that caused her to lose the singing competition. They married and pastored a small church until 1967, when the burden for Africa grew so strong that they pulled up stakes and headed for Lesotho, a primitive mountain kingdom inside South Africa.
The next seven years in traditional missionary work were not particularly successful. Bonnke was frustrated, and prayed much about what should change. In 1974 he began having a dream, night after night, in which he saw a map of the whole African continent filled with blood, and the voice of God declaring, “Africa shall be saved!” He took this to mean that the blood of Christ would redeem the souls of men and women on a major scale.
He acquired a modest tent and set it up in Gabarone, the capital of newly independent Botswana just north of South Africa. The first night, only a hundred people came to hear him preach the gospel. He was not discouraged; each night the crowd grew, and more people found salvation, until the final meeting filled a 10,000-seat stadium.
From that moment on, Bonnke’s approach was settled: He would lead evangelistic campaigns wherever possible, to reach as many as possible—black, white, and any other race. He set up an entity called Christ for all Nations, CfaN (not to be confused with Gordon Lindsay’s CFNI—Christ for the Nations Institute—in America). His boldly stated vision: “Plundering Hell to Populate Heaven.”
Three years after the first tent, he bought a much bigger one that would seat 10,000 … and then in 1983, the largest gospel tent ever constructed, to hold 34,000. But he didn’t get to use it long. A severe windstorm in Cape Town blew it apart a year later. Not to be deterred, Bonnke opted from then on to take most of his crusades outdoors, in parks and other open spaces, with floodlights, powerful sound systems, and eventually large video screens placed around the perimeter. Also provided were barrels to contain bonfires, where newly saved listeners could rid themselves of any magic amulets or charms. Crowds swelled into the hundreds of thousands; some estimates ran past 1 million on a given night. Press reports started calling him “the Billy Graham of Africa.”
Over the years, he campaigned in nearly every one of the continent’s fifty-four nations. He met face-to-face with fourteen different African heads of state, not all of them Christians. He even dared to go into heavily Muslim areas such as northern Nigeria. In 1991 a protest broke out in Kano over rumors that he was planning to “lead an invasion” and would blaspheme Islam. A mob of 8,000 youths rioted after Friday prayers and began attacking Christians as well as burning several churches. With actual lives in jeopardy, Bonnke elected not to continue his meetings—one of the rare times he backed down. But in a few years, he returned to preach again in Nigeria. “A man of faith has no reverse gear,” he insisted.
If anyone doubted whether the Jesus he preached was real, they had to reconsider as they watched Bonnke pray for the sick. Blind people came up on the platform to prove they could now see; the lame and deformed demonstrated how they could now run; out in the audience, hundreds of needy people found faith to jump up from wheelchairs. The evangelist truly believed, as he told an American interviewer, “If we preach what the apostles preached, we will have the results the apostles had.”
Would that even include raising the dead, as both Peter and Paul had done? In November 2001, a Nigerian pastor named Daniel Ekechukwu was driving to deliver a Christmas gift to his father when, coming down a steep hill, his brakes suddenly failed. His car slammed into a stone pillar, thrusting his chest into the steering wheel and his head into the windshield. At the hospital, the attending physician filled out a death certificate after finding neither heartbeat nor breath.
In the morgue, his body was embalmed (although, by African custom, his organs were not removed). His distraught wife, however, refused to bury him until she first arranged to have him transported in the casket (three days later) to a nearby church where Bonnke was preaching.
Church officials hesitated to bring the casket into the main service; instead, it was taken to the basement, where the lid was opened. There, while the sermon continued upstairs, Ekechukwu suddenly sat up, opened his eyes, and began to breathe again. The entire episode, with multiple verifications, is recounted in a six-part series of YouTube videos.
Yet, healing was never the main point of Bonnke’s ministry. It merely served to draw Africans to the healing Savior. “Some people call me a healing evangelist,” he complained to Christianity Today. “I do not like that. I define myself as a salvation evangelist who also prays for the sick. Wherever we go, 95 percent of the meeting is a clear preaching presentation of the gospel.” According to Christ for all Nations’ tally of his many campaigns, more than 97 million made decisions for Christ—a number based not just on an estimate of raised hands, but on individuals actually filling out information cards.
In the same meetings, untold thousands were baptized in the Holy Spirit. “If the church rejects the Holy Spirit, he is homeless—like the dove Noah sent out from the ark that couldn’t land just any place,” Bonnke said. “We must always make him, the heavenly Dove, welcome in our midst.”
- Reinhard Bonnke, Living a Life of Fire: An Autobiography (Harvester Services, 2019).
- Colin Whittaker, Reinhard Bonnke: A Passion for the Gospel (Destiny Image, 2005).
- Charles Obara, "The Role of Reinhard Bonnke in Raising National Evangelists in Africa" in Everyone Reaching EveryONE: Portraits of Spirit-Empowered Evangelists (ORU Press, 2025).
- Christ for all Nations, "Our History and Story," https://cfan.org/history.