He was principally known for his Great Gospel Crusades throughout Africa. The son of a pastor, Reinhard surrendered his life to Christ at the age of nine and heard the call to the African mission field before he was a teenager. He attended Bible college in Wales and was ordained in Germany, where he and his wife, Anni, pastored a small church until 1967, when, in obedience to his childhood call, they embarked on missionary life in Africa in the small mountain kingdom of Lesotho. In 1974, when the Holy Spirit spoke to Reinhard in a recurring dream about “a blood-washed Africa,” he founded Christ for All Nations, becoming an inspiring visionary who spoke of “plundering hell to populate heaven,” a dedicated preacher who saw “signs following” as the necessary evidence of the power of the Gospel to save, heal, and deliver.

Evangelist Bonnke began holding meetings in a tent that accommodated just 800 people. However, as attendance steadily increased, larger and larger tents had to be purchased, until finally, in 1984, he commissioned the construction of the world’s largest mobile structure at the time—a tent capable of seating 34,000 people. Soon, attendance at his meetings exceeded the capacity of even this huge structure, and he began holding open-air Gospel campaigns, with an initial gathering of over 150,000 people per service. From then on, he conducted citywide meetings across the continent using towering sound systems that could be heard for miles. The largest recorded attendance at such an open-air meeting was in the city of Lagos during the “Millennium Crusade” in November 2000, when over 1.6 million people thronged the field to hear the Gospel.