Reinhard Bonnke is best known for his immense open-air evangelistic campaigns, crowds, measured not by the hundreds, nor by the thousands, but by the hundreds of thousands. Acres of humanity gathered together to hear the gospel preached with clarity and sincerity. However, the man who now preaches to crowds, which sometimes exceed a million in a single service, began by preaching to only a handful.
Born in 1940 in war-torn Germany, Reinhard Bonnke gave his life to the Lord Jesus Christ at the age of nine; attended Bible school in Wales in his twenties, and was on the mission field in Lesotho, Africa by 1967. From then on his life was that of a typical missionary… at least until he cried out to God that at the rate he was seeing conversions, it would take millennia to ‘save Africa.’ It was then that he was gripped with a vision of the continent of Africa ‘washed in the blood of Jesus’ and felt a calling to take the gospel from ‘Cape Town to Cairo.’
Following this leading, his ministry began to expand to take up this new challenge, and soon he was filling a 10,000-seater tent to overflowing. A larger tent was purchased. This 34,000-seater structure was the largest in the world, and even entered the Guinness Book of Records, yet it also was to prove to be too small. Open-air crusades began, and have continued to this day.
In the late 1990’s Reinhard Bonnke, consumed with the ever-pressing need to propagate the gospel message to all parts of the world, distributed over 95 million evangelistic booklets to homes across Europe, America and the Far East. On another front over 2.6 million copies of his book Evangelism by Firehave been printed and ‘seeded’ to bible-schools and pastors across the world to inspire them to Holy Spirit evangelism. Today his books have been translated into over 135 languages and 174 million copies have been printed in over fifty countries and distributed worldwide.
In the past 30 years, more than 70 million people have attended these Great Gospel Crusades and since 1999 over 34 million people have signed decision cards committing their lives to the Lord Jesus Christ! Countless thousands press forward to hear the life-changing gospel message, and signs and wonders follow the preaching of the word. From the early days of a single office, CfaN, as it is universally known, has expanded worldwide, and now, with its headquarters in Orlando, Florida, has several offices in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas.