Monday 28 October 2024

Address to the Anglican Women’s Fellowship Provincial Council Meeting

 

Anglican Womens Fellowship

Provincial Council Meeting

The Kay Barron Address

Theme: Re-imagining ourselves Igniting God’s Flame

Diocese of Johannesburg

Archbishop Thabo Makgoba

23 October 2024



President of the AWF, Ms Pamela Mntonintshi,

Members of your Provincial Executive Committee,

Bishop Dan, your Liaison Bishop,

Your host bishop, Bishop Steve Moreo, and

Delegates to this Provincial Council,



Thank you so much for inviting me to this 28th Provincial Council today and thank you also to the visitors and guests here present. Please feel at home.

It is an honour and privilege to stand here today as Patron of the Anglican Womens Fellowship and to present the Kay Barron Address, giving me an opportunity to share some thoughts and reflections on the theme for this conference – ‘Re-imagining Ourselves - Igniting God’s Love’

Saturday 26 October 2024

Tutu Jonker Memorial Lecture at the University of the Free State

 

Hope and Forgiveness

Tutu Jonker Memorial Lecture

The Faculty of Theology and Religion

Equitas Auditorium, University of the Free State

The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba

Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town

23rd October 2024


Fellow theologians,

Fellow students of the Gospel (because all of us, no matter how well qualified, remain students of the Gospel all our lives);

Sisters and brothers in Christ;

Honourable guests, particularly from the Vrije Universiteit;


Good morning. And for those from other parts of our country, our continent and the world, welcome to our beautiful country – South Africa. It is exciting for me to join you virtually from Eswatini this morning.

Thank you for the invitation to give this prestigious address, it is a great privilege and honour. I am particularly grateful to Prof John Klaasen and his colleagues at the Faculty of Theology and Religion for all they have done for this lecture. The joint recognition of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and Professor Willie Jonker, which I will refer to towards the end of this lecture, is a wonderful gesture, commemorating as it does the grace which helped to save our country from a bloody civil war.

Friday 18 October 2024

"Choose Life, So that you and your children may live” - Farewell Presidential Address to the SACC

 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.


* * * * *

Wednesday 16 October 2024

Opening Worship -- Triennial National Conference of the SA Council of Churches

 South African Council of Churches (SACC)

Triennial National Conference 2024

Behold, I have set before you life and death, choose life so that you and your children may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19)

Opening Worship Service

Archbishop Thabo Makgoba

President

15th October 2024

May I speak in the name of God, Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of our lives, Amen.

Sisters and Brothers in Christ, Distinguished Guests, Conference Delegates, welcome to our opening worship at this Triennial National Conference of the Council. I have also been asked to speak to you tomorrow in what will be my final presidential address, so to avoid duplication, I will observe the customary protocols then, and tonight I will turn our attention to exegesis in the context of worship, firstly by contextualizing the Bible passage which constitutes our Conference theme.

Wednesday 9 October 2024

Inaugural Day of Courageous Conversation - Belo Horizonte, Brazil

 Inaugural Day of Courageous Conversation

Belo Horizonte, Brazil

October 8, 2024

Promoting the Common Good: Inter-sectoral Dialogue and Action on the Future of Mining in South Africa”

The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba,

Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town & President of the South African Council of Churches


Brothers and Sisters in the Mining Industry,

Manala, my wife, here in her own capacity,

Your Grace, Archbishop Marinez,

Your Eminence, Cardinal Stephen,

The Right Revd David Urquhart, chair of the MFRI,

Representatives of the wider Faith Community,

Government representatives,

Leaders of Community Groups,

Civil Society Representatives

All who have joined us today:

Thank you for your warm welcome, and to our hosts, thank you for the privilege you have afforded us in inviting us to be here. I am excited to be in Brazil, a nation whose churches have offered us so much in theological insight and your witness for justice and peace. I am here to tell you about our discussions and our joint activities with the mining industry in South Africa: our rationale, our origins, our participants and our joys and frustrations. It’s a story that goes back for nearly a decade, so let me begin at the beginning without further ado.