Charge to the 68th Session of the
Synod of the Diocese of Cape Town
The Most Revd Dr Thabo Makgoba
Archbishop of Cape Town
Cathedral Church of St George the Martyr
Cape Town
Thursday, 9th July 2026
“For such a time as this” (Esther 4:14)
“As you go, proclaim the good news” (Matthew 10:7)
May I speak in the name of God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Welcome and Acknowledgements
Sisters and brothers in Christ, I greet you all in the name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and welcome you warmly to this Session of our Diocesan Synod. A warm greeting also to all our special guests, including our ecumenical and interfaith partners, the Bishops and Vicars-General of our neighbouring dioceses, my counterparts in REACH, retired Bishops, the heads of our schools, recipients of the Diocesan Award and members of the Order of Simon of Cyrene, the highest honour we can confer on an Anglican lay person. To all watching online, from our parishes and from further afield, a very warm welcome.
Please allow me to acknowledge and thank my wife, Lungi, for the patient support and sustenance she always provides me. Thank you, Manala; “mmangoana o tshwara thipa ka bohaleng” — “a mother holds the knife by its sharp edge”. I thank too our two children, Nyakallo and Paballo, for their love and support, and for helping to keep me grounded and human through the challenges and joys of their own lives. And I thank my intercessors, who hold me and this ministry before God — all of you are important to me. My profound thanks to everyone in the Diocesan family who arranges and enables our mission, ministry and administration: the Diocesan Standing Committee, the Diocesan Finance Board and Trusts Board, the Diocesan Chapter, the Diocesan staff, all the ministry teams, the heads, chaplains and staff of our schools, homes and institutions, our legal advisers, and all the lay people who aid us. My deep gratitude to the clergy, their spouses and their families, for creating and sustaining us as a Christian community which demonstrates the redeeming love of God at work.
I want to acknowledge all the ministries of our Diocese — the many and varied works through which the love of Christ is made visible across our parishes and communities — and to thank, in particular, our children’s homes and their staff. For their pastoral heart, their daily faithfulness, and the tender support and protection they offer to the children entrusted to their care, we are deeply thankful. In them we see the Gospel’s reversal of exclusion at work, and the restoration of dignity to the most vulnerable among us.
I want also to thank our Diocesan Health Care Fund, which looks after us as clergy and our families with such faithful care, often unseen and easily taken for granted. It is my prayer that one day God will move someone to endow it generously, so that this ministry of care may be placed on a secure footing for the generations of clergy families yet to come. Thanks to for the Robert Selby Taylor Will Trust, which provides educational assistance to the children of our clergy.
I owe particular thanks to the staff of the Diocesan Office, to the Archdeacon to the Ordinary, and to Bishop Josh, the Bishop of Table Bay, for his support and collegiality, and especially for holding the fort as Diocesan during my three months of sabbatical. My thanks, too, to the Synod Advisory Team. I arrived back only a few days ago, in time for Synod but not for all the preparatory work they put into it. That work has made this gathering possible, and I am the grateful beneficiary of it. Thank you, all of you, for your faithfulness and your care.
I also want to thank my staff at Bishopscourt, who help me to keep the Benedictine rhythm of prayer, work and reflection — even when, I confess, I capsize that rhythm into work, work and work. For your patience in calling me back to balance, and for all you do, thank you, Bishopscourt team.
My thanks, too, to the Dean and to the Cathedral for hosting our opening Synod service, and — in advance — to the Revd Moeketsi and the community of St Cyprian’s, where our Synod will continue over the coming days. It is wonderful to be gathered once again as a worshipping people.
Our Synod Theme
The theme of this Synod is drawn from the book of Esther, and from Mordecai’s searching question to the young queen at the hinge of her people’s history: “Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (Esther 4:14). In addressing the theme, I hope to incorporate in broad terms the themes that we have worked on together during my time as your Diocesan.
Mordecai’s question is one that refuses to accept every excuse Esther might have come up with to dodge the challenge it presented. She might have pleaded her vulnerability, or the danger of taking the throne uninvited, She might have refused to serve because she was living comfortably. She might have said the crisis facing her people was not of her making. Mordecai would allow none of it. Deliverance would come, he told her; the only question was whether she would be found among those who acted, or among those who kept silent and let the moment pass.
“For such a time as this” is therefore not a sentimental phrase about feeling chosen. It is a summons to courage, to agency, and to costly action at the decisive hour. I want to hold that summons before us throughout this Charge, for I believe God is asking the same question of this Diocese, of this Province, and of this country: for what time have we been brought here, and what will we do with it?
We have just prayed our Synod Collect together, and I want us to carry its words with us through everything that follows, for it gathers our theme into a single petition. We asked God, whose “Word and steadfast love have sustained your people through all generations,” to “enable your Church with grace to discern your vision, that we may meet this moment with courage and act with intention to confront the challenges of this time, that we may witness to your transforming power as you make us partakers in your Kingdom.”
Hear how closely that prayer walks with Esther and with Mordecai: to meet this moment, to act with intention, to confront the challenges of this time. We have not merely described our situation; we have asked God to make us equal to it. It is my prayer that this Synod will be, for all of us gathered here and for those joining online, an opportunity to pray and to be renewed for God’s service. The whole of this Charge is, in one sense, simply an unfolding of that collect.
Grace, and an honest confrontation with reality
The great North African Bishop, Augustine of Hippo, spoke very tellingly as, on the one hand, he wrestled with the burden of being a bishop, while on the other he was filled with the energy that came with serving the Christian community; an energy generated by the intellectual discoveries that came from exploring the wonder of faith with his small community in the desert sands of North Africa. In Sermon 340 he could finally sense the hand of God and rejoice in the delicacy of ministry, as he wrote: “For you I am a Bishop, with you I am a Christian.”
Those words fill my heart as I deliver this Charge, as I look both back and forwards, recognising from where God has brought me and at the same time experiencing how, despite myself and my weaknesses, God has used me. The vocation of leadership is worth taking on only when those who accept the call not just occupy the thrones that come with office, but immerse themselves in the heart of the Church with all its rich diversity and its endless depth.
Augustine went on to say in that same sermon, “The former” — that is, episcopal office — “is a duty, the latter — that is, the Christian life — is “a grace.” If ever a word has been my lodestar through the profoundly changing scenes of life, it is surely the word “grace.” St Thérèse of Lisieux sums up what I feel in my heart after 24 years in episcopal ministry: “Everything is a grace because everything is God’s gift. Whatever be the character of life or its unexpected events, to the heart that loves, all is well.” Every day of this awesome calling, I have known that grace, leaned on that grace, and celebrated it. That I have sometimes failed despite that grace — that I have made mistakes, misunderstood, not listened, and at times not had the courage to take leaps of faith and so missed prophetic opportunities — goes without saying; and for that I beg your and God's pardon.
Even as I say these words, I hear the voice of Archbishop Emeritus Tutu, who reminds me in this moment that asking for forgiveness is a “risky undertaking, but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing.” That honest confrontation is itself an act of hope. We do not name our failures in order to be paralysed by them, but in order that grace may do its mending work. To draw on the depths of grace for the healing of our fractured world, our exploited continent and our broken country, is one of the core missions of our time; it weaves together the challenges of our age.
The former Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, located all of this — exploring the wonder of faith, drawing on grace, the work of healing — in the Church’s work of worship. Listen to Temple’s words: “To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.” Worship, then, is never an escape from the world’s pain; it is the furnace in which our engagement with that pain is forged.
In a timely way, today's Gospel text from Matthew, with its exhortation, “As you go, proclaim the good news”, draws us further into a grace-infused ministry of healing and offers us a way to think about the future of our Church, of our country and of our planet. I will always remember, when the leaders of the Anglican Communion met with Pope Francis, how he spoke of proclaiming the Kingdom of God as the hope for the nations. Holding out a vision of our evangelism as constituting a visible source of justice in the world, he told us:
“Today’s wounded world needs the appearance of the Lord Jesus! It needs to know Christ! Some of you come from lands in which war, violence and injustice are the daily bread of the faithful; yet even in countries thought to be affluent and peaceful, great suffering and poverty exist. What should be the message we offer in response, if not Jesus, the Saviour? Our mission is to make him known. In the wake of what Peter said to the lame man at the Temple gate, what we have to offer these troubled and needy times is not silver and gold, but Christ and the amazing good news of his Kingdom.”
Doing justice, not only speaking it
Our mission, the proclamation of the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ, is not merely to speak about justice, but to do justice. As we have seen our precious democracy falter in recent years, we have spoken up for justice, calling out the corrupt, the racists and those who put their own profits before the welfare and dignity of others. But we have lagged behind on doing justice.
The crisis we face over the treatment of the migrants from other African countries who live among us is an example of this. The urgent questions we face are: what does justice look like for South Africans in poor communities who can’t find decent jobs, and who fear that migrants willing to work for low wages are stealing their opportunities? What does justice look like for migrants who are fleeing conflict zones in which their very lives are at risk, or whose governments are so corrupt that they have virtually collapsed their countries' economies? What would it look like to restore the dignity of migrants as those who, just like us, are made in the image of God?
Recently a researcher on migration governance reform in the New South Institute urged religious and community groupings to drive programmes to include foreigners into the mainstream of South African society in a constructive way. (1) One of the reasons migrants are often received with such hostility is their capacity to survive and even flourish in conditions which local people struggle to overcome. That should be no surprise: across the world, migrants are often the most innovative and creative people their countries produce; how else would they have found ways to flee their countries, travel halfway across a continent, and survive in foreign, often hostile environments?
For us, this raises a challenging question: Are there not ways, even at parish level, in which we can encourage our communities to harness both the skills of migrants and the urgent clamour of our people for jobs to create win-win scenarios for both?
Addressing the demands for justice in South Africa is not easy. The old struggle against apartheid was not easy, and the New Struggle to realise the dividends of democracy, which you have heard me advocating times without number, is not easy. But if we are to have any kind of a decent future at all, we dare not dodge this struggle. We have to face the difficult, contested and controversial business of taking sides. We have to engage in informed advocacy. We have to enhance the agency of those whose voices are muted so that communities can speak for themselves. We must actively engage in community organising, and in doing so recognise that change comes from the margins and not from those who hold power.
There is a quiet temptation in a church such as ours — respected, well-networked, with access to the powerful — to mistake proximity to power for the exercise of justice. The first step in obtaining justice is therefore to change our mindsets and acknowledge the true source of change. For too long we have relied on the powerful to make the changes, and those changes have ultimately served the powerful and not given agency to the poor. We have learnt that no victor voluntarily shares power or allows alternative narratives to shape policy. Steve Biko put it succinctly: we must stand resolutely with the oppressed and the exploited. That applies in South Africa today, whether it encompasses poor and marginalised South Africans who can't find jobs, or desperate migrants whose exploitation is reflected in their low wages. The experiences, the cries and the struggles of all those are ours.
Here Esther meets Biko. Esther was inside the palace, close to power, comfortable, and able to tell herself that the suffering beyond the walls was not her responsibility. Mordecai’s warning is sobering: “Do not think that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews.” Proximity to power is no refuge, and silence is no safety. The agency God asks of us is not the borrowed agency of those near the throne, but the courageous agency of those willing to risk their standing for the sake of the excluded. Esther’s greatness is not that she was favoured, but that she stopped trading on her favour and spent it — “If I perish, I perish.” That is the approach to our challenges which this time in out country’s history demands of us.
When I came to this ministry, I would not have believed that so many of the gains we made in South Africa would be rolled back, that the scourge of corruption would continue to rob the poor and insult their dignity. Yet it is so, and the faith community stands condemned for the many times our voices were mute and our condemnations half-hearted. As I said in an earlier Charge, reflecting on our deeply unequal society — the most unequal in the world — the income gap has widened to the point where a tiny fraction at the top commands a grossly disproportionate share of our wealth, while the great majority are left to divide what little remains. And we have to acknowledge that this poverty still clings stubbornly to racial lines. Naming those statistics was never enough; the question each Synod must put to itself is what we have actually done since we last met.
We also need to be honest and not confuse charity with justice. It was the same St Augustine who reminded the early Church that “charity is no substitute for justice withheld.” Charity in crisis moments has its place, but it cannot replace justice in the long term. A soup kitchen is a mercy; but if year upon year the same queue lengthens, we are called not only to feed it but to ask why it exists and to dismantle what produces it. The grace of being part of a believing community must show itself in solid, unflinching work to change the mechanisms of injustice, exploitation and marginalisation.
We must also be more intentional in our engagement with community organisations and community struggles. Implicit in my suggestion for action at parish level around the migrant crisis is the wider need to play our part in enhancing agency for those most excluded, helping them find a place at the table of decision-making and assisting in the transfer of knowledge and skills. This is the difference between doing things for people and doing things with them — only the latter restores dignity.
Returning to the formative insights of Steve Biko and his generation, they insisted that the core components of a true liberation struggle must include psychological emancipation, self-reliance and the restoration of the dignity of black people. Those imperatives need to be examined afresh in our context as we move forward in making South Africa — in Chief Albert Luthuli’s poignant words — “a home for all.”
Anger at our country’s current condition is a necessary emotion. But it cannot stop there if we are to achieve necessary change. We need to hear again the words ascribed to St Augustine: “Hope has two daughters: anger and courage. Anger at the way things are, and the courage to ensure that they do not stay the way they are.” It is exactly that courage — the courage that comes from faith, the courage that ideology alone cannot give — that is our gift to South Africa at this time of profound challenge. That is why we are so clear in our ecclesiology: ministry is not possession; it is, rather, participation in God’s generosity.
Healing as the reversal of exclusion
The very core of today’s text from Matthew underlines our task in all situations: to proclaim that the Kingdom is at hand. It is not simply about a future that awaits us; more profoundly, it is testimony to the active reign of God breaking into history. We as church are called to be witnesses to God’s transforming grace in history. The actions that follow in Jesus’ narrative — to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons — are, every one of them, symbols of the restoration of life and dignity.
In Matthew, healing is never merely physical; it represents the reversal of exclusion and brokenness. To heal the sick and cleanse lepers is to restore people to community, to just relationships and structures, and to a renewed sensitivity to the burdens people carry and the wounds that afflict communities. This is why our safeguarding work — making our parishes, schools and institutions genuinely safe and inclusive for all, and especially for children and the vulnerable — is not an administrative burden bolted onto mission; it is mission. A Church that cannot protect the most vulnerable in its own midst has not yet understood what it means to cleanse the leper and restore the outcast to the community.
The verses we deal with from Matthew today make the point clearly: “Let your peace come upon that house.” We the church, and especially the clergy, are pre-eminently called to be the bearers of peace in our deeply fractured world: from the communities across our country so deeply wounded by violence, to homes scarred by gender-based violence, to the bleeding of Gaza, from Sudan and South Sudan, from the Sahel to the DR Congo, to the Straits of Hormuz, to Ukraine and Haiti — and countless other places where war kills, where weapons rob the poor of their meals and their education, and where greed, manipulation and the scramble for the earth’s resources rob people and nations of peace.
But we don’t have to feel that we are alone or isolated when we consciously decide to be voices of peace in our communities. In his recent Encyclical on artificial intelligence, Pope Leo XIV made a powerful point. “[B]uilding a world in which everyone can flourish,” he said, “requires shared responsibility and courage. No one can single-handedly bear the weight of the challenges the world is facing, just as no one is so weak that they cannot play their part, for ‘power is made perfect in weakness’ (2 Cor 12:9). All are given their own section of the wall: scientists and researchers, entrepreneurs and workers, educators and legislators, civil society, popular movements and faith communities.” (2)
Conclusion: Measure ministry by faithfulness
I end as I began, with the words of Jesus: “As you go, proclaim the good news. Freely you have received, freely give.” In the end it is sobering for all of us — whether at the brink of retirement or having just crossed the threshold of new beginnings in ministry and public office in the Church — to realise that ministry is not about how many buildings we erected, how many committees we chaired, or how many titles we accumulated. It is about whether we remained faithful to the One who called us. Only that.
To those who are actively in the field, let me say: there will be seasons when your efforts seem fruitful and seasons when they seem barren. There will be people who welcome your ministry and people who reject it. There will be days when you are encouraged and days when you are weary. Do not measure your ministry solely by visible indicators; measure it by faithfulness. Jesus did not ask the disciples to be successful in every town; he simply asked them to preach, to heal, to trust and to proclaim. The results always belong to God.
As you lead the Diocese into the future, I leave you with hope, confident that you will continue the grinding work of pursuing the New Struggle as part of your mission to discern what God is up to in the world in our time, and that you will do this by wrestling with the challenges you face through a process of courageous conversations and indaba. You may feel, to use the Pauline phrase, that you are seeing in a mirror dimly, but be reassured that if you approach the task with a sense of awe and wonder you will indeed discern the face of God in the incarnate Jesus, through Jesus the Holy Spirit.
And so I return us to Mordecai’s question, which is finally God’s question to each of us: “Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” We did not choose the hour into which we were born, nor the wounds of the country we have been given to serve. But we have been placed here, now, in this time and no other — and that placing is itself a calling. May we meet this moment with courage and act with intention, that we may witness to God’s transforming power as he makes us partakers in his Kingdom. And may we not be found among those who kept silent and let the moment pass.
In my pre-ordination retreat, all those many years ago, the retreat master sent us out with words something like these: “Love your people deeply; pray more than you worry; listen more than you speak; stay close to the poor, the wounded and the forgotten; and never lose the wonder of your calling.” I bless you with those words, in all the variety of the Church’s callings. Guard your hearts; protect your first love for Christ. When the road is long and the night is dark, remember that the One who called still walks beside you.
And finally, remember: God loves you, and so do I!
Amen
* * * * *
(1) https://theconversation.com/profiles/alan-hirsch-170889; https://nsi.org.za/media/the-conversation-anti-foreigner-violence-migration-governance-south-africa/
(2) Paragraphs 13 and 59, Encyclical Letter, Magnifica Humanitas, of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html [Accessed May 26, 2026]
