At 25 years of age, evangelist Daniel Kolenda began traveling with the late Reinhard Bonnke to Africa. It was here that Kolenda encountered witch doctors for the first time. Bonnke, Kolenda’s friend and mentor, taught him many things about dealing with witchcraft, one of them being that you can’t fight it with fear: You must fight with love.
“We had people who would come with us, visitors and sometimes they would have full-blown nervous breakdowns because they had some interaction with a witch doctor,” Kolenda says. “And I noticed Reinhard on the other hand, he was taking it all in stride, and none of this stuff ever seemed to affect him. … One of the devil’s great strategies is fear. If we allow the enemy to begin to bring fear into our hearts, it is the antithesis of love.”
Rather than retreating and calling for intercessors, Bonnke would confidently speak with the witch doctors and express pity for them, Kolenda says on the Greenelines podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network.
“They’re very well-known for voodoo and animism,” Kolenda says. “Of course, the witch doctors hate us when we come to town, because we put them out of business. That’s really just the reality. So, these witch doctors had gathered around the room where Pastor Bonnke was staying. And in the night, they stripped off all of their clothes, and they began to dance around that room, and they did it from the time the sun went down to the time the sun came up the next day. You might think, What is going to be his reaction to this? …
“Is he going to call the intercessors and say, ‘Oh, no, we’ve had these witch doctors cursing me all night long. We need to pray and break these curses off and plead the blood of Jesus over us’? Or go through some kind of a ritual to make sure that none of these things stick? What does Reinhard do? He opens up the windows, he shouts to those witch doctors walking around the hotel room and he says, ‘Hey, guys, good morning. I feel so bad for you because you’ve worked so hard all night, and I’ve slept so well.’ And he laughed. It’s a lesson to learn: I don’t have to allow those things to come on me. I am more than a conqueror through Jesus Christ.”
To listen to the entire discussion about spiritual warfare, click here for the episode titled Kill Your Pet Dragon.
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