Early Life & Conversion
Wellington Boone was born on September 17, 1948, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. As a young man he served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War era, and like many of his generation he came home carrying questions that neither the culture nor the institutions around him could answer. He was not raised into ministry, and he did not drift into it. It found him in a room by himself.
At twenty-five, alone and in the middle of a personal crisis, he had a dramatic encounter with Jesus Christ. He describes being overwhelmed by what he calls the Shekinah glory of God — a presence so tangible that it settled, in a single evening, the question of who he would serve for the rest of his life. He began sharing his faith immediately, with the urgency of a man who had been rescued rather than persuaded. That same year, 1973, he was ordained.
In November 1973 he married his childhood sweetheart, Katheryn Watley. Their marriage would span forty-eight years, through every church plant, move, and season of ministry described below, until her passing on March 12, 2022. In June 2025 he married Margarette Boone, with whom he now ministers internationally. He is the father of three children and the grandfather of nine.
Richmond, Virginia — The Church-Planting Years
The newly ordained minister began where he could: holding multiracial gatherings in hotel meeting rooms around Richmond, Virginia, at a time when such gatherings were still uncommon in the South. In 1981 he incorporated what became Wellington Boone Ministries and planted his first church in Ettrick, Virginia, near Virginia State University. The proximity to a campus proved formative. College students filled the meetings, and reaching them well required a ministry built for them.
So in 1982 he founded New Generation Campus Ministries and placed it under the leadership of Garland and Eileen Hunt — a young couple who would remain at his side for the next four decades. By 1995, New Generation was active on more than fifty college campuses.
In 1984 he planted Manna Christian Fellowship of Richmond. The congregation met first in the two-hundred-year-old Monumental Church near the State Capitol, then in a renovated car dealership at Belvedere and Broad, and finally, in 1989, on a ten-acre property it purchased on South Laburnum Avenue. Manna became a hub for weekly, multiracial, cross-denominational prayer gatherings — meetings credited with contributing to a substantial drop in Richmond's murder rate during those years. One relationship from that season captures the spirit of the church: Boone built a genuine friendship across racial lines with the former owner of the church's land, a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
The rhythm of the church was demanding. Weekday prayer began at five in the morning. Summers brought Leadership Training Schools for students. The campus housed a Christian daycare and Kingdom Preparatory Academy. In 1995, after eleven years, Boone released Manna Richmond into the care of his spiritual son, Bishop Marvin Mason, who leads it still.
Atlanta — The Father's House
That same year he moved to Atlanta and founded The Father's House in Norcross, Georgia. He served as its senior pastor for twenty years. In March 2015, in keeping with a lifelong conviction that spiritual fathers exist to raise successors rather than to hold positions, he commissioned his spiritual son and daughter, Bishop Garland Hunt and Pastor Eileen Hunt, as his successors. The Father's House continues under their leadership today.
Fellowship of International Churches
In 1994 the elders of Manna Christian Fellowship conferred on him the title of Bishop and, in covenant with him, founded the Fellowship of International Churches. What began as a covering for a handful of churches has grown into a multi-national network of bishops and pastors — spanning many races and nations — training Christ-centered leaders through churches, Bible schools, and education and feeding programs. Its members serve in business, education, civil government, media, and sports “from a Biblical base,” carrying a biblical worldview into every sphere of society.
Coalition on Revival & National Platform
In the 1980s Boone met Dr. Jay Grimstead, founder of the Coalition on Revival, and came to regard him as a spiritual father. Grimstead had earlier convened the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy in 1977, which produced the landmark 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. In 2022 Boone became president of the Coalition, which works to restore biblical inerrancy to the Church and a biblical worldview to society — a direct continuation of the work Grimstead began.
Over the decades his platform has extended well beyond the churches he pastored. He has appeared on Fox & Friends and Pat Robertson's The 700 Club. He has served as a platform speaker for Promise Keepers, Focus on the Family, the American Association of Christian Counselors, and the Family Research Council. He has served on the boards of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability and Regent University.
Legacy
More than forty years of his manuscripts, recordings, and research are held in the Bishop Wellington Boone Collection at Regent University Library, formally dedicated in 2010 with Pat Robertson present. The collection preserves a body of teaching on the inerrancy of Scripture, a lifestyle of humility, prayer, and consecration, and servant leadership — the low road that, in his telling, is the only road to new heights.