Troubled Times: Can We Be Surprised by Hope Again?

Troubled Times: Can We Be Surprised by Hope Again?

The Most Revd. Dr Thabo Makgoba

Book Launch — Voices of Hope

English Reformed Church, Begijnhof 48, Amsterdam

3rd June 2026

Thank you for your generous welcome to this church, to the university community, and to this city. What a privilege it is to be with you in this beautiful, history-laden space — and to those joining us online from different parts of the world, you are not a distant audience. You are part of this gathering. This evening belongs to all of us.

I am grateful to Professor Jan Jorrit of the School of Theology and Religion, his team and colleagues responsible for today and for my and my family’s sabbaticalp; to the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Professor Gregor, the faculty that is hosting us; and to the Rector, Professor Jeroen Geurts, and University Council for their welcome and for the gift of a three-month sabbatical at this university.  To the Rector of this parish, Revd. Marius and to Prof Dion Foster, dankie ook, Broers! 

And I am grateful to the editors and contributors of this book — thirty voices, from different continents, disciplines, generations and religious traditions — for trusting that hope is still worth speaking about.

I want to say one more thing before I begin. I have spent these last six weeks in Amsterdam, meeting what I call different publics — communities, institutions, individuals who rarely appear in the same sentence, but who together make up the living texture of this city and its questions, thanks Jan Jorrit (JJ). This sabbatical has been a gift of time and encounter, and much of what I want to say tonight has been sharpened by what I have seen and heard here. Amsterdam has been teaching me. I am still learning.

Can we be surprised by hope again?

I want to sit with that question before I try to answer it. Because the word surprised matters. We are not asking tonight whether hope is theoretically possible. We are asking whether it can still arrive uninvited — whether, after everything the world has shown us, we still have the capacity to be ambushed by it. In Sepedi, “go Makala”- startled, frightened, astonished, seized or overtaken and IsiXhosa- “ukumangalizwa”- struck with awe or wonder, or ambushed”.

I want to earn that answer honestly. The people watching this evening from different parts of the world — some of them in places where hope is not a lecture topic but a daily survival decision — deserve more than comfortable reassurance from a church building in Amsterdam. So let me begin not with hope, but with the world as it actually is or as I see it.

We face what I have called a kairos moment for humanity. Kairos in Greek does not mean ordinary time. It means the appointed time — the moment of crisis and opportunity that cannot be postponed. And the crisis I am describing is this: economic inequality is metastasising across the world like a cancer. Over a hundred million people are currently displaced from their homes — the largest forced migration since the Second World War. The Uppsala Conflict Data Program in Sweden recorded 61 active conflicts involving at least one state in 2024, the highest number since statistics were first collected in 1946.1 The climate crisis is bearing down most heavily on the communities that contributed least to causing it. And the political response across much of the world has not been to face this honestly but to find someone to blame.

Across both the economically developed and under-developed world we are watching the rise of what I call the left-behinds: people standing on the margins, watching elites prosper while their own standard of living is eroded. These victims of the current system of global financial governance are responding to their situation by turning towards populist politics, embracing economic chauvinism, xenophobic nationalism, resurgent racism and the stirrings of a new kind of fascism. And in an age-old pattern, the elites — through their dominance of media and public debate — are exploiting the disillusionment of the left-behinds by cultivating division; by diverting people's anger away from those responsible for the inequality by blaming the vulnerable, the poor and the weak – those even less fortunate than themselves – for their plight. Like a cancer, inequality eats away at our social compacts, threatening to devour everything that makes us human.

I say this not as an observer from a distance. I have consoled weeping mothers and sisters in Ukraine and prayed at mass graves while sirens wailed overhead. I have sat with despairing peace mediators freshly returned from South Sudan and attended a memorial service for fellow South Africans killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo during a peacekeeping mission. I have walked the corridors of the United Nations and the rooms of Davos and found, in both places, the same exhaustion: people who know the scale of what is broken and have run out of the language to say so. I have walked with communities that have no sanitation, no voice, no expectation that the powerful will look their way. And I have stood on the floor of the London Stock Exchange and in the corridors of financial power — and found there a kind of moral vacuum, a disconnection between the decisions being made and the lives being shaped by them.

Earlier this week I was in the south-east of Amsterdam, in Bijlmer, where I learned that although Amsterdam is one of the wealthiest cities in one of the wealthiest nations in history, you can still see the same logic at work in its streets and in its policies: that some lives count more than others.

As I have said, we face a kairos moment. It is real. It is now. And into it, tonight, we launch a book called Voices of Hope.

Before we go further, we need to be precise about what kind of hope we are speaking of. Because there is a hope that is merely the absence of despair — thin, nervous, easily shattered — and there is a hope that is something altogether more durable. I want to speak about the second kind.

Last year in Rome, at a symposium on hope jointly hosted by the Vrije Universiteit, the University of the Free State and the ACSA, I drew on the work of the theologian Jürgen Moltmann, whose Theology of Hope, written in 1964, remains one of the most searching theological texts of the twentieth century. The South African scholar Professor Jacobus Vorster argues that Moltmann's framework offers not sentimental hope, but what he calls tangible hope — grounded not in single liberation events but in the ongoing movement of the Spirit of the living God in history.

Moltmann's thesis, as Vorster reads it, is that hope does not lie primarily in historic moments. Not in 1994 in South Africa. Not in any single triumph. The people of Israel had many liberations — the Exodus, the return from Babylon — and hope rooted in those events soon faded. Consistent hope, on this account, is found in the movement of God's reign flowing from the resurrection of Christ — manifesting in signs where good is victorious over evil, peace over enmity, love over hatred. These signs are God continuously grinding out of the hard rocks of evil the visible and touchable signs of goodness.

I find that image extraordinary and I want to dwell on it. The hard rocks of evil. The grinding. The slow, costly, material production of something good out of something terrible. This is not hope as a feeling that arrives when conditions improve. It is hope as a practice — a refusal to be daunted, an intensification of effort precisely in the face of the challenge, a willingness to act as instruments of the moving God even when the large picture is dark.

We are warned, on this reading, against placing all our hope in single episodes or single persons. And this brings me to the South African story — which is often told as a reason for hope in the world — and to what it does and does not prove.

For most of the second half of the twentieth century, it looked as though South Africa was headed for a racial war. We avoided it — through a largely peaceful struggle, through international sanctions, through the exemplary leadership of Nelson Mandela and the last white president, FW de Klerk. Mandela was what I would call a symbol of holiness: a leader set apart, able to hold himself and others accountable to a greater Being, and to draw people together based on a vision for the common good. Our Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by my predecessor but one, Archbishop Tutu, was praised across the world as something genuinely new in the life of nations — amnesty in exchange for truth, healing in the place of retribution.

I prayed with Mandela. I wrote a book on it — Faith and Courage: Praying with Nelson Mandela. I also prayed with FW de Klerk. I spoke at his funeral and was present at his cremation. Whatever history's contested account of his legacy, his final recorded words were these: “I, without qualification, apologise for the pain and the hurt and the indignity and the damage that apartheid has done to black, brown and Indians in South Africa.” He said it was as if he had a conversion — that he realised in his heart of hearts that apartheid was wrong. Even in the most unlikely of people, the grinding of goodness out of hard rock continues.

But I want to be honest about what the South African story does not prove. The Commission is, as Jesus said of himself in Nazareth, a prophet without honour in its own country. Our government has never acted on some of the key recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Victims of gross violations of human rights violations have been sold short. And it was never mandated to deliver economic justice — that is a task in the hands of the government and the private sector, which have both failed to implement redistributive measures, making us the most unequal society in the world. So, while our forebears fought a struggle against colonialism and apartheid, bringing us out of a wilderness and into a non-racial democracy, we have not built the land which that democracy promised us. 

This is why I have been calling for over a decade for what I name the New Struggle — a struggle to eradicate corruption, to regain our moral compass, to bring about economic justice and realise the promises of our Constitution. 

This New Struggle cannot be for a new multiracial middle class to simply inherit the privileges of the old elite. The struggle must be for a new society: more equal, more honest, one in which the wealth that comes from growth is shared equitably among all, and in which equality of opportunity is real rather than rhetorical. And those of us with financial means must be prepared to make sacrifices to redistribute what God has given us for the benefit of the poorest of the poor.

In response to this crisis, which as I have said affects the Global North as well as the South, I am urging the adoption of a theology and ecclesiology of generosity — focusing on the Incarnation as the hermeneutical key to both theology and economy. If God chose the margins of society in which to demonstrate God's presence in our world — if the Divine entered the world as a refugee child in poverty, in a borrowed room — then the church that follows that God must orient itself toward the margins too. Not as a matter of charity, but as one of justice. Not out of occasional generosity but as a demonstration of structural commitment.

And I want to add what I have been saying recently in Geneva and New York: we must address not only material poverty but spiritual poverty. It is the spiritually poor in the developed world — and many among wealthy elites in the Global South — who generate the blindness that ignores the desperate suffering of the people of Gaza, of Sudan, of Ukraine and the sixty-one other places of conflict in the world today. The ecological crisis belongs to this same frame: the communities of the Sahel, of coastal Bangladesh, of the Pacific islands did not cause two centuries of carbon accumulation. They are bearing its first and heaviest costs. This too is a justice question. This too belongs to the New Struggle.

Let me now name three practices — not programmes, not policies, but spiritual and civic disciplines — that I believe are equal to this kairos.

The first is Indaba. This is a isiZulu and isiXhosa concept — a gathered community discerning together, every voice carrying weight, the purpose being not majority decision but shared wisdom. It entered global Anglican life at the 2008 Lambeth Conference as a way through profound disagreement. Its theological root is ancient — it mirrors the silence of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, sitting with what had been heard before it reached its conclusion. In a world designed to hear only the powerful, Indaba insists that the woman excluded from the peace table in South Sudan knows something about peace that the men around it do not. That the un-documented person in Amsterdam knows something about belonging that the policy document does not. Practising Indaba is, in itself, an act of hope.

The second is Courageous Conversations. I have called the church throughout my ministry to conversations it would rather not have — about the gap between what we preach and what we practise, about the young people we are failing, about the inequality we have normalised. These conversations are not performances of moral superiority. They are acts of love toward a community you refuse to give up on. Amos named the exploitation of the merchants of Samaria with a precision that made comfortable religion impossible. Tutu called out apartheid as an evil policy, evil in and of its very nature, but he simultaneously insisted that its perpetrators were redeemable. That combination of unflinching honesty and unmistakable love is the hardest thing in public life. It is also the most transformative.

The third practice I want to highlight is a Theology of Generosity — the ecclesiology I have been developing from the Incarnation outward. If the God we follow entered the world at the margins, then our institutions, our budgets, our policies and our prayers must orient themselves there too. This means challenging the structural causes of inequality, not merely ameliorating their symptoms. It means being prepared — as Pope Francis insists — to reject the absolute autonomy of markets when those markets produce suffering, and to attack the structural causes of inequality. It means the church acting not as a commentator on injustice but as a participant in its dismantling.

Tonight we present thirty voices. Thirty people from different continents, disciplines, generations and religious traditions, asked to speak about hope in troubled times.

The polyphony of this book is itself part of its argument. A single authoritative voice on hope would be a kind of contradiction — because hope that belongs only to the powerful, only to the credentialed, only to those who have not been broken by what the world has done to them, is not hope in any sense that the suffering can use. These thirty voices are, in Vorster's language, signs of the moving God — each one grinding something good out of hard rock, each one a small step taken in hope.

Already the range of these voices tells us something: hope migrates, cross-pollinates, appears where it is not expected — in a government ministry and dialogue global citizenship on peace with justice at VU, in a mosque in Bijlmer and a churchyard in Ukraine, in a stadium in Soweto or soccer stadium watching match in joy and anxiety and a round table of young city-makers who refuse to accept the world as it is.

So, let me return to our question: can we be surprised by hope again?

I want to answer that question now — not with optimism, but with the testimony of what I have seen. I have been in rooms far darker than this one where hope arrived anyway. Not announced. Not argued into existence. Just present — the way Moltmann describes it: the living, moving God grinding goodness out of hard rock. A woman in Ukraine who had lost everything and was somehow not destroyed. A peace mediator who came back the next day. An apartheid president who spoke words of apology into a camera, knowing they would be his final words to the world.  A woman from South Sudan at VU talking about daring to hope and the courage to knock and open doors shut by male comrades. Young people in Bijlmer this week who looked at a broken city and refused to accept that it could not be made whole.

These are not proofs. They are signs. And signs, as Moltmann reminds us, are exactly what hope is made of — not certainty, but the visible and touchable evidence that the moving God has not finished with this world.

As I have said in South Africa, as well as in Faith and Courage- Praying with Mandela, and as I want to say here tonight in Amsterdam: hope is not a nebulous, pie-in-the-sky concept. It is the driving force that motivates our determination to name our problems, to identify solutions and to mobilise people to overcome them. Hope must be what drives us to fulfil the promise of societies based on democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights.

Small steps taken in hope can become islands of hope. And as those islands come together, we can create landscapes of hope.

That is what this book is. Thirty islands. One landscape, beginning.

Faith sees further. Justice reaches further still.

Welcome to Voices of Hope. May they surprise you.

Thank you.

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