Traveling to surprising spiritual places

The Church Jesus Prayed for: A personal journey into John 17
by Michael Cassidy
Monarch Books, 2012
Paperback 

When you have read Michael Cassidy’s 415-page “personal journey” into John, chapter 17, you might well ask: “During umpteen readings of the Bible, how could I have missed the importance and healing value of this extraordinary prayer? How many times have I quoted verses from it without seeing John 17 as a whole?”

Well, Cassidy spent 50 years exploring and reflecting on this chapter’s 26 verses, so maybe you (and I) haven’t really been so unobservant after all. For 37 years Cassidy embraced John 17 as the basic text for his life, then, hugging its message even more tightly, spent 13 years writing The Church Jesus Prayed For.

Chapters 14–17 of the Gospel of John are known as the Farewell Discourse, which Jesus gave to his disciples immediately after the Last Supper in Jerusalem the night before his crucifixion. In the final part of the discourse (John 17:1–26 ), which happens to be the longest prayer of Jesus in any of the Gospels, Jesus prays for his followers and the coming church.

Cassidy says that as he set to work, he saw that everything to do with the church’s life is in this text—“its authority, its characteristics, its lifestyle, its mission, its inner dynamics, plus both its heavenly and its earthly purpose.”

Yet, in his own life as an international speaker and preacher, he has remained a layman—as he puts it, “with a layman’s limitations … or maybe advantages!” He is the founder of African Enterprise, an interracial, interdenominational mission and service agency based in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, where he lives.

After giving the context for the prayer—which is helpfully quoted in full, from the New Revised Standard and The Message versions, in the first chapter of his book—Cassidy lists ten “key ideas” that he feels characterize Jesus’ church. They become chapter headings: Truth, Holiness, Joy, Protection, Mission, Prayerfulness, Unity, Love, Power, Glory. 

Cassidy takes special delight in exploring joy, which, he reminds us, was once described by English poet and essayist G.K. Chesterton as “the gigantic secret of the Christian.” Cassidy finds pointers to joy in the Bible’s Old and New Testaments, and leans heavily on lay theologian, academic, and novelist C.S. Lewis to establish the true foundations of joy.

Cassidy doesn’t hesitate to recount stories of joy from his personal life, including romps, bedtime reads, and rides with his parents, and a touching tribute to his wife, Carol, who finds profound joy in painting and gardening. He even recalls a hilarious scene when his college roommate burst in on him to find him, with tears of joy streaming down his face, standing on the couch conducting Max Bruch’s violin concerto with a bread knife! 

Staying firmly rooted in the John 17 prayer, Cassidy writes about the need for the church to be protected not from “the world” but from “the evil one” (verse 15 ). He writes candidly about the “evil supernaturalism” and Satanism he has witnessed during his African Enterprise missions to several countries. His defense: “Be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil” (Ephesians 6:10, 11 ).

At no point does Cassidy suggest that his book is necessarily the final word on John 17. He encourages people of all faiths to bring their own inspiration to the table and thus move even closer to the truth. And he draws two unforgettable conclusions:

“If all believers in joy and delight are converging on the glory and divine character, imputed or gradually imparted to each believer, the outcome can only be a glorious unity, the likes of which the world has probably not yet seen.” 

And, likening John 17 to a river, he says it “catches us in the flow of its embrace and takes us into surprising spiritual places we might not have expected to travel.”