Flashback: Reinhard Bonnke's missionary journey in Africa

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AS A YOUNG missionary with my wife in Africa, I sometimes preached to just
five people. My opportunity to see the impact of the glorious Gospel presented in the “proven” tradition of foreign missions had come. But five people? Beyond our mission station there were 450 million souls in Africa, most of who were ignorant of salvation through Jesus Christ. Yes, they could all be evangelized by the way we were tackling it, but only if they obliged us by staying alive for about five thousand years!
However, small audiences did not dismay us. Revival could come, and that would save us a lot of trouble. God could rouse Himself to battle. This hope kept us patient and starry-eyed, for had not our spiritual great grandfathers banked upon this with unquestioning faith?

AN UNPREACHED GOSPEL IS NO GOSPEL
Later, I began questioning this idea. It struck me that the Gospel is not good news to people who do not hear it–that an unpreached Gospel is no gospel at all. Another small ray of understanding penetrated my heart. In the New Testament we never read about God going forth on His own, but that, “They went out and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them” (Mark 16:20, emphasis added). God acted when they acted. Smith Wigglesworth once said, “The Acts of the Apostles was written because the apostles acted!”
Therefore, He is waiting for us to act also! That meant that I had to do something.
I started a Bible correspondence course, and within five years fifty thousand people had enrolled. So many! Like a periscope from a submarine, it revealed that I was submerged in an ocean of salvation-hungry humanity. In addition, a vision followed me. Night after night I saw a map of the entire African continent being washed in the blood of Jesus, country after country, and at the same time the Holy Spirit kept whispering in my ear, “Africa shall be saved!”

Wait for revival? We had waited—persistently and patiently— through a hundred long years of earnest prayer. Surely God must answer now?
Yet, one more fact faced me. There had never been revival without the preaching of the Gospel. So, on a seemingly wild impulse, which proved to be of God, I booked a ten-thousand-seat stadium for a campaign with a church of forty members—and ten thousand people came! It was the first ripe wheat.
Then He said to His disciples, “The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.”
—MATTHEW 9:37–38

For the first time I witnessed thousands running forward to respond to the call of salvation. God opened my eyes, and I actually saw an invisible, mighty wave of Holy Spirit power arrive in the stadium. A mass baptism in the Holy Spirit, accompanied by many healing miracles, took place. I wept like a baby and vowed to the Lord that in obedience I would move across all of Africa to bring the vision to pass. I reasoned that if God could do that to ten thousand people, He could do it to 450 million.
What we are seeing God do today in Africa is breathtaking. Following in the footsteps of famous missionaries of old, we reap with joy where they had sown in tears. We came to Bukavu, first visited by missionary C. T. Studd, and still remote in the rain forests of Zaire. There we saw seventy thousand people respond to the call of God’s love. David Livingstone prophesied that where he hardly saw a convert, later there would be thousands, and so it was. At Blantyre, Malawi, named after the town in Scotland where Livingstone was born, several hundred thousand responded to the call of salvation.

– Reinhard Bonnke (Evangelism by Fire 🔥)

Credit: -JESUS SAVES TV

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