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.
