Ray McCauley, the ‘high priest of South Africa’

Ray McCauley, the “high priest of South Africa” who has died aged 75, was a bodybuilder and bouncer turned charismatic Bible puncher and shrewd businessman, who started the Rhema Bible Church in South Africa and built it into a multimillion-rand regional empire.

Born in Johannesburg on October 1 1949, he dropped out of school to become a hairdresser but instead became a bodybuilder and bouncer at Johannesburg’s Go-Go nightclub. He took up bodybuilding as a young teen who idolised the pioneering English bodybuilder Reg Park. He was fixated by the image of “the guy who had big muscles, the beach thing, the girls’ thing”, he said. It also helped him control his appetite and deal with the insecurities that came from having a rough childhood with a gambling father and alcoholic mother.

McCauley came third in the 1974 Mr Universe competition in London that was won by Arnold Schwarzenegger. But bodybuilding and bouncing didn’t quench his inner demons, he needed much more. McCauley, a “born storyteller” by his own estimation, told how he found his true calling in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at a comparatively obscure Bible school with his first wife Lyndie. They returned home and set up a Rhema franchise in a spare room in his parents’ house in 1979.

With his enormous charisma and spellbinding oratory, his flock grew quickly from 13 to hundreds and then thousands. The church moved into the former Constantia Cinema in Rosebank, Johannesburg, to a warehouse in Jan Smuts Avenue in Randburg and in 1985 into a 5,000-seat auditorium in Randburg which was later upgraded to more than 7,500 seats. By 2010 Rhema had more than 45,000 members — making it the single largest church congregation in Southern Africa.

McCauley was accused of selling an empty “rock and roll religion” with a US flavour. Whatever it was he was selling, thousands of ecstatic worshippers bought it week after week, and he became South Africa’s rock star of religion with an international following. He had sold-out evangelical shows at the Sydney Opera House and the Royal Albert Hall in London.

His Sunday performances at Rhema’s Randburg arena were tightly controlled by “ushers” who were more like bouncers. If you were a journalist sitting in a back pew taking notes they’d be onto you very quickly, beckoning you in no uncertain terms to join them in the aisle, demanding to know why you were taking notes before frogmarching you out by the scruff of the neck while thousands of worshippers listened raptly to McCauley preaching the message of God’s love from the podium before collecting the tithes that secured him a monthly salary of R100,000 in 2009.

In 2008 Rhema had brought in more than R100m, R68m of which was from “tithes and offerings”, said then spokesperson Vusi Mona. Criticised for splashing millions on property, cars and clothes, McCauley retorted that he was only earning what any “CEO of a medium-sized company” would expect to earn. He found running the Rhema business so stressful that in 2006 he and his second wife Zelda sold their R10m mansion in Sandton and moved to a beachside mansion north of Durban from where he travelled to Randburg to preach every Sunday. 

Rhema attracted celebrities, the rich and famous who were drawn to McCauley’s materialist message that wealth was a sign of God’s approval, a measure of faith. In a piece about McCauley, a writer for the British Independent newspaper wrote that on Sundays the vast Rhema church car park resembled “the forecourt of a luxury vehicle dealership”. Attendees at a Rhema church induction ceremony were reminded by an excited, newly inducted pastor that “the Bible tells us that the streets of heaven are paved with gold”, and that “where there is Jesus, there is gold everywhere”.

To its supporters, Rhema represented a divinely sanctioned coming together of conspicuous consumption and Christianity. To critics like Jacques Rousseau, University of Cape Town academic and director of the Free Society Institute,. Rhema was a “prosperity cult”, teaching that “wealth is the same as happiness, and that all this is possible if you give money to Ray McCauley”.

McCauley’s mostly white, neo-Pentecostal Rhema Church became politically engaged shortly before the end of apartheid. In 1990, he and 97 other church leaders signed the anti-apartheid Rustenburg Declaration. He apologised for not taking a stand against apartheid earlier. In 1991, he served on the steering committee for the National Peace Accord with Rev Frank Chikane, and was involved in mediation efforts following the Boipatong and Bisho massacres in 1992. He was praised for contributing to the transition to democracy by promoting the church’s message of forgiveness alongside Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

After 1994 there was an increasing synergy between senior members of the ruling ANC and Rhema church where they increasingly worshipped. A number of Rhema publicists like convicted fraudster Carl Niehaus and spokesperson Mona moved from the church to senior roles in the ANC, and McCauley was close to presidents Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa.

In 2009, McCauley caused waves politically when he invited the as yet unelected president Zuma to speak at a Sunday morning service. Many of the ANC’s most senior figures also attended, and he was accused of political bias. When Zuma took office in 2009, McCauley formed the National Interfaith Leadership Council (NILC) which publicly defended Zuma and the ANC government on several highly controversial matters, and was wont to issue press statements from ANC headquarters at Luthuli House.

When Zuma was engulfed in a scandal over fathering children out of wedlock in 2010, the NILC publicly forgave him.

Not for nothing was McCauley accused of hypocrisy. He stridently preached against divorce on scriptural grounds until he got divorced from his first wife Lyndie in 2000, and reinterpreted scripture to justify it. As hugely charismatic and persuasive as he was, not everyone in the church bought this, and a large chunk of his congregation who stood by the belief that divorce had no biblical basis, broke away.

Shortly after his divorce, he met two-time divorcee Zelda Ireland, who he married in 2001. In 2010 they divorced, and in 2013 they remarried. As well as preaching against divorce McCauley also preached against gay rights and abortion, and publicly lobbied for a change in the constitution to have them banned.

McCauley was a spiritual mentor to former Proteas cricket captain Hansie Cronje, who was banned from cricket for life after admitting to taking money to fix matches involving South Africa, and died in a plane crash in 2002. When Cronje became captain, McCauley became the South African cricket team’s unofficial chaplain. After making a confession to McCauley a tearful Cronje told the commission of inquiry into his match fixing that “the Devil made me do it”. 

During the 2010 soccer World Cup an unwell looking “Pastor Ray” was called on to bless Bafana Bafana on live television. Soon afterwards he had to undergo heart bypass surgery.

McCauley, who wrote several books including Our God Is An Awesome God, Walk-In Faith and Expect More Bottom Line, leaves his wife Zelda, son Joshua, a senior pastor of Redemption Church SA, and three grandchildren.