The Secret Place of Reinhard Bonnke

Reinhard Willi Gottfried Bonnke was born on April 19, 1940 in Königsberg, East Prussia, in a world already trembling under the weight of war. His father, an army man turned pastor after the conflict, gathered the family for Scripture and prayer in the years of hunger that followed. In that lean season the boy discovered the nearness of God. At nine years old he surrendered to Christ. At about ten he sensed a call that would brand his soul for the rest of his days. Africa shall be saved. The words were not a slogan then. They were a summons that would shape his study, his friendships, his geography, and every line of his daily schedule.

As a young man he crossed the Channel to study at the Bible College of Wales in Swansea, a school that pressed students into the disciplines of prayer and faith. He returned to Germany to pastor, married his lifelong companion Anni, and soon left for southern Africa as a missionary to the mountain kingdom of Lesotho. There he learned the difference between noble plans and the power of the Holy Spirit. Early efforts felt small. Church buildings were simple and meetings seemed ordinary. He began to rise before dawn, walking the hills and praying aloud for the villages below, confessing that unless the Lord visited, his work would remain a mist at sunrise.

In those years the phrase that had stalked his childhood returned to him with new force. Africa shall be saved. He wrote it in his journals. He preached it to his own heart when visible results were thin.

The shift came as he embraced the ministry of the Spirit with all his heart. He left the safety of small halls and carried the gospel into markets and open fields. In 1974 he established Christ for All Nations to serve the growing work. The meetings multiplied across southern Africa and then leapt northward. He pitched simple platforms, trained choirs, organized counselors and follow up teams, and most of all, he prayed. Before the first speaker checked the microphone he gathered teams for unhurried intercession. He had learned in Lesotho that bold preaching without deep prayer is a house without a foundation. After seasons of wrestling in prayer he stood in fields where the wind carried his voice to the far edges of the crowd and he preached Christ crucified and risen with a strength that felt larger than one man. The message was uncomplicated. The blood of Jesus cleanses. The Holy Spirit empowers. Come to the cross and live.

In the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties the work reached a scale few imagined possible. Whole cities turned out. The sea of faces became a parable of God's mercy rather than a measure of human achievement. He was meticulous in the way he honored local pastors. Every decision card was placed in the hands of churches prepared to disciple the new believers. He knew the meeting is not finished when the generator is switched off. It is finished when a new believer sits under the Word in a congregation that prays. The figures that Christ for All Nations recorded over the decades told a story of grace, with documented decisions for Christ reported in the tens of millions. Yet those statistics were always accompanied by another story, the story of prayer tents behind the platform where teams travailed in intercession, sometimes through the night, asking for the fear of the Lord to rest on the field and for the Word to run swiftly and be glorified.

Bonnke never cultivated mystique. He cultivated obedience. He guarded early mornings for Scripture, pacing as he prayed the Word back to God line by line. He taught his teams to seek the face of the Lord before they sought the face of the crowd. In hard places he and his colleagues fasted, not to bend God's will but to bend their own. When violence threatened, as it sometimes did, he refused to allow fear to draft the sermon. He answered danger by adding hours to the prayer list. He believed that courage is not an emotion but the by product of communion. Out of that communion sprang the phrases that became watchwords of his life. He spoke of plundering hell to populate heaven and he never tired of declaring the sentence that had commandeered his youth. Africa shall be saved.

The evangelist's schedule remained relentless, but the secret place did not shrink to make room for it. He kept the burden of intercession when he sat in planning sessions, when he navigated permissions with officials, and when he stood backstage listening to the roar of a crowd. He taught young preachers that every platform must be paid for in prayer. He warned them that eloquence without an altar is a candle in the wind. He stayed close to the cross in the pulpit and on his knees, certain that only the blood of Jesus can cleanse the conscience and only the Holy Spirit can draw a sinner home.

In his later years he turned increasingly to the task of raising successors. He wrote, he filmed lessons, and he mentored those who would carry the gospel banner when his strength waned. He handed the day to day leadership of Christ for All Nations to Daniel Kolenda and rejoiced as the same fire that had burned in his bones began to burn in the next generation. He went to be with the Lord on December 7, 2019. News reports counted the years and the crowds. Those who had prayed with him remembered the mornings and the tears and the sentences of Scripture whispered back to God before the microphones were ever switched on.