Ready, Set, Revival… says a headline on Kimberley’s Jesus Week Invasion website.
I encountered that level of excitement and expectancy for what Jesus is going to do in the city next month when I spoke to Jan van Reenen senior pastor of City of Hope Church and coordinator of the Jesus Week programme
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He said 30 Kimberley churches “are fully on board” with partnering with Christ for All Nations- (CfaN) trained evangelists in a big Gospel campaign in which they are trusting God for over 50 000 salvations.
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The Jesus Week Invasion from October 20 to 27 includes a 4-day stadium crusade led by a team of 30 CfaN evangelists from all over the world, supported by local evangelists who will receive crusade evangelism training at a CfaN Fire Camp from October 14 to October 19. Thousands of volunteers are being recruited for the week from local churches.
CfaN’s visit next month will be their first to Kimberley since the ministry founder, Evangelist Reinhard Bonnke, led a tent crusade in the city exactly 40 years ago
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Many pastors currently serving in Kimberley say they attended that tent crusade as teenagers – and were saved and called into ministry there.
A little over 50 years ago – before he launched CfaN – Bonnke preached in a church in Kimberley and discovered there were no young people in church because they were all at a local night club. One night, the night club owner reluctantly gave Bonnke permission to speak to the young people there for five minutes before their midnight closing time. When Bonnke made an altar call most of the young people responded to Jesus on their knees. Within a year the night club closed and the building became a church, said Van Reenen.
Over two days leading up to the Jesus Week Crusade which will take place at the AR Abass Stadium, evangelists will saturate the city with the Gospel during strategic outreaches on the streets, in malls, at schools, at hundreds of businesses, at police stations, the army base and government departments.
The week will conclude on Sunday October 27 when thousands of new believers are expected to attend services at churches they have been slotted into
Van Reenen said they are currently preparing to equip churches throughout the city and the townships to cope with the challenge of discipling so many new Christians
Amazingly, he said there are a number of local churches which are quite small but which have a significant missions impact into Africa and who have great discipleship material which they can share with other Kimberley churches which don’t have a discipleship process.
“So we’re seeing a beautiful synergy happening between people and gifts that God has given to leaders here,” he said.
2024 is CfaN’s 50th anniversary year and the ministry has already seen over five million souls saved this year under the leadership of Evangelist Daniel Kolenda. As Bonnkes’s successor, Kolenda’s jubilee-year goals include hosting a record 50 Gospel campaigns across Africa in 2024 and reaching a global tally of 100 million decisions to follow Jesus.
The ministry’s partnership with churches in Kimberley next month will be ground breaking in several ways.
When CfaN said “YES” to Kimberley’s request for a stadium crusade in the city, it departed from its tradition in recent decades of only holding big crusades in African nations to the north of South Africa.
Combining a fire camp with a crusade locally is another innovation aimed at reaching more people for Jesus.
Since Covid, Kimberley pastors have wanted to hold some kind of evangelistic crusade in the city to call people back to God and back to church. After connecting with Shaun Smit, a local evangelist and graduate of CfaN’s three-month Boot Camp evangelist training programme in Orlando, Florida, USA, they agreed to jointly host the Jesus Week Invasion.
Register now
At the time I spoke to van Reenen he said 66 people had already registered for the Fire Camp training from October 14 to 19. More local evangelists are encouraged to register for training on the website https://firecamp.co.za/
Registration to volunteer for the Jesus Week Invasion is open on the website www.jesusweek.co.za. Volunteers will serve on the salvation team – helping people to fill in follow up cards when they give their lives to Jesus, and by inviting people to the crusade.
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