The pop, soul and funk sound of the 1960s undoubtedly influenced singer/songwriter Andraé Crouch to a great degree. But Crouch, who grew up in the Church of God in Christ in California, never compromised the gospel of Jesus Christ through his music throughout his legendary career.

The words to two of his biggest hits, “The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power” and “Jesus Is the Answer,” couldn’t have been expressed any better if they had been preached by a Pentecostal/charismatic from the pulpit. And it was that genuineness that endeared him to so many in the music industry.

Crouch passed away at the age of 72 in January after a heart attack and a bout with pneumonia. The gospel icon was mourned not only by those in the church and the Christian music industry, but also by those in the secular music world. Contemporaries and celebrities like Prince, Stevie Wonder and Quincy Jones paid tribute to him at his widely attended memorial service.

Following Crouch’s death, Steve Strang, Charisma founding editor and publisher, who interviewed Crouch as a young reporter in the 1970s, wrote of the legendary performer: “His impact on gospel music cannot be overestimated. He was a crossover artist who made the black gospel music sound part of the Contemporary Christian Music mainstream.”

Like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson and Thurgood Marshall, Crouch was a major inspiration for many African-Americans. “He (Crouch) broke the wall of segregation where black gospel wasn’t being played or being accepted,” gospel entertainer and friend BeBe Winans said during Crouch’s memorial service.

The most recognizable evangelist in modern history, Billy Graham preached to some 215 million people in more than 100 countries—and another 2 billion via radio and TV—before ceasing public speaking in 2006.

While never discussing a classic charismatic experience, Graham’s writings included an emphasis on the work and power of the Holy Spirit.

His two appearances on the cover of Charisma symbolize how Graham reached beyond his Southern Baptist roots to unite evangelicals, charismatics, Pentecostals and mainline denominations in soul-winning. Through the years, more than 3 million people signed cards at his meetings, affirming their decision to follow Christ.

North Carolina’s governor honored Graham in 2013 as the state’s “Favorite Son.” On the eve of his 97th birthday this November, the North Carolina Museum of History will unveil an exhibit on his faith journey.

Historian Grant Wacker, whose 448-page biography of Graham released last November, says the evangelist probably preached to more people than anyone in history, with the exception of Pope John Paul II. The retired Duke University professor identifies the magnitude of Graham’s ministry and personal charm as reasons the evangelist is special in the annals of the church.

“He’s extraordinary,” Wacker says. “His charisma is unparalleled. When I met him, he was in his 90s. The man fills the room. The three distances he traveled were to Christ, to racial reconciliation and to (support for) nuclear disarmament. I think it’s remarkable where he traveled.” The author says what isn’t often recognized about Graham is the extraordinary complexity of the evangelist’s mission, which included multiple crusades, radio and TV broadcasts, newspaper columns and books. In addition to traditional broadcast and print outlets, in more recent times the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) has added new media to its outreach. Oldest son Franklin, who now leads BGEA, uses Facebook and Twitter.

Franklin credits his father’s steadfastness in preaching the gospel as the most significant aspect of the famed evangelist’s legacy. He notes how Billy once delivered the same message (from John 3:16) in Oxford, England, to a highly educated audience that he had a week earlier to a mostly illiterate crowd in Nigeria. In both cases, numerous people responded to his invitation to follow Christ.

This focus led the evangelist to resist a suggestion by a board member years ago that the association consider dropping “evangelistic” from its name. Graham replied that he would remove his own name from the ministry before he consented to taking out any mention of evangelism. Graham also crossed racial barriers in the early 1950s, a time when many Americans accepted segregation as the norm. At a crusade in the South, after the head usher refused Graham’s request to take down ropes designed to separate blacks and whites, the evangelist left the stage and did it himself. The gesture opened doors with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and his African-American followers.

“My father was just willing to include the races in his ministry because he felt the ground was level at the foot of the cross,” Franklin says. “Christ died for all men. He made great strides to bridge the segregation issue.”

Humility was another aspect of Graham’s character that his protégé, Luis Palau, observed during one of the many conferences Graham convened for evangelists. The 1978 meeting in Germany prompted a convert from an earlier Graham meeting to approach Graham with a request. Although the convert had 17 members on his teams, he had no invitations to conduct evangelistic meetings: “Can you help me?”

After offering some advice, Graham suggested they pray. After the visitor prayed, so did Graham, but Palau noticed the evangelist’s voice growing muffled. When a curious Palau opened his eyes, he saw Graham lying flat on his face as he asked God to provide the young man with opportunities to preach. “When the man left, I made a comment about that, and Billy said, ‘The Bible says (1 Peter 5:6) to humble yourself before the mighty hand of God and in due time He will lift you up. I take that at face value. If you do that, He will do it for you too,'” Palau says. “To see this great servant of God meeting this young evangelist and humbling himself was amazing. He’s such a man of God and a spiritual person. To even be compared to him is embarrassing.”

Franklin identifies his father’s integrity as another hallmark of his ministry. Not only was BGEA one of the first organizations to make outside audits available to ministry supporters, Billy played a key role in establishing the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. Wacker says that Graham not only had a spotless financial record, but he also helped evangelicals achieve broader recognition in public life.

“The thing about people making a commitment to Christ is the most significant thing, but beyond that, he brought evangelicals into the mainstream, past Sunday,” Wacker says. “(Historian) Samuel Hill said Billy Graham taught American evangelicals when to wear a necktie.”—Ken Walker

John Wimber’s story represents the quintessential testimony of a changed life. A beer-drinking professional musician before his 1963 conversion, Wimber went on to lead hundreds to Christ and teach numerous Bible studies.

While Wimber formed the house church that became the Anaheim (California) Vineyard, the Association of Vineyard Churches remained a modest handful of congregations until he assumed its leadership in 1982. Today there are more than 1,500 Vineyard congregations worldwide, about a third in the U.S.

The association maintains an international publishing arm, with its worship songs helping thousands of churches experience intimacy with God.

A one-time Quaker whose pastor tried to discourage him from speaking in tongues after his Holy Spirit baptism, Wimber later taught a course on signs and wonders at Fuller Theological Seminary.

This advocacy stemmed from his belief that such gifts as healing, prophecy and tongues can transform people and should be a natural part of life.

Wimber emphasized that these powerful gifts should occur in the context of evangelism, which Pentecostal historian Charlie Self sees as the most significant aspect of Wimber’s legacy. “I would describe him as both an evangelist and a pastor with theological depth,” says Self, a professor at Evangel University. “Wimber said if the church is on her mission, she should expect miracles to accompany that mission. It wasn’t that everything he did was new; it’s that he made it conversational. He made it part of the church.” Ironically, although Wimber believed in supernatural healing, he died of cancer in 1997 at 63. However, Self says his passing helped many charismatics acknowledge they have to be open to both joy and lament.—Ken Walker

Few stories are more amazing than David Wilkerson’s: A small-town pastor from Pennsylvania moves to New York to minister to the downtrodden and writes a book about it that becomes one of the most influential in church history.

Although The Cross and the Switchblade sold more than 15 million copies and became the basis for a popular movie, Wilkerson’s legacy doesn’t end there. The founding pastor of Times Square Church founded Teen Challenge, whose 245 ministry centers nationwide include 191 residential treatment facilities. His brother, Don, went on to form a global Teen Challenge network.

In addition, David Wilkerson organized World Challenge, an international missions organization now headed by his son, Gary.

Ironically, Rev. Joe Batluck, the new president of Teen Challenge USA, grew up under the ministry of Wilkerson’s father, Kenneth, at Green Ridge Assembly of God in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Batluck remembers Kenneth Wilkerson’s faithful gospel preaching, a foundation Batluck says fueled Wilkerson’s son and instilled in him the enduring belief that all things can become new.

“It’s amazing how God can take a regular human being and pour a vision into him that will unfold as a worldwide ministry with an amazing legacy,” says Batluck, who took office Aug. 1 after nine years as president of the Teen Challenge Training Center in central Pennsylvania.

“I cannot get any more profound than 2 Corinthians 5:17,” Batluck says of the founder’s vision that launched Teen Challenge 57 years ago. “It let him see things that day that didn’t exist because of that rock-solid promise.”—Ken Walker

Once a fiery Southern Baptist evangelist, James Robison mellowed after a powerful encounter with the Holy Spirit. He has since earned renown for bridge-building efforts between multiple denominations.

That included organizing the National Affairs Briefing in 1980, partially credited with creating the momentum for Ronald Reagan’s election that year as president.

Robison later put aside traveling evangelism to host a daily syndicated TV talk show that airs worldwide. Life Today also formed a humanitarian outreach that helps feed and clothe thousands of children around the globe.

“When we began to serve other ministries worldwide and went into mission outreaches, we went from seeing thousands of people saved a year to millions,” Robison says. “Our ministry exploded when I sat on a sofa by my wife rather than standing in coliseums.”

More recently, Robison organized leadership summits in 2010-11 for more than 80 pastors, ministry leaders, rabbis and others to discuss society’s moral and cultural decay.

The result appeared in February: The Stream (), a site of news and commentary that builds the case for biblical values.

It generated nearly 1.3 million page views in its first four months. “The verse that sums us up is found in Psalm 46:4: ‘There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,” Robison says. “Those tributaries are truth. I’m encouraging all of these tributaries of truth to understand that each of us is vitally important with our unique giftings. We need to learn to honor God by honoring one another.”—Ken Walker

The reality of mass salvations isn’t foreign to Reinhard Bonnke. Since 1967, the German-born evangelist has spent his life reaching the lost in various African nations to the tune of 74 million souls saved for Christ.

Bonnke is now praying for the same results in America. The founder of the international ministry Christ for all Nations has turned his attention toward the U.S. in hopes of another Great Awakening. He began his U.S. crusades in 2013 with the declaration that “All America Shall Be Saved!”

If God works through him as he’s done in Africa, there just may be a spiritual explosion in America. “This is not the day of damnation; this is the day of salvation,” Bonnke says.

The son of a pastor, Bonnke was saved at the age of 9, and “heard the call” to the African mission field as a teenager with a vision of Africa being “washed in the precious blood of Jesus.” He has conducted crusades across the African continent with as many as 1.6 million people (in Lagos, Nigeria) attending a single meeting.

In 1974, Bonnke and his wife, Anni, founded Christ for all Nations and, as the ministry name promises, Bonnke has reached nations around the globe. CfaN has made such a worldwide impact that Bonnke has met with presidents and has addressed houses of parliament to present the gospel to leaders of nations. Bonnke counts many of them as personal friends. In 2011, Bonnke handed the reins of CfaN over to Daniel Kolenda, a fifth-generation preacher with a powerful evangelistic anointing. Kolenda has since led more than 17 million people to Christ in some of the most dangerous and remote locations on earth. “Evangelist Reinhard Bonnke has been more than a mentor to me—he has been like a father,” Kolenda says.

Bonnke has been featured on the cover of Charisma magazine twice. The first time came in December 1993 and the most recent in September 2013.—Shawn A. Akers

Anyone aware of the modern charismatic movement is familiar with Jack Hayford. Even the venerated evangelical magazine Christianity Today called him the “Pentecostal Gold Standard.”

He is the founding pastor of The Church on the Way; chancellor of The King’s University, author of more than 50 books, composer of hundreds of songs, including “Majesty,” and for about 15 years the senior editorial advisor for Ministry Today magazine.

He is also the man Steve and Joy Strang consider their “spiritual father,” so he has worked with the Strangs, the magazines and the entire staff for many years. From this vantage point, we wanted to ask him to opine about the magazine’s role over the last four decades, how it relates to other media ministries and the wider body of Christ, and what’s next for the Pentecostal/charismatic movement, a modern-day phenomenon that has exploded from only a handful of people a century ago to more than 600 million today.

Here is what Hayford had to say to Shawn A. Akers, the online managing editor who conducted the interview on behalf of Charisma.

Charisma: Our cover story features “40 People Who Radically Changed Our World” as a part of the magazine’s 40th anniversary. What role has Charisma played in the movement over the past four decades?

Hayford: Charisma has been a clearinghouse for what’s happening globally in the charismatic movement. But foremost its strength has been its stable and straight-forward, level-headed maintenance of a charismatic passion for the things of God. The magazine has focused on true Spirit-filled experience without yielding to some of the charismatic doctrines (that even if they had aligned it to some degree with Scripture) that stretch credibility. Without being judgmental or critical (other than just heeding to biblical righteousness and morality and fundamental evangelical soundness), Charisma has been the foremost uniting voice of the move of God among all charismatic and Pentecostal people globally.

Charisma: How would you describe the impact of the Pentecostal/charismatic movement on the larger body of Christ both in North America and around the world?

Hayford: We need to harken back to more than a decade before Charisma began to pick up some of the really pivotal launch points of the movement, which had not yet gained broad recognition. Some of this impact had already taken place before the birth of Charisma, but the media failed to report it with consistency. The magazine brought that and continues to do so. Charisma not only has been a strong voice in that regard, but it has been constant for a long time in handling matters in ways that are biblically sound without surrendering to passivity toward the Bible’s revelation of the life of the Spirit and the manifestations that are consistent with the power of God’s presence.

Charisma: You have mentored many Christian leaders over the years. What advice would you have for younger charismatic leaders who are trying to reach millennials with a new level of ministry?

Hayford: I don’t know that you can reach a new level of God’s grace and workings. As a matter of fact, when you start looking for something “new,” that usually generates people falling off the bandwagon of what is sound and steadfast. At the same time, what’s sound and steadfast needs to be recast in terms of the methods of communication and generational nuances of style. So, what is needed is for leaders of the rising generation to gain a deeper understanding of solid, basic, evangelical and historic Pentecostal/charismatic theology. A theological “thinness” has come about in recent years. I don’t say that in a condescending way. But that has become very clear in conversation, within sermons and in written materials. It isn’t simply a matter of being more precise—although that’s important—but keeping to our theological moorings.

Charisma: Charisma magazine has evolved into Charisma Media, which publishes many books in English and Spanish, publishes several magazines in print and online and has released a brand new translation of the Bible—the MEV. What do you think will be its lasting legacy?

Hayford: Other publications serve denominations or ministries. They are not necessarily narrow, but their main task is to communicate within their own circles. By its very nature, derivation and continuance, Charisma incorporates something of a voice for the entire movement. There is an “in-touchness” with the broad arena of the Pentecostal/charismatic fellowship as well as a healthy sensitivity toward what is going on in the evangelical movement. Charisma’s scope is distinct.

The lasting legacy will be that it rose in a season that needed not only a voice, but a stabilizing one, very worthy of note that has been consistently done and maintained. There has been no journalistic arrogance as though it were the magazine’s task to slap the hands of the “naughty” people or to be the fountainhead of all wisdom. It has been a simple, even-handed acknowledgement of what the soundness of New Testament church life is, what the Bible reveals is the nature of whole life in Christ, and richness of the entirety of the Word of God.

This is true not only of the magazine but of all of Charisma Media—to serve the entire body of Christ. That is evident by the Modern English Version and the interest in bringing out this new translation. The entire organization has maintained “openness” and scope and will endure as long as it does not slide toward trying to be hip by focusing on whatever is the latest thing that is “bright and shiny.”

Charisma: Steve and Joy Strang have said publicly how important your relationship is to them both professionally and personally. How did that develop and what would you say to the Strangs on this 40th anniversary?

Hayford: I remember meeting Steve at a conference nearly 40 years ago. The magazine was just being born there in Orlando. The relationship didn’t deepen until 5 to 10 years later. A turning point came when Jamie Buckingham died in 1992 and Steve asked me to take the senior editorial advisory role for Ministry Today. Because of that, I was in the offices with some regularity and I got to know the staff as we planned issues. Gradually we grew closer, probably by reason of my seniority and their acceptance of whatever stability they perceived that my ministry carried. Over the years, Steve and Joy wanted to discuss things that pertained to their overall management or their lives. All leaders face trying times, and you look for a prayer partner. I have been that through the years. It has been a rich relationship and I am very honored by their trust and grateful for the relationship.

Charisma: What advice do you have for the Strangs and for Charisma Media as it enters its fifth decade?

Hayford: There is an old hymn that used to be thundered out by oldtimers. The chorus said, “Hold the fort for I am coming, Jesus signals still.” Today some might say that sounds defensive. The concept for this song in its time was not to hunker down into some defensive mode. It is to withstand the various attacks that come against the truth about the divine order of things. And its social context is constantly under fire and getting worse. But we must do this in ways that you can win a hearing by reason of the soundness of your approach—because you are not trying to win a battle with tirades but with reason. 

Born in 1915 in India to British parents, Derek Prince experienced a supernatural experience with the Holy Spirit during World War II. Afterwards, he devoted his life to teaching and studying the Bible.

Eventually living in the U.S. part-time, after the war Prince also took up residence in Jerusalem. Israel served as the base for his embrace of the Jewish people and is where he launched his worldwide ministry and the radio program that airs to this day.

Although caught up in controversy over the “shepherding movement” in the 1970s and ’80s, Prince remained popular in charismatic circles after dissociating himself from its leaders. His ministry career spanned nearly 60 years before his death in 2003.

“I have learned all through my life that God has a plan,” Prince told Charisma in 1995. “You don’t have to work it out. You just have to be in it.”

“He was certainly a respected leader,” says Russell Spittler, professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. “He was a straightforward teacher.”

Although they lost contact in the early 1980s, former shepherding associate Charles Simpson recalls how Prince’s suggestion that he do presentations on “discipleship, fellowship and worship” came to define Simpson’s ministry.

“I view Derek as a great man whose influence continues in many lives,” says Simpson, who is still involved in ministry. “He took the Bible as God’s Word, loved Israel deeply and gave his life to teach what he saw in the holy Word.”

Still going strong at 84, Marilyn Hickey has taught millions how to love the Word of God and apply it to their lives. After setting out to simply teach the Bible, the former schoolteacher wound up with an international ministry that eclipsed that of her pastor-husband, the late Wallace Hickey.

Today she retains the love for Scripture that prompted a campaign in 1979 to get 1 million people reading and memorizing it that year.

“I was raised in liberal Methodism and when I got born again (as a teen) I said, ‘People are missing this,'” she recalls. “That’s still a passion. I’m always mentioning it on TV but I don’t have a campaign now. Maybe I should.”

On television since 1973, for the past 19 years she has co-hosted Marilyn and Sarah with her daughter, Sarah Bowling. Sarah and her husband, Reece, co-pastor Denver’s Orchard Road Christian Center, home base for Marilyn Hickey Ministries.

Still soft-spoken and outgoing after four decades in ministry, Hickey has become an international evangelist, a destiny prophesied long ago by Daisy Osborn.

Hickey has since visited 130 countries, including such Muslim strongholds as Indonesia and Pakistan. In 2012 more than 230,000 Pakistanis came to her meetings there, with 60 percent signaling acceptance of Christ.

Her itinerary includes an upcoming trip to the Far East, a signal that she has no plans to slow down.

“God is good to me with health and I love to minister,” Hickey says. “People ask me when I’m going to retire and I tell them, ‘I am retired.’ Retiring is doing what you like. I’m doing what I like.”

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