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Ziba Jiyane, a central official in the IFP, sensed the supernatural in the retreat from civil war's brink. "In the ranks of many in the political groupings of both IFP and ANC [African National Congress], we politicians have become more keenly aware of the helplessness of humanity in our own wisdom," he said after the election. "We had reached a point where, on our own, we had failed and were irrevocably fixated in the path of doom—until God's intervention."

The final, frantic efforts to bring political opponents to the negotiating table, however, were made possible by painstaking groundwork two years before the intensity of electoral transition. Cassidy and his colleagues had convened a series of informal sessions among political enemies at a remote hunting lodge. As Cassidy relates in A Witness For Ever (Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), there Christians created a safe space for en trenched opponents to hear each other's stories and learn of their hopes for a new South Africa.

Whites and blacks (and those of other colors), former prisoners and exiles, guards and jailers, those on the left and right, came together with and without bodyguards to find the deeper human layers beneath the bellicose rhetoric of their political profiles. Many participants were surprised to hear individuals describe their life pilgrimages and openly acknowledge both their faith as well as barriers to faith.

Much Christian peacemaking takes place in the trenches of such track-two diplomacy, the informal and back channels that are effective precisely because of the willingness to forgo recognition. New relationships characterized by personal warmth can lead to unforeseen possibilities when parties return to formal negotiations.

Participants not only learn the life stories of their opponents but also come to comprehend just why their opposites think the way they do. Sometimes the fruits of this patient investment are not evident until a much later crisis requires the kind of trust that makes negotiations work.

In the previous decade, Cassidy had often taken on the unsavory task of direct personal encounters at the highest levels of political decision-making. He would be sent to deliver a message from a crucial church gathering; government officials would show only irritation or deep-rooted skepticism. Why should political leaders entrenched in a failing apartheid system pay any attention to nettlesome church leaders?

But the churches' witness against racial hatred and discrimination began to introduce cracks in the social order of South Africa. Cassidy recalls spending "the roughest hour of [his] life" in 1985 with then-President P. W. Botha, asking him to release Nelson Mandela from prison, remove the army from the black townships, and revoke the ban on political parties. Faith communities undergirded this effort by engaging in a "Pray-Away," a suspension of normal economic activities in favor of prayer.

Government leaders did not receive these proposals favorably. Yet after six years of prayer and intervention by various Christian representatives—including the (Afrikaner) Dutch Reformed Church's declaration that apartheid is a sin—President Fredrik Willem de Klerk enacted these same measures. Whether de Klerk's dramatic about-face was rooted in pragmatic politics or, as Cassidy believes, in "a real Christian heart," the result reinforced the evangelist's conviction that patient preparation, bold confrontation, and constant intercession are the Christian contributions to peaceful social and political change.

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December 4 2000, Vol. 44, No. 14