Reinhard Bonnke was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, on April 19, 1940, the son of a German army officer. As a boy, he gave his life to Christ at age nine and, soon after, felt an inner call to serve as a missionary on the African continent.
He trained at the Bible College of Wales, in Swansea, where he was deeply shaped by the prayer life of its director, Samuel Rees Howells. In 1964 he married Anni Suelze; together they pastored a small church in Germany before leaving for Africa in 1967.
The couple settled in the small kingdom of Lesotho. There, Bonnke reported hearing, on successive nights, a conviction that would come to define his entire life: “Africa shall be saved.” That certainty would later lead him to organize open-air evangelistic crusades on a continental scale.
In 1974 he founded Christ for all Nations, the organization that hosted his crusades, first in Johannesburg and, from 1986 onward, in Frankfurt. Ever larger crowds gathered under tents and open skies to hear his direct biblical preaching.
In 1984, the largest mobile tent ever built, seating 34,000, was destroyed by a storm hours before a crusade in Nigeria. The team decided to preach outdoors anyway, and the crowd exceeded 100,000 people, an episode that became a symbol of his resolve.
Not everything in his journey was free of tension. In 1991, his visit to Kano, a Nigerian city with a Muslim majority, coincided with religious riots between Muslims and Christians that left several dead, amid tensions over statements he had made about Islam. The state governor formally cleared him of blame, but the episode kept him away from the country for nearly a decade, as Nigerian authorities denied him visas.
Another grave episode marked 1999, in Benin City, also in Nigeria: a crowd estimated in the hundreds of thousands gathered for the opening of a crusade, and a crush as people pressed toward the stage left sixteen people dead and many injured. Bonnke’s organization attributed the tragedy to a lack of crowd control by local authorities.
The conversion figures his ministry publicized were also questioned by observers over the years: the tens of millions of “decisions for Christ” recorded on cards at the crusades did not always correspond, critics argued, to lasting conversions, a recurring tension in assessments of the mass-evangelism model he helped establish.
From 1986 onward, his Fire Conferences gathered tens of thousands of African pastors and leaders for training in evangelism, extending his impact far beyond the mass crusades. In 2000, a single series of services in Lagos drew record crowds over several days.
In 2009, he appointed Daniel Kolenda as his successor at the head of Christ for all Nations, and preached his final international crusade in Lagos in 2017. He died in 2019, in Florida, leaving behind a legacy of cross-cultural preaching that still inspires evangelists across Africa.
