News of the passing of South African pastor Ray McCauley on 8 October was met by a flood of tributes from across the spectrum of society, from President Cyril Ramaphosa to everyday worshippers at the Rhema Bible Church. McCauley established the influential church in 1985.
It has since attracted a vast and racially mixed profile of worshippers, even during apartheid, an era of white minority rule.
McCauley would become a prominent public figure and his church a space where upwardly mobile South Africans congregated as Pentecostalism spread in the country and, along with it, the prosperity gospel.
As a Pentecostal pastor myself in a previous life and now a theologian who has studied evangelicalism and democracy in South Africa, I reflect here on the passing of McCauley. One of the most prominent Pentecostal pastors in South Africa with an influence that extended into the political arena, his legacy is as remarkable as it is controversial and has many lessons to teach us.
Who was Ray McCauley?McCauley was born in Johannesburg on 4 October 1949. He had rather a rough childhood, with drinking and gambling problems in the house. At an early age he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his idol, Reg Park, a British bodybuilder and businessman who was Mr Universe in 1965. McCauley dropped out of school early, took up bodybuilding, and made it to the Mr Universe competition in 1974, where he came third.
