December 11 1995

ARTICLE TOOLS

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While many local churches are conducting follow-up work on new converts from the Billy Graham crusade, employees at Reinhard Bonnke Ministries in Sacramento have a much bigger harvest field in sight: all 50 United States and the 12 Canadian provinces and territories.

The week before the Graham crusade, employees at the German evangelist's U.S. headquarters in Sacramento began work on a two-year project: designing a 20-page evangelistic booklet that will be mailed to all 112 million households in the United States and Canada in September 1997.

Bonnke's international ministry, Christ for All Nations (CFAN), based in his hometown of Frankfurt, has mailed booklets to the 24 million homes of the United Kingdom and the 40 million German-speaking households of Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Liechtenstein during the past two years. To date, 70,000 decision-for-Christ cards have been mailed back to West Midlands, England, and 33,000 returned in Frankfurt.

The glossy British version of "From Minus to Plus: The Epic of Christ's Cross" features full-color photographs and the simple message of salvation in chapters from "Sin in the Twentieth Century" to "Close Encounter with God."

A HEART FOR AFRICA: Bonnke, 55, is known primarily for having held huge tent revival meetings in Africa since 1978. According to Bonnke's own numbers, in this decade alone he has preached to 17.5 million on that continent, with 3.6 million making professions of faith.

For most of his ministry, Bonnke has been preaching in the Third World. He continues to conduct crusades primarily in Muslim-dominated countries, such as Chad and Mali, that have a minority Christian population. He regularly encounters opposition not only from Muslim leaders, but the Orthodox church ...