South African Council of Churches (SACC) Triennial National Conference 2024
Conference Theme:
“Behold, I have set before you Life and Death
Choose Life
So that you and your children may live”
Building A Community of Justice and Solidarity
Farewell Presidential Address
The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba
16th October 2024
Conference Delegates,
Members of the National Executive Committee,
Retiring General Secretary, Bishop Malusi,
Our new General Secretary, the Revd Mzwandile Molo,
Special guests and representatives of the wider religious community,
Sisters and brothers in Christ:
I greet you in the name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, and extend to each of you a renewed presidential welcome to this Conference. Above all, I thank you for extending to me the privilege of serving as your President for the past three years. Thank you to everyone who helped facilitate me in this role, complicated as it was by increasingly heavy responsibilities in my own church, in the Anglican Communion, and in efforts such as that aimed at transforming mining communities, both in South Africa and in places such as Brazil.
Thank you especially to our retiring General Secretary, Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana, who has served our churches and our country with distinction ever since his days as a student activist in the 1960s, and who – in bringing that distinction to the name and influence of the SACC – has helped raise our profile as an essential voice in our national debate. Thank you also to the Revd Mzwandile Molo for your support in your acting capacity, and heartiest congratulations on your appointment as our new General Secretary.
Our agenda has provided ample opportunity to examine the detail of what the Council has achieved in the past three years, as well as time to debate what the priorities should be under the incoming leadership. Allow me therefore, as I end my term as President, and look towards my retirement from my own church before the next Conference, to share some personal reflections on the context in which the household of faith has worked during my presidency, both in South Africa and the world at large.
I was reminded last week that the theme of one of our National Conferences during our struggle for liberation was based on Jesus’s words reflected in chapter eight of John’s Gospel, as he and the religious leaders of Jerusalem debated back and forth. During this exchange, he assured those who believed him: “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” (Jn 8: 31-32).
So back in the 1970s, Conference took place under the theme, “The truth shall set you free”. What was the truth that the SACC sought to impart to our people back in those days? I suggest it was simple, that the oppression, the racism, the exclusion, the exploitation represented by apartheid was evil, not just evil, as one of our general secretaries used to say, but “evil without remainder”; moreover that when the broader South Africa polity accepted that truth, we would achieve our liberation.
Well, of course, through the efforts of the churches and others in the faith communities, of the unions, of the civic organisations, of the liberation movements, of our supporters abroad, and at its heart through the determination and resilience of countless South Africans, this truth was broadly accepted, and we achieved our political liberation.
If we ask ourselves today, 30 years on, “What is the truth which, if we accept it, will set us free?”, what should our answer be? Again, I suggest that it is simple: the truth is that we have not achieved our economic liberation; that some of our liberators, in the words of Cheryl Carolus, a former deputy secretary general of the ANC, stopped the gravy train only long enough to get on board, that corruption and mismanagement have crippled services in many local authorities, and that we have betrayed the sacrifices of those who suffered and died in poverty to liberate us.
This truth, more than any other, is the truth which most threatens South Africa’s future. The last National Conference recognised it when we resolved to launch the Initiative for Economic Transformation. As I said to the Council two years ago, “it appears that inter-generational inequality is becoming ever more deeply embedded in our society…. We are trapped in a situation in which the sons and the daughters of the elite remain privileged, while the sons and daughters of the poor are caught in a self-perpetuating spiral of poverty, inadequate education and denial of opportunity…. This is happening in both the private and the public sector.”
So this year, when our Conference theme exhorts us to “Choose Life”, in order that we and our children may live, I believe that its implementation demands that we reclaim the churches’ prophetic ministry, not only by vigorously campaigning for pro-poor policies such as a Basic Income Grant, but by lobbying leaders of other sectors of society such as big business, with their single-minded focus on showing profits in their quarterly reports, and the unions, which are increasingly leaving the interests of the unemployed behind.
And to repeat what I advocated to the Council two years ago, we must warn the newly-empowered opposition parties serving in multi-party administrations that they too will experience the temptation of nepotism and self-dealing; we must develop processes and structures which enable us to hold public representatives to account; and we must work for changes in our electoral system which will make it easier to remove the corrupt from power. But choosing life does not only mean replacing one set of leaders with another. Our ongoing New Struggle for a new kind of society is not so much about personalities as it is about values and ethics, which are matters churches and other faith groupings are uniquely placed to speak to.
There are of course other issues, some already on our agenda, which we need to address. As examples of priorities which my own church's delegates have a mandate to speak on, our recent Provincial Synod debated how to promote eco-justice, how to combat the alarming prevalence of youth unemployment, how to provide pastoral ministry to people of differing sexual orientation, how to ensure that our churches are safe spaces for all, especially women and children, as well as how to provide access to those with disabilities.
One of the worries I have, and this applies especially to what used to be called the main-line churches – such as my own – which dominated the SACC during the struggle, is that we are in danger of becoming churches of the elite; that because we grew up with and went to university with leaders who are now in government or business, that we find it difficult to criticise them strongly enough in public. I know the problem only too well myself from my engagements in airport boarding lounges.
Two of our general secretaries of the past warned us about this in the early days of our political liberation. Desmond Tutu used to remark on how easy it was to fall into the trap the Dutch Reformed Church fell into under apartheid, when they told him that lobbying their government behind the scenes was more effective than attacking them publicly. And Beyers Naude, the best example of someone who had the moral courage to speak out against the leaders of his own community, warned us in 1996: “People tend to say that now that we have a new government, now that we have a new Constitution, now that we have solved our political problems, for the time being, there is no prophetic role for the Church at the moment. I think such a perception is a very serious mistake.”
Turning to the international stage, one trap that I believe that the Council and our member churches have not fallen into is that of equating the current State of Israel with the nation of Israel of the Bible. It is sad to see so many of our Western sister churches so muted in their criticism of Israel’s pitiless and brutal attacks on the people of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Perhaps they are weighed down by guilt at the long history of European anti-Semitism and the pogroms perpetrated on the Jewish people going back centuries, but I think Bishop Malusi got the balance right in his statement soon after the Hamas assault of October the 7th last year, when he said that that attack was “rightly to be condemned with the same vehemence with which we condemn all brutal attacks on defenceless people anywhere in the world” but added that the Israeli response went beyond hitting back in rage, becoming “a systematic assault on the Palestinian people, almost as though their crime is being Palestinian.”
One further, and specific, step we should take as a Council is formally to support the launch of a new Palestinian support movement and open a local chapter of the initiative, and to make one of the targets of our campaign for a free Palestine those who provide weapons to parties to the conflict. This includes Israel's big brother, the United States, for the Americans hold the key to stopping Israel from perpetrating genocide against our Palestinian brothers and sisters.
Let me close with a renewed appeal for the SACC under its new leadership to stand and work for the interests of the weak and the marginalised, wherever and among whoever they may be found, in South Africa and the world.
I thank you, and wish God's blessings on these proceedings, and on the new leadership to be elected.
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