%20by%20Francine%20Rivers%20(z-lib.org).epub-160.webp)
About the Book
"Immanuel's Veins" by Ted Dekker is a supernatural thriller that follows a young nobleman named Toma who falls in love with a mysterious and enchanting woman named Lucia. As their relationship intensifies, dark secrets from Lucia's past emerge, revealing her true identity as a vengeful vampire queen. Toma must struggle between his love for Lucia and his desire to protect his family and himself from her deadly nature. The novel explores themes of love, sacrifice, and the battle between good and evil.
Reinhard Bonnke
Reinhard Bonnke (19 April 1940 - 7 December 2019) was a German-American Pentecostal evangelist, principally known for his gospel missions throughout Africa. Bonnke had been an evangelist and missionary in Africa since 1967. In Nigeria’s city, Lagos, in 2000, a single service is believed to have been attended by 1.6 million people. Christ for all Nations (CFAN), an organisation founded by Bonnke, claims he preached Christ to more than 79 million non believers.
Early life
Reinhard Bonnke was born on 19 April 1940, in the city of Königsberg, East Prussia, Germany, the fifth son of Hermann Bonnke, an army logistics officer in the Reichswehr who fought on the Eastern Front; his paternal grandfather was August Bonnke, the owner of a windmill in Trunz, East Prussia (now Milejewo, Poland), who was healed of an unknown ailment by the evangelist Luis Graf in 1922, but died during the evacuation of East Prussia in 1945. His mother was Metaa Bonnke (née Scheffler). Bonnke had six siblings: Martin, Gerhard, Jurgen, Peter and Felicitas, his only younger sibling and his only sister.
With his mother and siblings, he was taken to Denmark during the evacuation of East Prussia and spent some years in a displaced persons centre before settling in Gluckstadt, West Germany. After his own war service, his father became a pastor in the village of Krempe. He became a born-again Christian at the age of nine after his mother spoke with him about a sin that he had committed. He sensed a call from God to serve as a missionary in Africa from the age of 10 and said that he had the experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit.
Bonnke studied at the Bible College of Wales in Swansea, Wales, UK, where he was inspired by the director, Samuel Rees Howells. In one meeting Howells spoke of answered prayer; after this meeting, Bonnke prayed, "Lord, I also want to be a man of faith. I want to see your way of providing for needs." Passing through London, he had a chance meeting with the preacher George Jeffreys. As he walked, he came across a house with a nameplate on the front that said “George Jeffreys”. He wondered if it could be the great George Jeffreys who had founded the Elim Pentecostal churches in Ireland and England. He prayed for the young student and imparted grace to him.
After graduation, he pastored in Germany for seven years, including establishing a congregation in Flensburg which met in a former rum factory.
African mission
His work in Africa began in 1967. He arrived in South Africa and almost immediately encountered the apartheid system, which he developed an antipathy towards, which in turn caused friction between him and the minister who oversaw him in South Africa. Bonnke subsequently accepted a position to oversee three churches in Lesotho, but began again from scratch after he discovered that unbiblical practices had emerged in the congregations he was to oversee.
In the first few years of his work, Bonnke encountered poor results from his evangelistic efforts and felt frustrated at the pace of his ministry. Then he had a recurring dream featuring a picture of the map of Africa being splattered with blood and heard the voice of God crying "Africa Shall Be Saved". This ultimately led him to adopt large-scale evangelism, rather than the traditional small-scale missionary approach. He rented a stadium in Gaborone, Botswana, and preached with little cooperation from local churches. The first meetings saw about 100 people attending, but this number grew swiftly.
In 1974, Bonnke founded the mission organisation Christ for all Nations (CfaN). Originally based in Johannesburg, South Africa, the headquarters were relocated to Frankfurt, Germany, in 1986. This was done primarily to distance the organisation from South Africa's apartheid policy at the time.[9] Today CfaN has 9 offices across 5 continents.
Bonnke began his ministry holding tent meetings that accommodated large crowds. According to an account published by the Christian Broadcasting Network, in 1984 he commissioned the construction of what was claimed to be the world's largest mobile structure - a tent capable of seating 34,000; this was destroyed in a wind storm just before a major meeting and therefore the team decided to hold the event in the open air instead. According to this account, the event was subsequently attended by over 100,000 people which is far greater than the 34,000 seating capacity the tents could have contained. For various reasons, usually due to insufficient capacity, the 34,000-seat tent was only used once, in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1986.
In addition to South Africa, Bonnke would also hold many campaigns in other African countries including Nigeria and Kenya and became known as "the Billy Graham of Africa." In the 5 February 2001 edition of Graham's Christianity Today, journalist Corrie Cutrer stated that Bonnke had set "record-breaking attendances" at recent events he held in Nigeria. Bonnke announced his "farewell gospel crusade" to be held in Lagos, Nigeria, in November 2017. Lagos is also the location of a gospel crusade held in 2000 which, according to CfaN, is the organization's largest to date, drawing an attendance of six million people in a 5-night crusade, and as much as 1.6 million attendance in one day. In 2009 Bonnke appointed his successor, Daniel Kolenda who continues to lead the ministry. In 2020, following Bonnke's death, Christ for all Nations launched the CfaN Evangelism Bootcamp. In 2022 Schools of Evangelism were started in South Africa, and Europe and Fire Camps were launched in dozens of nations on six continents. Today, more than 4,000 evangelists have been trained by Christ for all Nations and more than 91-million decisions for Christ have been counted. In 2024, in the 50th year of the ministry, CfaN is conducting 50 gospel crusades throughout the African continent.
Persecution
Kano riots, subsequent expulsion from Nigeria, and return to the country
In 1991, during Bonnke's visit to Kano in Nigeria, there were riots in the city as Muslims protested over remarks he had reportedly made about Islam in the city of Kaduna on his way to Kano. A rumour was spread that Bonnke was planning to "lead an invasion" into Kano. Muslim youths gathered at the Kofar Mata Eide-ground where they were addressed by several clerics who claimed that Bonnke was going to blaspheme Islam. About 8,000 youths gathered at the Emir's palace and after noon prayers the riots ensued, during which many Christians sustained various injuries and several churches were burned. Official reports state that at least eight people were killed, although other research and reports place the number as being as much as 500 as many of the Christians who were killed were thrown into wells and the attacks were spread between multiple locations.
Despite the state governor absolving Bonnke of any blame for the incident, Bonnke's subsequent attempts to return to Nigeria were denied, as the Nigerian Embassy refused his visa applications. In 2000, a new civilian government in Nigeria was elected to power, and President Olusegun Obasanjo, a Christian, invited Reinhard Bonnke to return to the country. Bonnke returned to Nigeria and held a crusades in Benin City in the south. He would deny reports that the Northern Region of Nigeria's Council of Ulamas banned him from entering northern Nigeria.
Bonnke held many crusades in Nigeria after 2000, and conversion rates were significantly higher than in many other African nations, with one campaign achieving a conversion of 1.1 million people. Nigeria would be where his final international crusade would be held, in Lagos in 2017.
Personal life
After graduating from the Bible College of Wales and returning to Germany, Bonnke led a series of meetings in Rendsburg. He began receiving speaking invitations from all around Germany and the rest of the world. Bonnke met Anni Suelze at a gospel music festival and admired the grace which she showed when a mistake led to her losing a music competition. He offered to preach at the church she attended and over time they fell in love. They married in 1964 and had three children: Kai-Uwe Friedrich, known as "Freddy", Gabrielle and Suzanne.
Death
Bonnke died on 7 December 2019. The month before, he had announced on his official Facebook page that he had undergone femur surgery and needed time to "learn how to walk again". Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, who is Muslim, praised Bonnke for his frequent visits to Nigeria and described his death as a "great loss to Nigeria".
His appointed successor is the evangelist Daniel Kolenda.
He would be buried in Gotha, Florida's Woodlawn Memorial Park, with his memorial stone being shaped to resemble Africa.
take time to be unproductive - how busyness can waste a life
Søren Kierkegaard, a nineteenth-century Danish theologian and social critic, once wrote in his journal, “The result of busyness is that an individual is very seldom permitted to form a heart.” We sense in our souls he is right. Unrelenting busyness — running here and there, late and in haste, always with more to do than we have time for — stifles the life of the heart. Yet I fear that many in the church, especially those of us in various forms of leadership, often pursue that very busyness. We occasionally warn others about burnout and stress, but we are constantly in motion, endlessly feeling harassed by all that clamors to be done and feeling guilty for projects we haven’t completed. And we frequently pass that stress on to others, in subtle but destructive ways — we are busy, so we can act like everyone else should be busy. If they are not, we can treat them as lazy or negligent. But is our problem primarily that we are not more productive, or is it that we have allowed unrealistic expectations to distort our vision of faithfulness? While it’s very likely that we could become better organized and more efficient, pursuing those efforts may feed and hide the true problem rather than helping it. What if the heart of our trouble is not time management, but something else? What if the goal of Christian life isn’t merely to get more done? And if that’s true, why do many of us feel a need to fill every moment either with items we can check off a to-do list or with mindless distraction? Binge-watching television and hours spent on social media may be more symptoms than causes of our problems, signs of a deeper malady. What if God doesn’t expect us to be productive every moment? What if growing comfortable with slowness, with quiet, with not filling every moment can help reconnect us to God, others, and even with our own humanity? That’s at least worth thinking about. Unexamined Expectations While it was Ben Franklin, and not the apostle Paul, who observed that “time is money,” we Americans have baptized that sentiment — not to derive financial benefit from every moment, but because somehow we have the idea that every minute should yield positive measurable results. Don’t just sit around; do something! Of course, diligence, a good work ethic, and innovation typically do make life better for ourselves and others. Sometimes, however, a genuine good can become a horrible master, and when productivity and efficiency become our highest goals, our world and our lives suffer. That’s because God’s highest value is not productivity and efficiency, but love (Matthew 22:37–39; 1 Corinthians 16:14). This sounds too abstract, so let’s turn to more direct questions about our own lives. What do you think God  expects of you in any given day? If you are like me, this question can reveal some painful disconnects in our perception of God and the faithful life. I recently spoke with a pastor in the Midwest who told me that, when he was in college, he got so excited about the idea that he should “make every minute count” and “redeem the time” that he and his friends mapped out how they could live on four hours of sleep a night; this way, they could “do so much more for Christ.” Twenty years later, this once strong and zealous servant of Christ was physically, emotionally, psychologically, and relationally broken. His faith, his family, and his ministry were all on the brink of collapse. He certainly wouldn’t trace all of his problems to his early zeal and oversized projects, but he does see how that pattern distorted his life, increasing his expectations not just for how much he should do in a day, but for how much he should accomplish in his life. We may easily dismiss his crazy idea of four hours of sleep per night, but my guess is many of us are living with similar assumptions, and it is hurting us. One sign that unhealthy expectations are running our lives is a constant background frustration in our souls, hiding behind our smiling faces. We are exhausted by the kids, by the church, by the spouse, by the endless demands. We have no margin in life, so when someone says the wrong thing, or a child doesn’t move fast enough, or a neighbor needs help, this anger tries to burst through our kindness. People are keeping us from doing what we need to do! Efficiency and productivity have replaced love as our highest value. Gift of Slow Maybe in order not to waste our lives, you and I need to learn the benefit of “wasting” some time. Let me explain. What we think of as boredom or unproductive time can be a great gift. In the spaces opened by moments of slowness, if we don’t immediately fill them with more tasks or distractions, surprising things often happen: our bodies breathe and relax a bit, our imaginations open up, and our hearts can consider all manner of ideas. We have space to evaluate how we spoke to a colleague that morning or notice a young parent struggling with a child. Only by slowing down, and not immediately filling the space, do we start to sense God’s presence and the complexities of the world — including both its beauties and problems, our wonder and fears. We miss the world when we are constantly busy. Thus Kierkegaard’s insight: the result of busyness is that we are seldom able to form a heart. Compassion, thoughtfulness, repentance, hope, and love all grow in the soil of reflection. And healthy reflection rarely occurs when we don’t slow down. “Compassion, thoughtfulness, repentance, hope, and love all grow in the soil of reflection.” Busyness also stunts our growth. Creativity and wisdom require our internal freedom to reflect, wrestle, and sit with challenges. There is a reason that walks and showers are often places of great insight: the distractions are minimal, so the mind and heart can wonder. Such periods of slowness also enrich our communion with God if we take time for mental, emotional, and even physical engagement that the overly busy life excludes. Life improves if we carve out extended times for solitude and silence. These practices have historically been used and recommended by Christians who saw that busyness made it harder to be present with God and with others. These times of silence and solitude can be difficult, especially at first. But until we grow in our ability to be alone with God — and alone with ourselves — we will have difficulty recognizing the Spirit’s presence in our day. Forming Our Hearts Another reason we like to be busy is that we often don’t like ourselves. Slowing down and creating space for quiet often faces us with matters we prefer to ignore, whether painful memories from our past, undesirable traits in our personality, or actions we wish we hadn’t taken. Busyness can be a way to avoid confronting our sin. It can also be our way of avoiding the wish that we were someone else, or had a different set of abilities or background or temperament. Busyness that enables avoidance can stunt our growth. Busyness makes self-knowledge very difficult. “We miss the world when we are constantly busy.” Rather than being honest with God and ourselves about our hurts, sins, motivations, and disappointments, we dull our sensitivity with busyness. It takes courage to let moments remain unoccupied, but when we are willing to enter open spaces with an open heart, God can bring serious healing and growth. We also gain more courage to enter such spaces when we live in a community of faith that is safe and loving, where others don’t panic or shut down in the face of our pain and shortcomings. When others are comfortable with quiet, mystery, and unfinished work, secure enough in Christ to endure messy situations, that also frees us to face this season in which God is still bringing to completion that which he began (Philippians 1:6): God is comfortable with process, too. We learn to avoid endless busyness when embracing slowness becomes not merely a personal value, but that of our community. Learning to go slower and maybe even “waste” more time together opens up fresh spaces to grow in our awareness of God’s presence and work. We start to become people who can, in the slowness, pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17), often without realizing that is what’s happening. Slowing down — not filling every moment with distractions, dropping the compulsion to squeeze productivity out of every moment — allows us to hear God and others. It gives our imagination and creativity oxygen to breathe, and we start to develop a heart. It opens up the path of love. So go ahead, “waste” some time, because this may keep you from wasting your life.
