Daniel Kolenda is the successor to Evangelist Reinhard Bonnke and he leads Christ for All Nations. Their ministry has now recorded over 100 million documented decisions for Christ. Today on the Evangelism Podcast, we talk about his new book titled “Furious” about Paul’s epistle to the Galatians. This book contains a powerful revelation of the Gospel that has the power to revolutionize your life.
Learn more about Christ for All Nations: https://cfan.org/
Notes:
This interview with Evangelist Daniel Kolenda of Christ for All Nations (CFAN) covers several key topics:
- CFAN has just surpassed 100 million documented decisions for Christ since its founding in 1974, averaging 2 million salvations per year. Kolenda believes this is just the beginning of an even greater harvest in the coming decades.
- Kolenda discusses CFAN’s strategy of training and empowering thousands of evangelists around the world to multiply their impact. This includes initiatives like the CFAN Evangelism Bootcamp and the new Christ Royal Nation School of Ministry.
- Kolenda has recently written a new book called “Furious” which provides a fresh, narrative-driven exploration of the Book of Galatians and the gospel message. The book aims to transform readers’ understanding of the power of the gospel.
- Looking ahead, CFAN is focused on expanding their crusade efforts to new regions and continuing to raise up the next generation of evangelists to participate in the “decade of double harvest” that Kolenda believes the ministry is entering.
Transcript:
Evangelist Daniel King (00:00):
Daniel Kolinda is the successor to Evangelist Reinhard Bonnke and he leads Christ for All Nations. Their ministry has now recorded over 100 million documented decisions for Jesus Christ. Today on the Evangelism podcast, we talk about Daniel Coda’s new book titled Furious. It’s about Paul’s epistle to the Galatians. This book contains a powerful revelation of the gospel that has the power to revolutionize your life. Jesus said,
Evangelism Podcast Host (00:43):
Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast with Dr. Daniel King, where Daniel interviews full-time evangelists, pastors, missionaries and normal everyday Christians to discover how they share their faith, their powerful testimonies and amazing stories that will inspire you to reach people with the good news. And now here’s your host, missionary, and evangelist
Evangelist Daniel King (01:05):
Daniel King. Welcome to the Evangelism Podcast. I’m Daniel King and I’m excited about telling people about Jesus. Today I have a very special guest with me, Daniel Kolinda from Christ for All Nations. Thank you for being on the Evangelism Podcast.
Evangelist Daniel Kolenda (01:20):
Thank you. From one Daniel to another. It’s great to be with you today.
Evangelist Daniel King (01:24):
Well, you are a wonderful friend and it is so exciting to see what Christ for All Nations is doing around the world. And C Fan just recently passed a major milestone. Tell me about that.
Evangelist Daniel Kolenda (01:40):
Yeah, I’d love to. First, I just want to say to you, Daniel, thank you for the work that you do as well because we’re both evangelists and we share a heart for the nations, and you’ve been going for many years preaching the gospel around the world. And I’m really thankful for what God has done through your ministry. You’ve actually helped us here in training of evangelists. You’ve been one of the trainers that’s come into our bootcamp and helped impart to the next generation. So thank you for that and love and appreciate you very much. Yeah, our ministry, Christ for All Nations, founded by the late Evangelist Bonnke back in 1974. So we are now a 50-year-old ministry. We just passed the 50th birthday and we also just surpassed as of a couple of weeks ago, the landmark of 100 million documented salvations since the founding of the ministry. So that averages out to 2 million people a year coming to Christ, which is something that I’ve never heard of it before. It’s not, I don’t take any credit for it. It was very much a team effort and of course Evangelist Bonky for many, many years before I even came along. But we are celebrating and so thankful for what God has done. We’re really living in the greatest harvest of all time.
Evangelist Daniel King (02:58):
It really is an amazing milestone. When Reinhard Bonnke passed away, I remember that there was an average of about 1 million people who had given their lives to Jesus every year of his life. And then you have continued the Harvest. CFAN as not slowed down or slacked off ever since. Reinhard went on to heaven. CFAN has been aggressively going after souls. You haven’t lost the purpose. So tell me a little bit about what that was like going from being under Reinhardt’s leadership to now you leading Christ for All nations.
Evangelist Daniel Kolenda (03:35):
Yeah. Evangelist Bonnke passed away in 2019. He was 79 years old and at that time we had seen 79 million documented decisions for Christ. So you can kind of do the math and see how it’s increased, but actually I became the president of the ministry 10 years before he died. And so I was very firmly in the captain’s chair, but Evangelist Bonnke and I worked together very closely over those 10 years. And he was more than just a mentor to me or a good example. He was really like a father in many ways. And when he passed away, it felt like losing a father. It had that kind of impact on me. I don’t know that I can say that I’ve even now fully processed the difficulty of that loss, but because of his incredible wisdom in the way that he structured transition, and he chose me for successor long before he passed and worked with me to see that transition happen very smoothly in terms of the ministry impact we have not ceased after he passed away or slowed down.
(04:45):
In fact, we have increased. And the Lord began to speak to me in 2017 about the upcoming decade that we’re living in right now. And the Lord told me it would be a decade of double harvest. And the reason that it would be that way was because we would not just be adding, we would be multiplying. And so we really began to put emphasis and intention into investing into the next generation and multiplying laborers and evangelists for the sake of the harvest. And at this moment, there are over 5,000 evangelists that have been trained through Christ for All nations. They are literally spread out all over the world and they’re working very much together with each other and with us to see exponential impact all over the world, which is why we’ve seen these numbers just continue to skyrocket. And I believe that actually we’ve only touched to the very, very beginning of this, just the tip of the iceberg.
(05:37):
I believe that we’ll see by the end of this decade we’ll see 150 million salvations. And then I believe that’s just again the priming for an even greater harvest. Because imagine with these thousands of evangelists now spread out all over the world with their own ministries and their own influence, and God is blessing them and using them. I we’re in for the following decade to be a billion soul harvest decade. And I don’t say that just as wishful thinking or grand faithful talking. I mean based on the numbers that we’re seeing on the ground and the fruit that’s already coming in, if we just project forward, it looks like we’re in for an even greater season of harvest yet to come.
Evangelist Daniel King (06:16):
This is one of the greatest harvest of souls in history. And heaven will record what is happening during this decade of time. The decade of Double Harvest. Heaven will celebrate the millions of people that are coming into a relationship with God. I’ve had the privilege of teaching many of the C fan evangelists with the Evangelism Bootcamp, and it was such a tremendous privilege to be able to pour into them and to be a part of that, to come down to your headquarters there in Orlando. And just recently I have been with some of the CFAN evangelists in different parts of the world, and it’s absolutely amazing to see what God is doing through them. Just a couple months ago I was in Finland and there’s a group of evangelists there that went through the Evangelism bootcamp that now are doing crusades and outreaches in Finland.
(07:21):
And it’s not just first generation, it’s second and third generation evangelists that have gone through the CFAN training system. And then just last week I was in Thailand with evangelist Daniel Es. We were doing a Jesus camp together and we had 176 evangelists come from 15 different provinces across Thailand to be trained. And we took them out to do outreaches. And in the outreaches we did, we had 607 people give their lives to Jesus. And then some of those that have been trained just this week I got a report, they have been doing youth events and over 9,000 young people have given their lives to Jesus, God. And this is all a fruit of what CFAN is doing to train these evangelists. Talk to me a little bit about this strategy of going beyond being just one evangelist on the platform to training many evangelists.
Evangelist Daniel Kolenda (08:24):
Well, I really do believe in the principle of impartation. When you look at the story for example of Elijah and Elijah or Moses and Joshua or Jesus and the disciples, which would be the greatest example, you see this emphasis on not simply doing the work of the ministry but passing it on. And in fact, Jesus, what’s interesting with the ministry of Jesus, the very first thing that you read about in the gospels that he does as he launches his public ministry, as he chooses 12 disciples, these are the ones that will on after he’s gone. Now, I mean in our time, usually succession plans are saved for the deathbed. A preacher or a minister or a leader doesn’t think about who’s going to take on the ministry after they’re gone until they’re dying. But with Jesus, that was the very first thing that he did.
(09:11):
He chose the ones that would carry on because he understood that this would be, I mean, think about it. If Jesus hadn’t picked 12 disciples, we probably wouldn’t know who Jesus was because who would’ve written the gospels, who would’ve taken the witness of what they saw to the nations of the world? And so I really felt coming in to Christ for All Nations. I was 28 years old when I became the leader of the ministry. Evangelist Bonnke was still very much around, but I felt myself often asking the Lord, why me? Why did you pick me for this? I’m not a great preacher like Evangelist Bonnke. If you knew Reinhard, he was just a very, very special man. And I never felt like I was in his league in any way, and I still don’t. But I felt like what the Lord told me my assignment would be was not simply to carry on the ministry, although I am doing that and I continue to preach in the Crusades and carry the baton that he passed to me.
(10:04):
But also I felt like the Lord said that my job was to utilize that platform that had been built by Evangelist Bonnke and so many others to launch not only my own ministry but a whole generation of others to give it away. It’s the parable of the feeding of the 4,000 or the 5,000 where Jesus takes these pieces of bread and fish and he puts them in the hands of the disciples and he tells them to give them away. And you might think you can imagine those disciples, they’re all hungry. There’s thousands of people there, and they’ve got just a few crumbs of bread and a little piece of a fish in their hand and they’re thinking themselves, this isn’t enough for me. How is this going to be enough for the multitudes? But they found this amazing secret that as they gave away what they had been given, it began to grow and they actually never ran out and actually had baskets full of food left over at the end. And I think this is a spiritual principle. It says that when Jesus took that bread, it says he blessed it and then he broke it. And I think that God only blesses what he breaks and when he breaks, it’s for the sake of multiplication and distribution. As we give away what we have, he gives us more. And that’s been my experience and the experience of the ministry. And I think that the best years of our ministry and of our lives are ahead of us still because of this incredible thing of multiplication.
Evangelist Daniel King (11:28):
Now, if someone’s listening and they feel a calling to evangelism, what are some ways that they can get trained? I know you’re launching a brand new school of ministry. Are there still opportunities for people to get trained through that? And what are some of the other things that CFAN is offering?
Evangelist Daniel Kolenda (11:47):
Yeah, of course the Christ for All Nations School of Ministry is an incredible opportunity to be raised up and trained. We still have the bootcamp, it’s not running right now, but if you come to the School of Ministry, you’ll be in the line for the bootcamp as well. Also, we have schools of fire. We have the fire camps. Jesus Camps is a derivative of the fire camps, as you know, which is like a one week long intensive where you get linked with the Christ for All Nation’s family. We call it the Evangelism Alliance, which has thousands of evangelists linked together, working together. And really what we do, we have different levels of training. Some are very in depth, some are customized for people that want to do gospel crusades like Chan is known for. We have a training called One-to-One, which is designed just to help people share the gospel with their neighbor and their friends in a one-on-one way.
(12:37):
It’s a one day training. So we’ve got all these different levels. But I found that the great thing is that I remember early when I first started doing evangelism and I was trying to do gospel crusades, I saw what Evangel Bonnke was doing. This was before I was working with him. And I looked at these super massive gospel crusades and I thought to myself, how do you even get started doing something like that? It just seems overwhelming, it seems impossible. Where would you begin? And I found that by just giving people the tools and the resources to be able to begin, then that ability to take the first step results in God just blessing the steps and providing more. Like Evangelist Bonnke said, even God can’t steer a parked car. So on some level, you’ve got to be able to get busy and take the first step.
(13:26):
And we have been able to do that very effectively for many of these evangelists. And now some of the guys that we’ve trained, as you said, they are quickly becoming and sometimes already are in different places of the world, the leaders of evangelism in their respective regions and countries. And like you just said, everywhere we go in the world, we see them and God is raising them up and using them. I think that in many ways, they have themselves become heirs of the legacy and the heritage that God has entrusted us here with at Christ for all nations. They’ve become carriers of that same torch and that same fire, and it just goes on and on. And it will outlive both of us, Daniel and I believe it will continue until Jesus comes.
Evangelist Daniel King (14:08):
Amen. Not only are you leading Christ for All Nations, but you’re also pastoring nation’s church, which is a local expression of the Global Sea fan vision in the Orlando area. And you’re also writing books, and you’ve just recently written a brand new book called Furious. Tell me a little bit about this new book that you’ve just about to come out.
Evangelist Daniel Kolenda (14:35):
Well, that’s a perfect segue, Daniel, because the evangelistic ministry and the pastoral ministry kind of come together at this point because as evangelists, we love the gospel as every believer should. But for us, it is where we live. We live in the revelation of the gospel and in the preaching of the gospel. And as a pastor, I don’t preach as evangelistically in my church Sunday after Sunday, as you can imagine, but I still always find a way to slip the gospel in there no matter what we’re doing. And that was especially easy recently when I decided to do an expository series preaching verse by verse through the Book of Galatians. Now, the book of Galatians is one of the most fascinating books in the entire Bible. It was written by the apostle Paul. It is a fiery book. It is a raw book. It is a book that seeds with emotion and passion.
(15:30):
And Paul is fighting for the gospel against these people call the Judaizers that are trying to convince new believers, gentile believers in Galatia to go back under the law of Moses. And he’s refuting their doctrine and debating with them. And there’s just a lot of interesting backstory and there’s a lot of context to Galatians that’s very important for somebody to grasp it. If you don’t grasp it, you might read Galatians and not even really understand what’s going on. I was enjoying preaching expositorily verse by verse through Galatians in my church every week people were coming up to me and just telling me how much it was transforming them and changing them and opening their eyes, and people asked me to write something. So when I got to the end of the series, I thought, I’ll just take my sermon notes and I’ll put ’em together in sort of a casual commentary, nothing scholarly, but just to help people guide them through the book of Galatians.
(16:24):
And as I was working on it, I just felt frustrated and I didn’t really grasp why do I feel this way? And then it occurred to me just expository book, like a commentary going through Galatians, doesn’t do it justice. It’s so much more dynamic than that. And I began to think about how can I really help somebody to understand at a very deep level what’s happening in the book of Galatians? And then suddenly I felt like the Holy Spirit just touched me. I really do believe the idea came from the Lord. And I suddenly saw it was a vision of this scene where the Apostle Paul is sitting in a room and he’s dictating the book of Galatians to a scribe. Because if you know how Paul wrote his letters, he very often utilized a scribe. He would dictate, the scribe would write down what he was saying, and I imagined what would it be like if you could sit in that room where Paul is dictating the book of Galatians and hear this conversation unfold between him and his scribe and have Paul himself telling the backstories in dramatic flare and in really engaging fashion, what would it be like if you could absorb not just what he was saying but why he was saying it, and the logic behind his words and the heartbeat that drove him to write the book of Galatians?
(17:42):
And so that’s where I started, and I just began writing this book not really knowing if I could even finish it or if it would have the continuity needed to bring it out. And as I was writing, I just felt like the Holy Spirit kept helping me page by page, chapter by chapter. And what we ended up here with is something that is really unique. I’ve never read another book like it. When you read the book, you will literally go through the entire book of Galatians verse by verse, because Paul’s dictating it throughout the course of the book, but you don’t feel like you’re reading the Bible. You feel like you’re reading a novel. It’s a story, and it’s exciting and it’s colorful, and you will naturally absorb all of these things, the logic and the context of the book of Galatians. And by the end, I think you’ll have a deep revelation, not only of what Galatians itself is saying, but the gospel understanding the gospel and the importance of the gospel on a totally new level. I think it will be very transformative to people who read it.
Evangelist Daniel King (18:38):
So bring it forward for us from the Galatians who read this letter over 2000 years ago to today. What do Christians today need to understand about the gospel that you can find in the Book of Galatians?
Evangelist Daniel Kolenda (18:55):
Well, there’s so many things, and the reason that the Galatians still speaks to us so much today is because it touches on, there was a very specific issue in the Galatian church, but the underlying layer to that is something that it is characteristic of all human nature, and it is this desire and this attempt to constantly take the wheel. It’s kind of like, well, Jesus saved me by grace through faith. There’s nothing I could do to earn it. But then there’s this temptation to grab the wheel and say, okay, Lord, now I can take it from here. And we may not think of it that way consciously. We wouldn’t express it that way with our words. But at the same time, there’s this tendency to feel like, well, I’ve got to add something. I’ve got to do something. If I can just be a little bit better, then God will love me a little bit more.
(19:46):
If I can just pray more, if I just read my Bible more, if I just live a holier life, then God is going to really accept me, then I’m really going to be part of his family. And again, for the Galatians, they were being tempted to supplement the work of the cross by going back to the law of Moses. Now, that’s not the biggest issue now, although I don’t know if you know this Daniel, but there is a big movement right now where people are being drawn back into. Some of ’em will call it like Hebrew roots theology. There’s different names for it. I’m not talking about Messianic Jewish believers. That’s a different thing. But this is people who are trying to persuade even today gentile believers in Jesus that if they really want to be pleasing to God, what they have to do is observe the law of Moses.
(20:31):
And you see people returning to the feasts and the fasts. And I’ve even seen people go so far as they stopped wearing clothes with mixed fabrics in them. I had one friend that I heard that he was getting into some of this Hebrew roots stuff, and he was, again, is a gentile believer. And then we pulled up to his house one day and he came out, and I was shocked when I saw him come out of the house and he was wearing a black coat and a black top hat, and he’d grown his beard out and the sides of his side burns were curled, and he was dressed like an Orthodox Jew because he literally believed that God wanted him to fulfill the law of Moses in order to be more pleasing to him. And it’s interesting because Orthodox Judaism didn’t even emerge until hundreds of years after Christ.
(21:17):
So this wasn’t even something that was around in the time of Jesus. And yet you can see how insidious this temptation to slip back into law and into performance and into the work of our own hands is not just for those following Hebrew roots theology, but for every believer. The Book of Galatians, it’s one of those books, Galatians and Romans are what sparked the Protestant reformation in some ways. Many of us, I would say probably the majority of your audience is a product of the Protestant Reformation. But I believe that we need constantly to have a fresh reformation in our own hearts, which is turning away from the work of our hands and our striving and our efforts to please God and putting our focus back on the cross, the finished work of Christ and the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
Evangelist Daniel King (22:04):
So one side is people going back to the law, and then there’s another movement where people take grace to the extreme and say, we can do anything and say, we’re not subject to any of the laws. We don’t have to obey anything. We can do anything we want and live any way we want, and God will still love us. So how do we as Christians stay holy, but also walk in the knowledge of what God’s grace has done for us?
Evangelist Daniel Kolenda (22:39):
Well, this is something that Paul addresses in the Book of Galatians because again, you can imagine that one of the things that the Judaizers were accusing Paul of is being lawless and promoting some sort of a lawless approach to the gospel, maybe to win the approval of people. And Paul addresses this after he lays out very clearly the gospel he gets into in chapters three and four, and especially near the end of the book, he really begins to focus on how do we live a life that is pleasing to God? So it’s not just that, oh, Jesus died for you now go do whatever you want, just live any way that you want. No, the power of the gospel is that Jesus died so that we could become children of God. And now that we are children of God, the Holy Spirit comes to live and dwell on the inside of us, and the Holy Spirit changes us from the inside so that we, by our new natures in Christ naturally live lives that are pleasing to God, and we naturally bear the fruit of the Spirit. By the way, you know that whole passage on the fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, long suffering, yet all these things that comes from the book of Galatians where Paul is describing to these Gentiles, how you can actually live a life that is pleasing to God, and you cannot do that. This is the crux of the matter. You cannot do this apart from the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit in your life.
Evangelist Daniel King (24:04):
It sounds like this book really makes the Bible come alive in a very real way. And so I hope that everyone who’s listening will get a copy of it. How can they order a copy of your new book Furious?
Evangelist Daniel Kolenda (24:19):
Well, it’s available everywhere where you buy books. If you get ’em on Amazon or I don’t know what’s out these days, Barnes and Noble, but we also have it available on our ministry website. You can go to CA n.org that stands for Christ for All Nations CA n.org, and you can find it there as well and anywhere else that you buy your books.
Evangelist Daniel King (24:42):
And I’d really encourage you, if you’re listening to go to the CAN website, CA n.org, and on there you can find out about all the opportunities to be trained in evangelism. And if you want to help support an evangelistic ministry that is making a difference around the world and has an amazing track record of over a hundred million souls, I’d really encourage you to become a supporter of C Fan and help them on a monthly basis, give them a gift to help them with one of their crusades. It will be a huge blessing.
Evangelist Daniel Kolenda (25:19):
Thank you, Daniel.
Evangelist Daniel King (25:21):
Yeah. Well, tell us kind of what comes next for CA. What are some of the big plans that you guys have coming up?
Evangelist Daniel Kolenda (25:30):
Well, again, our big focus the next five years, we we’re doing crusades all over the world, expanding territory into new regions, and really focusing on training up new evangelists. And that really is the heart of the ministry and the vision that God has given us. I believe that we’ll see over the next five years, over a million Africans become part of the Evangelism Alliance. We have a strategy for this, and I’m just looking forward to the greatest season of harvest that we’ve ever seen coming up just ahead.
Evangelist Daniel King (26:02):
Amen. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for being on the Evangelism Podcast. I appreciate it.
Evangelist Daniel Kolenda (26:08):
Thanks, Daniel. God bless you.
Evangelism Podcast Host (26:09):
Are you called by God to be an evangelist? Do you want to lead millions of people to Jesus? Do you desire to be trained in the practical side of building a ministry? Then check out the Daniel King School of Evangelism. Learn how to be an effective evangelist from Dr. Daniel King’s 20 plus years of experience. Daniel King has done crusades all over the world in over 70 nations and is seen over 2 million people give their lives to Jesus. But it wasn’t easy. There was no crusade school. So Daniel traveled the world learning from and observing top evangelists, noticing how they successfully won souls for Christ. Now he wants to share decades of knowledge and experience with you. Topics of the Daniel King School of Evangelism include what is an evangelist, how to be a master soul winner, how to give an altar call, how to organize a crusade, how to raise money for your ministry, and much more. If you want to be an evangelist, but don’t know where to start, the Daniel King School of Evangelism is for you. Enroll today in the School of Evangelism by going to Daniel King ministries.com/evangelism. Thanks
Evangelist Daniel King (27:12):
So much for listening today. I am excited about telling people about Jesus, and I want to invite you to be a part of helping us to rescue people from Hell and take them with us to heaven. There’s two things you can do to help. First of all, can you go find the Evangelism podcast on Apple iTunes and leave us a positive review by giving a review, you will help other people find these valuable resources about sharing our faith. And second, would you become a financial partner with King Ministries. Every single dollar that people give us enables us to lead at least one person to Jesus. And so that means for only $1, you can help start a party in heaven. And so today I want to invite you to become a monthly partner. You can start out for just a dollar, but if God puts it on your heart to do more, of course you can do more. But please go to king ministries.com and become a monthly partner with us today to help us to lead more people to Jesus. Thank you so much, and God bless you.
Evangelism Podcast Host (28:32):
For more information about how to share your faith or to financially support our worldwide evangelistic outreaches, visit king ministries.com. Again, that’s www.kingministries.com.
Subscribe to The Evangelism Podcast on Apple iTunes
Listen to The Evangelism Podcast on Spotify
Subscribe to The Evangelism Podcast on Google Podcasts
Listen to The Evangelism Podcast on Amazon Audible
The Evangelism Podcast is also available oniHeartRadio
