Christianity Today September 24, 2026 9 min signal 2026-09-24

He brought Black and White South Africans together. Today he’s still praying.

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

September 24, 2026

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Photo courtesy of Stephanie Ebert / Edits by CT

On a misty November morning, I could hear piet-my-vrou (red chested cuckoos) calling as I walked through the hydrangea garden and into the neat white house just outside Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal, home of evangelist Michael Cassidy, who turns 90 years old today.

Cassidy, who walks with a cane, had just returned home from a weeklong hospital stay for pneumonia. Yet he stuck with his routine. As he has done for the past six decades, he started the day by reading four chapters of Scripture and praying for one of the major cities of Africa.

Known for his large evangelistic crusades from the ’60s to the ’90s, Cassidy was instrumental in bringing together black and white Christians in South Africa during apartheid and providing pastoral counsel to political leaders of all stripes—from white apartheid leaders to their counterparts in the militant Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, whose slogan was “One Settler, One Bullet.” As the founder of the evangelistic group African Enterprise (AE), Cassidy brought together evangelicals from across the continent.

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Today, Cassidy says his days of speaking prophetically to South Africa’s leaders are behind him, as he believes the government needs to hear from black Christian voices. But he hasn’t stopped praying. During weekly prayer meetings that Cassidy’s wife Carol has organized for the past ten years, participants pray not just for their grandchildren’s exams, but also national concerns, such as anticorruption laws or educational policies.

During our two-hour interview, I saw Cassidy’s desire to cover both the distant and the immediate in prayer. As I asked him about his life, he continually circled back to the needs of my family and me. He would not let me leave without praying for us.

“Michael’s such a relational person. He’d come back from any trip or mission and write down the name of everyone he met,” said Mike Odell, Cassidy’s successor as head of AE. “He’s always an evangelist. I visited him in the hospital last week. He’s in [the] ICU with pneumonia, and what is he doing? Evangelizing the hospital staff.”

Cassidy believes the church plays an important role in the direction a country goes. Colleagues know him for saying, “The church gets the country it deserves.” I asked him what that meant.

“The Lord says you are the salt of the earth and the light of the world,” Cassidy said. “So if you have a country [that] is clearly corrupting and breaking down and unraveling, then the church has not done its job. … And if you find a country going into darkness in its social and political life, even moral life, then the church has not been shining the light. So if a country goes to pieces, the church has a major culpability.”

Born in 1936 in Johannesburg and raised in nearby Lesotho, Cassidy grew up in a Christian family but did not come to know Christ personally until he went to study modern languages at Cambridge University in 1955. One day, a new friend abruptly asked, “Michael, do you know Christ?”

“I don’t know if he had been subtle if it would have worked,” Cassidy said with a chuckle. “But in the economy of God, that question broke through my defenses.”

When Cassidy later spent the summer of 1957 visiting relatives in New York, he jumped at the chance to attend a Billy Graham rally at Madison Square Garden. As he watched attendees give their lives to Christ, he had “one of those moments,” he said. “You know, Isaiah says, ‘I heard the voice’ [Isa. 6:8], and that’s what it was. And the Lord said, I want you to do … evangelism in the cities of Africa.” He added that the only other time he felt God speak to him was to prompt him to propose to Carol Bam, whom he married in 1969.

Cassidy recalls spending that summer bouncing between Billy Graham’s three-month evangelistic outreach in Madison Square Garden and studying another preacher who was attracting many: Martin Luther King Jr. Some Christians at the rallies dismissed King as having a liberal social gospel. Yet Cassidy disagreed. In his 2019 autobiography, Footprints in the African Sand, he wrote,

Listening to Billy Graham at the Garden and Martin Luther King on TV set me thinking. Were these two different gospels? … No! These were complementary messages, the obverse and the reverse sides of the same coin and the same gospel. One was addressing the vertical dimension of the gospel—and our relationship upwards to God—and the other, the horizontal dimension of our outward relationship to our neighbor … I saw this afresh with eyes of fire as being profoundly relevant for South Africa.

At that time, the apartheid government in South Africa was entrenching its segregationist policies. In the 1950s, the Group Areas Act removed black South Africans from their homes and into arbitrary “homelands,” creating ghettos outside cities as temporary housing for workers. The government passed laws to prosecute interracial sexual relations, banned black South Africans from attending white churches, and prosecuted any opposition.

Cassidy viewed the messages of Graham and King as the two wings of a great bird—distinct yet inseparable. Holding the importance of a personal relationship with Christ and justice in society (“love in application,” as Cassidy quotes King as saying) would later become a hallmark of AE, which he launched in 1961 while completing his bachelor of divinity at Fuller Theological Seminary.

After completing his studies in 1964, he moved back to South Africa with a small team, pursuing AE’s mission of evangelizing in the country and major cities of the African continent. Using a method of “stratified evangelism,” prioritizing smaller meetings over larger rallies, AE coordinated short-term missions and established bases in ten African countries, from Ghana in West Africa to the Democratic Republic of Congo in Central Africa to Malawi and Zimbabwe in the south.

Cassidy’s “biblically conservative and socially liberal” policies, as described by his colleague Odell, meant AE received opposition from both the far right and the far left. For instance, he recalls submitting a paper for the 1966 World Congress on Evangelism on how subjugating the gospel to a political ideology harms the church’s witness. He noted that apartheid’s white nationalist policies—which barred interracial living and created a migrant labor system—made evangelism impossible in black South Africa.

When he arrived at the conference, some of the white South African delegates who had read his abstract cornered him, asking him to rescind the paper. But after praying with a colleague, he persisted in presenting it. Although he lost the white South African delegates’ support, he felt encouraged by the global church’s reception. On his way out of the lecture hall, he recalls theologian John Stott putting a comforting arm around him and saying, “Maybe there are some people whose support you shouldn’t have. And you mustn’t try to get it.”

Years later, in 1973, Cassidy saw progress in uniting diverse groups of Christians as he organized the South African Congress on Mission and Evangelism. At the time, the South African Christian community was split between those who focused on the need for social activism to end apartheid and those who focused on personal relationships with Christ. The divide was largely along racial lines. The latter group worried that a focus on apartheid would lead to a social gospel.

Through prayer and many personal calls to government officials, Cassidy managed to bring together representatives from these different sides for the gathering. According to his autobiography, it was the first time in apartheid South Africa that black and white church leaders slept in the same hotel rooms, used the same swimming pool, and rode the same buses to and from the conference venue. Clergy not only worshiped and prayed together but also ate and lived together as they sought a unified vision for evangelism in their country.

When authorities released Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990, it was unclear whether democracy or violent conflict would result. Political violence, stirred in some cases by the apartheid police, plagued Cassidy’s province of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal).

In a CT editorial in 1990, Cassidy asked the global church to pray for “supernatural wisdom” and protection for Mandela and the country’s leaders, for South Africans to show a “spirit of magnanimity” that “requires whites genuinely and deeply to repent for the iniquities and inequities of apartheid,” and for the country to be “controlled by Christian principles.”

Beginning in 1992, a year and a half before the first post-apartheid elections in 1994, AE hosted both black and white politicians at Kolobe Game Park for weekend getaways. Cassidy hoped that, as with the earlier South African Congress on Mission and Evangelism, he could unite the country’s leaders by having them live, eat, and talk together.

Former political enemies were sharing picnics, going swimming, and looking for elephants together, Cassidy recalled. For the first time they were listening to each other’s stories, humanizing each other. And of course, Cassidy was praying for and with them.

Without knowing whether the elections would proceed peacefully, AE organized a Jesus Peace Rally on April 17, 1994, packing the Kings Park Stadium with 25,000 South Africans of all races. Together they gathered to lament the violence and beg God for a peaceful election. At the time, Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a major political party, refused to join the elections, compromising the country’s stability.

But AE reached out to Kenyan diplomat Washington Okumu, who met with IFP leaders and facilitated terms of agreement that would allow the elections to proceed as planned, stemming turmoil and violence.

Cassidy continued to lead AE’s administrative and fundraising efforts, and he organized outreaches across Africa until 2009, when he shifted his focus to writing and mentoring the next generation of leaders.

Although officially retired, Cassidy still attends board meetings, speaks at AE functions, and contributes to various publications. He also served in the Lausanne Movement and was appointed its honorary chair in 2012.

Cassidy noted that today his views still don’t neatly align with South Africa’s political categories. He’s just as concerned about maintaining biblical sexuality and strengthening the nuclear family as he is about addressing the extreme poverty and inequality plaguing South Africa. He worries about the lack of ethics and guardrails around artificial intelligence: “Your generation is going to have to figure this out quickly!” he told me.

As he has over the decades of his Christian life, he turns to prayer, the Word of God, and the wisdom that comes from the Holy Spirit to navigate the issues of the day.

“What we must do, what we must always do, is show how the gospel is answering the questions that are implicit in today’s challenges,” he said. “But it takes a lot of wisdom.”

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