Reinhard Bonnke was born on 19 April 1940 in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad). His father Hermann was a Pentecostal pastor. Reinhard attended the Bible College of Wales in Swansea, was ordained in the German Pentecostal Federation, and served seven quiet years as a missionary in Lesotho beginning in 1967.
In 1974 he founded Christ for all Nations (CfaN) with a burden he later described in a vision as the map of Africa "washed in the blood of Jesus, from Cape Town to Cairo". Between 1975 and 1984 he preached in stadiums across southern Africa; in 1984 CfaN commissioned the "Big Tent" — a 34,000-seat, 262-metre canvas structure that was for a decade the largest mobile tent on earth. It was destroyed by a storm in Cape Town in 1984 and never rebuilt.
"From 1986 onward Bonnke moved to open-field crusades. Attendance figures — recorded from aerial photographs and police estimates — began to climb: 500,000 at Ibadan (1988), a full 1.6 million on a single night at Lagos (November 2000, the largest crowd Bonnke ever addressed), and cumulative six-night totals of over 6 million at Lagos and 6.7 million at Ogbomosho."
His signature altar call — "Jesus is Lord!" repeated with the crowd — was followed by registered decision cards, which CfaN counted and archived. The lifetime tally at his last crusade in November 2017 (Lagos again) was 79 million cards. Skeptics contest the number, but no other single evangelist in history has left a comparable paper trail.
Bonnke died on 7 December 2019 in Orlando, Florida. His hand-picked successor, the Nigerian-American evangelist Daniel Kolenda, continues CfaN's African crusades under the same name.