Charge to the 38th Session of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa's Provincial Synod

Anglican Church of Southern Africa

38^th 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 20^th 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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