Anglican
Church of Southern Africa
38th
Session of Provincial Synod
“A
Church Held by God’s Steadfast Love and Renewed for Faithful
Witness”
Charge
by the President of Synod
The
Most Reverend Dr Thabo Cecil Makgoba
Archbishop
and Metropolitan
September
20th
2026
Readings:
Exodus 16:2–15; Psalm 105:1–6, 37–45; Philippians 1:21–30;
Matthew 20:1–16.
May
I speak in the name of God who is Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer.
Amen.
Eternal
God, whose love is steadfast throughout all generations: keep us
mindful of your faithfulness, attentive to your sacred work in our
time, and expectant of what is to come. As we gather in this Synod,
united in heart and mind, may you renew and transform us for faithful
witness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy
Spirit reigns as one God, forever and ever. Amen.
That
is our Synod collect, and I have prayed it more than once in
preparing to stand before you today, because it says, more simply
than I can, everything I hope this Charge will manage to say: that we
are held, before we are ever sent.
Welcome
and Acknowledgments
Members
of Synod, sisters and brothers in Christ, a very warm welcome to the
opening Eucharist of this, the 38th Session of Provincial Synod.
This
being my last Synod, allow me first of all to extend my profound
thanks to Lungi and to our children, Nyakallo and Paballo, for their
love and support through the years; without them the journey would
have been lonely and unreal. Let me also acknowledge my sisters,
Mathapelo and Matapala, for their caring and support. Thank God for
our parents and our siblings.
I
also want to pay tribute to the memory of Bishop Luke Pato, who
served this Province with great distinction over many years and in
many roles. We remember in particular his service as PEO and of how
he stepped up when the Province was in particular need, especially in
launching the College of the Transfiguration and in accepting
election as the Bishop of Namibia. May he Rest in Peace, and Rise in
Glory.
Although it is embarrassing for me to mention this, I want to record
my profound gratitude for the work of Bishop Luke and the Revd Janet
Trisk in editing the Festschrift they are launching at this Synod.
Turning
to those responsible for our
presence today, I want to name, with gratitude, those without whom
this gathering would not exist: our Steering Committee, who built the
Synod session by session; the Dean of the Province, who chaired so
capably in my absence while I was on sabbatical; and our liturgical
team, led by Seipati, who shaped our worship this week. I also thank
my staff, members of the Order of Simon of Cyrene and recipients of
the Archbishop’s Award for Peace and Justice, as well as our
distinguished colleagues and our ecumenical friends — all of you
who have carried me, quite literally, to this pulpit.
A
Decade and More: Where We Have Come From
It
is difficult to stand at a threshold like this one without looking
back down the road that brought us here.
In
my Installation Charge in 2008, I said I believed I was called to be,
in the words of the Sepedi phrase, Sekgo sa Metse, a vessel for peace
with justice and reconciliation, and for cultivating a yeast for
healing the bruised, the crushed and the broken in God’s world.
At
our Synod in 2010, marking 140 years of this Church’s life, we said
together that we were a people anchored in the love of Christ,
committed to God’s mission, and transformed by the Holy Spirit —
and we said it while looking directly at poverty, at HIV, and at
corruption, refusing to let doctrine float free of the world it was
spoken into.
In
2013, under the theme Vision for Education and Education for a
Vision, we turned our gaze to the quality and inequality of schooling
in South Africa — and in that same Synod, for the first time, we
welcomed woman Bishops to this Provincial Synod, a vision of who may
lead as well as a vision for education.
In
2016, Synod dared to discern, develop and direct — an honest
reckoning with how we steward our physical, spiritual and financial
resources, taken up in the same season that we were wrestling as a
Province with human sexuality and same-sex partnerships. We did not
choose an easy year to talk about stewardship of the whole self.
In
2019, we called ourselves to review, renew and restore — to
reconnect faith to daily life. We audited our own transparency. We
began, for the first time in this Charge’s public language, to name
safeguarding as unfinished business, a priority which we have been
challenged by the Church of England’s Makin report to give
accelerated attention to, in order to ensure that our parishes,
organisations and schools are safe spaces for all. And in the 2019
Synod we also asked what it would mean for each of the nations of our
Province to be, in the words of Albert Luthuli, an equitable “Home
for All” — not only for Anglicans.
In
2021, under the theme
Discipling Communities for a Changed World, we
met for the first time ever in a virtual Synod, governing the Church
through a pandemic that widened every economic gap it touched, and
exposed, with unbearable clarity, the violence done to women and
children behind closed doors. That was also the year we gave birth to
a new Province — IAMA, the Igreja
Anglicana de Moçambique e Angola
— sending part of ourselves out to see if it could stand on its
own.
And
in 2024, we said we would flourish like a garden — listening,
reconciling, celebrating God’s new creation, as the world breathed
a sigh of relief as it exhaled after COVID-19 and turned its
attention to ecological justice, human rights, inclusion, and the
long, unglamorous work of dialogue and reconciliation.
And
running through these milestones in our growth as a Province have
been initiatives to which we returned repeatedly at a number of
synods: the establishment and refinement of our Safe and Inclusive
Church ministry, the championing of the integrity of all of God’s
creation, and the ongoing challenge of ensuring that our theological
education prepares clergy to meet the demands of witness and ministry
in an era characterised by unbelievably radical technological change.
In addition we have held multiple elective assemblies, consecrating
so many new Bishops that the makeup of the bench of Bishops has been
completely transformed, and we have birthed Khahlamba Diocese.
While
we have faced many challenges, suffered many failures and sometimes
experienced stubbornness of heart, hope has been the thread running
through every one of those synod years, whether or not the word
appeared in the theme. I do not think that is an accident. I think it
is what happens when a people keep returning, Synod after Synod, to
the same well, working as best we can discern to the glory and
extension of God’s rule.
What
We Have Heard: The Life of the Province Since We Last Met
Members
of Synod, as I turn now to the reports before us, I want to read them
as I have always tried to — not as a summary to be endured, but as
testimony; as evidence of a Church held together by love, and still,
unevenly but genuinely, being renewed for witness.
From
Belfast, where the Anglican Consultative Council met to do the hard,
patient work of discerning what primacy and synodality mean for us
today, we heard a call to keep talking to one another before we
conclude we have nothing left to say. The ACC’s resolutions,
ranging across gender justice, disaster response, pilgrimage and
migration, are themselves an extended commentary on what “steadfast
love throughout all generations” must mean when a Communion spans
as many wounds as it does altars.
In
Amsterdam, we have pursued for a decade now an informal partnership
with the Vrije Universiteit, culminating this year in a symposium in
Rome that dared to ask how we might discover and build hope for all,
and leading to the book Voices
of Hope.
I return from the Netherlands, grateful for my recent sabbatical
there and requesting Synod to endorse formally what has for a decade
been true informally: that this partnership, together with our newer
relationship with the University of the Free State, belongs within
our missional priorities, not at their margin.
And
then there is IAMA. Five years ago this Synod gave birth to a new
Province and said, in effect: go, and show us you can stand. This
week we receive the final report from IAMA under that five-year
mandate, and bring to a close the financial scaffolding we built to
help hold the new Province up. I do not read this as an ending;
rather it is a vineyard owner stepping back to let those he sent out
do the work he trusted them to do. We are asked now not to fund IAMA
but to befriend IAMA — to keep fostering relationship wherever
mission and partnership still call us together.
Our
Disability Justice Commission asks something deceptively simple of
every guild, every Diocese, every group within this Province: name a
person, a disability champion, one contact, by Ash Wednesday. It is a
small ask, carrying a large theology — that inclusion is not a
sentiment but a name on a list, someone who can be telephoned.
I
could not read the report of the Anglican Women’s Fellowship
without remembering when we first welcomed woman Bishops to this
Synod. The AWF’s outreach has seen twelve women trained and
supported as priests recently, providing in its own words a lifeline,
and this year reaching the College of the Transfiguration, Hope
Africa’s
work against gender-based violence, and flood relief in the Diocese
of Natal. Nor could I read of Mothers’ Union planting a thousand
trees in a single year without hearing an echo of the exhortation in
the 2024 Charge to flourish like a garden — proof that a theme,
once adopted by Synod, need not remain a metaphor.
Nor
could I read, without real discomfort, the motion before us on
protecting the elderly from being exploited by the Church. We are
asked to stop collecting Church dues from the housebound and the
frail, in short to stop asking those who can no longer fully
participate in the life of the Church to help fund that life if they
cannot afford to do so. I confess I had not thought to ask who among
us have been quietly billed for belonging. The parable to which we
will turn shortly has already been rehearsing this question for us.
Hope
Africa tells us plainly that the funding environment remains very
difficult — and tells us, in the same breath, that it intends
between now and 2028 to expand, to strengthen, to grow. The Anglican
Board of Education reaches for almost identical language; this has
not been a season of easy success, but of faithful, patient work,
staying present where retreat would have been easier. I do not think
it accidental that two very different bodies, in two very different
fields, arrived independently at the same posture. Perhaps that is
what “renewed for faithful witness” looks like once translated
out of Latin liturgy and into a budget line.
Our
Environmental Network has chosen, wisely I think, not to launch
something new but to spend this season monitoring what we have
already resolved to do, so that our commitments do not simply
accumulate but actually take root.
The
USPG reminds us that fallow Church land can become a vegetable
garden, feeding both a family and a market stall. The College of the
Transfiguration reports itself well governed, still working to become
the Province’s institution of first choice, and its alumni having
gathered again to celebrate Transfiguration Week. Our Fellowship of
Deacons wants simply to be able to find one another, Diocese to
Diocese.
The
men of Bernard Mizeki continue building houses for the elderly,
filling food parcels, visiting hospitals and jails — grace with its
sleeves rolled up. Our pension fund, for clergy and for their
survivors,
continues its quiet, unglamorous faithfulness,
and the Robert Selby Taylor Will Trust remains a great resource for
our clergy who are educating their children. We are in great need of
endowments from Anglicans with resources to help in areas such as
theological studies and the health of clergy families.
And
Anglicans Ablaze reminds us that its very first conference shared a
birthday with my own first Provincial Synod as your Archbishop, and
asks the one question that has quietly organised sixteen years of
ministry among you: what does God want us to do together that we
cannot do on our own?
The
South African Council of Churches continues to do us proud — in
Palestinian solidarity, in climate and gender work, in the
unglamorous civic labour of youth forums and women’s dialogues,
standing where the Church’s ecumenical voice is still needed and
still heard.
Before
us also are matters of governance that may seem, on the surface, far
from grace: measures to define trusts and trustees, to regularise the
election of Bishops and Bishops Suffragan, to establish a Provincial
Tribunal of Appeal so that the Archbishop is no longer the last court
of resort, to strengthen safeguarding through Act 3, to stand up a
dedicated Finance Board. I do not think these are far from grace at
all. A church that builds tribunals so that no single person is its
final word on justice, that legislates the protection of the
vulnerable into its own Constitution, is doing in its bylaws what the
vineyard owner does in the parable: refusing to let power alone
decide who is included.
And
on the question of incorporating Botswana in our Province, we are
called to patience with the recommendation to defer a decision until
2027, giving a Diocese room to grow into readiness rather than being
rushed into a decision not yet ripe. Even our procedure, at its best,
can practise the parable’s economy — the economy of not yet, held
open in hope rather than closed in judgement.
The
Gospel: Matthew 20:1–16
It
is difficult to describe a day like today. I have tried, but it seems
to defy all conventional description. All I can come up with, in the
end, is to say that it is a day, to use Luke’s tender phrase, “full
of grace.”
I
carry in my heart, then, many graces — especially the tremendous
grace of gratitude. Gratitude to God for what God has done in my
life, in my private moments, in my public ministry, and especially in
and through those I love. Gratitude for the many unexpected moments
of blessing that have come my way, mostly unbidden — in unexpected
places and through unexpected people, reminding me that God speaks in
many and varied ways and in many and varied places. I am grateful to
those who have made my life richer, who expanded my heart, who probed
and challenged my imagination and shook my intellect, and have been,
through it all, a source of inspiration to me. I bless God for them.
There
is grace, too, in reminiscence — recalling the beauty of
worshipping in a rural parish with a mere handful of people who sang
lustily the glories of God and testified to God’s faithfulness; and
of joining the great ceremonies of the Church, in cathedrals over one
thousand five hundred years old, that have through the ages, in all
the changing scenes of life, keeping a sense of God alive.
I
have experienced the grace of remembering that in such places, our
generation is one of the many building blocks in the great edifice of
history — the beautiful grace of ordinations, consecrations,
blessings, baptisms, marriages, confirmations; the harsh grace of
canonical sentencing and the tender grace of a dying parishioner’s
last smile and firm hand grip.
I
have had the grace of ministering at the edge of a world both
beautiful and fracturing, as it struggles to provide a “home for
all”. The grace of reminiscence carries this reminder too: that
public events are so often the fruit of private prayers, and I have
had the honour of making that connection in the public space.
I
have also experienced the harder grace of being challenged — of
having my comfort zones, my own ways of thinking and acting,
unsettled by others who called me to broaden my vision, to think more
deeply, to be more compassionate and inclusive in my ministry. Having
heard those challenges, I tried to respond to them, and they shifted
me — through consecrating the first four woman Bishops of this
Province, through walking with fellow Anglicans in a continent
divided, through Marikana, through hiring and firing, through
overseeing the retirement of Bishops, through peace efforts in
Lesotho, through a cold, war-time Advent visit to Ukraine, through
collecting plastic from wetlands, through the pain of reading
safeguarding case files, through pleading with Bishops to save our
theological college, and through dancing at youth guild gatherings
with a mitre knocked sideways on my head. I have known the strange,
undignified comedy of ministry alongside its gravity, and both, I
have come to believe, are filled with grace.
But
I have also received the harder grace still of being called to honour
the words we say every time we gather at this liturgy: that I have
not done things I ought to have done, and have done things I ought
not to have done. That honesty has forced me, more than once, to my
knees.
So
today is a day of grace, and yet, irrefutably, a day of ongoing
challenge. While I may be laying down this form of ministry within
the year — this being my last Provincial Synod — I will remain
challenged in my retirement to stand in places outside the leadership
of the Church that demand my presence.
For
whatever role we fulfill as followers of Jesus, whether inside or
outside the Church, whether as clergy or laity, whether in
stipendiary ministry or not, whether retired or not, there is still
work to be done. I think of the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, who
says so tellingly: “Don’t disparage the day that still has an
hour of light in its hand.” I keep, too, in my heart the writer Ben
Okri, who asks a question I take seriously as I look to my own
future: thousands of years of loving, failing, killing, creating,
surprising, oppressing and thinking, he says, ought now to start to
bear fruit, to deliver their rich harvest — will you be at the
harvest, among the gatherers of new fruits?
In
the spirit of today’s Gospel, by retiring I will not stop going
into the marketplace to engage those left behind. As we heard, the
vineyard owner goes out, again and again — not once, not twice, but
five times — to engage those excluded from the day’s economy.
Human need calls him out repeatedly; he goes to reverse the systemic
exclusion of those on the periphery, those with no way into
meaningful participation in the economy, in education, in health, in
the justice the law promises but does not always deliver.
It
is difficult to find a clearer definition than that embodied in
today’s reading of what ministry looks like in our and other parts
of the world, in our time, than this: going out, again and again, to
engage those systematically excluded from what makes for a decent
life. I think of the poor and the marginalised who have become
addicted to the iniquitous new phenomenon of online gambling,
squandering their social grants or their NSFAS funding and enriching
those who control an industry which has grown exponentially, from
thirty billion to more than one trillion rand a year in the last
decade. (I hope that this Synod will consider a resolution on this
issue arising from this Charge.)
Beyond
our borders, I think of the suffering of the people of Sudan and the
eastern DR Congo, sponsored by weapons supplied by outside forces. I
think too of the people of Gaza and of Lebanon, and of the outrageous
and increasingly bold attacks which Israeli settlers carry out
against Palestinians on the West Bank of the Jordan, attacks which
are encouraged by cabinet ministers and to which Israeli troops often
turn a blind eye. The resolution before this Synod gives us the
opportunity to stand with our Palestinian sisters and brothers, who
are facing settler terrorism on the Occupied West Bank which amounts
to an attempt at ethnic cleansing which will permanently block the
creation of a viable Palestinian state. As the Bishop of Chelmsford
in England has said in supporting British sanctions against Israel,
“settler violence is part of a wider strategy of control and
coercion by the state of Israel.”
Returning
to the plight of our own poor and unemployed, perhaps verses five and
six are for us the most poignant in today’s Gospel. The vineyard
owner goes out yet again and asks the ones still standing, “Why are
you here, idle, all day?” He does something more than notice them —
he lets them answer for themselves, gives them the dignity of naming
their own condition, enabling them to reply: “Because no one has
hired us.” That is not an excuse. It is a diagnosis of an unjust
labour system, spoken plainly, without shame, by people rendered
surplus by an economy with no place for them. We live in a time that
too easily blames the poor for their poverty — the unemployed for
lacking initiative, the migrant for having come, the young for their
impatience.
The
response of the landowner in our reading is neither one of pity nor
one of turning away his gaze as he passes by: it is inclusion. He
sends the unemployed into the vineyard with only an hour of daylight
left, knowing exactly what that hour can and cannot produce. A core
responsibility of the Church, like this vineyard owner, is to ask
ourselves, plainly: who have we passed by, deliberately turning our
gaze away? Who have we neglected, made excuses to keep outside,
denied access to the life of this Church? What have we done in our
parishes and Dioceses to act on the knowledge that it is above all
the young who carry the heaviest burden of exclusion from our
economy? These are hard questions, but they open the door to a new
way of being missionary, a new way of being a beacon of hope in
difficult times. The Church has a prophetic destiny to be a space of
radical inclusion, especially in an era of chilling exclusion.
As
I asked the Diocese of Cape Town recently: we have in our
congregations members of the migrant community, who out of desperate
need and showing extraordinary initiative, have often traversed half
a continent in order to feed, clothe and house their families. We
also have in many of our congregations South Africans who are
unemployed, vulnerable to the rhetoric of xenophobes who ignore the
evidence that migrants are a plus contributing to our economy, and
who whip up hostility against migrants. Surely it is not beyond the
capacity of our parishes and Dioceses to harness both in creative,
mutually-supporting ways of seeking a living. As a Province, we
derive great value from clergy who cross national borders to serve
the church in other dioceses, and, while putting that on record, I
want to record that when it comes to South Africa, we should not have
to struggle so much to secure permission from the Department of Home
Affairs for our clergy from outside South Africa to minister in South
African dioceses.
The
reading from Matthew calls us not to turn away from a challenge, but
to turn towards it, to face it and to respond by finding ways to
include instead of to exclude. As so often in the Gospels, we find
that Jesus’s way is counter-intuitive to our all-too-human
responses. Perhaps the verse we would most like to skip past is that
which asks: “Are you envious because I am generous?” In the
Greek, the question is posed more sharply, asking “Is your eye evil
because I am good?” The eye is scripture’s image for how we
perceive and judge others; an evil eye is a way of seeing that
begrudges another’s blessing.
Also,
note that the landowner does not deny the wage gap. He denies that
labour is the only category by which worth is measured in his
vineyard. We are so much more than what an economy prices us at. We
recall the words of Irenaeus in the second century: the glory of God
is a human being fully alive. God’s economy does not run on merit
accounting. It runs on the prior, unearned decision to include those
the world has left standing idle.
Closing
Charge
In
whatever years remain to me — in whatever shape or size those years
take — I pledge, today, that this will remain the guiding principle
of my life: to continue to go out, to continue to engage human
suffering, to continue to speak into human need, to continue to work,
even against the odds, to reverse injustice, as long as there are
those left standing on the margins.
That
must be the ongoing ministry not only of an Archbishop retiring, but
of all of us — of this Church, yes, but also of people of every
faith and of no faith who share in this deeply interconnected
ecosystem of shared values. It is from this whole cloud of witnesses
that I have drawn strength, and with whom I will continue, in
whatever form my ministry now takes, to share in the work of walking
together — daily transforming the kingdom of this world into the
kingdom of our God.
It
is also from you that I have drawn strength over my term of office.
Each one of you is important, and God knows each hair in your head
and how you have enabled almost two decades of archiepiscopal
ministry and nearly four decades of ordained ministry. We
are, as our collect says, a Church held by God’s steadfast love
throughout all generations. May we leave this Synod renewed —
mindful of that faithfulness, attentive to God’s sacred work in our
time, and expectant of what is still to come.
God
loves you, and so do I.
Amen.
*
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