To the Laos - To the People of God – Advent 2016

Dear People of God

As I was completing this letter, news came in from Bishop Manuel Ernesto of the Diocese of Niassa that 60 people were reported killed, more than 100 injured and many are still missing after a fuel tanker travelling from Beira to southern Malawi exploded while on a road in the community of Cafrisange in the central province of Tete. Bishop Manuel asks us all to pray for Archdeacon Martins Nselela and his team in Tete as they minister to the families affected.

Sermon at a Combined Confirmation Service for Anglican Schools in Cape Town

Sermon preached at Herschel Girls School on Sunday 23rd August 2015:

Readings: 1 Kings 8:22-30; Psalm 84; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69

May I speak in the name of God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Archbishop Thabo had the "rare and humbling opportunity" to confirm Paballo Makgoba and her friends.

Thanksgiving and Farewell Service for Nomfundo Kwini, Johannesburg

Genesis 3:8-15; Psalm 113; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 11:27-28

May I speak in the name of God who is Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer. Amen.

Dear Nomfundo and Kwini family, what a joy it is for Lungi and I to share in today’s celebrations! Thank you for your invitation to preach and celebrate at this farewell Mass on the Feast of St Mary the Virgin.

Homily for the Induction of the Revd Roger Cameron as CEO of ABESA

Archbishop Thabo Makgoba

Induction of the Revd Roger Cameron as CEO of ABESA

St Mary’s School – Waverley, 17h00

24 March 2015

1 Timothy 1:15-17, Luke 6:43-49

May I speak in the name of God who knows each tree by its fruits and who separates the bad tree from the good one. Amen.

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, let me repeat what a great delight it is to be with you and to be licensing and inducting Roger as CEO of ABESA tonight.

Roger, we offer you hearty congratulations on this appointment and we warmly welcome you and Ann to this key ministry of our Church.

Let me also congratulate the Board on this appointment, an excellent choice. We know that Roger comes with extensive experience in educational excellence and a deep mature, Christian faith. We look forward to harnessing these good fruits for both the Church and the nations of ACSA.

CEO of Anglican Board of Education to be Licensed

Archbishop Thabo Makgoba of Cape Town will today license the Revd Roger Cameron, recently-retired head of St. John's College, Johannesburg, as the Chief Executive Officer of the Anglican Board of Education in Southern Africa (ABESA).

"This is a significant event in the life of the Church," said Archbishop Makgoba. "I am exhilarated by the potential of ABESA to reclaim the Church's role in education and thus promote what I call 'the new struggle' to create opportunities for young people in practical ways.

"It is one of my key ambitions to build new, quality Christian schools, easily accessible to all. We also want to galvanise parishioners to be involved and to work with existing independent schools in creating new opportunities for young people."

The licensing will be attended by Bishop Peter Lee, who chairs ABESA, and Bishop Steve Moreo of Johannesburg.

Homily at Western Province Preparatory School's Centenary Celebration

A homily preached at the Western Province Preparatory School's Centenary Celebration dedication service at St John's Parish, Wynberg on January 31:

Psalm 51:1-9; Mark 4:26-34.

I greet you all in the name of God, who created you, sustains you and redeems you. Amen.

What a joy it is to be here today to join you in giving thanks to God for your centenary celebrations. Congratulations to the School, and to all the dedicated visionaries who have not only kept this school going but grown it. Let us pause and say, “Thank you, God, for your faithfulness in nurturing and growing this seed over these hundred years.”

Reading your history, I can only say that it must be through the grace of God working through you, God’s people, that you have germinated and blossomed to reach this milestone. You can go forward confidently into the future, knowing that God will carry you further. The story of WPPS is a story of faith; a response to what an individual felt placed in his heart, by God and in faith, and on which he acted. It is a “reckless” belief that once touched by God you are transformed eternally. Faith without works is dead and, I might add, work with no faith is “going nowhere slowly.” So we are grateful for your predecessors and benefactors, who had faith and acted, and we celebrate this story of faith today. As in the Bible lesson, Mark 4, it is through one sower who plants seeds filled with the Spirit, urging God’s community to act for God’s sake and with God’s people, that we can achieve God’s result, fruitfulness.

God still calls each one of you today as you celebrate this centenary – boys, parents, old boys and teachers, all present here – to continue to have such faith. So I ask each one of you today what is the one thing – the tiny seed – that God is saying or putting in your heart and mind today as you celebrate 100 years of God’s faithfulness to you? What action will you take on it? How will you respond in worship today and in witness and service to God’s people, in the here and now for this revelation?

As Bishop of Grahamstown, I used to be on the councils of St Andrew's School and of the Diocesan School for Girls. One of those who served with us was Mr Brockman, who represented WPPS. In retrospect I enjoyed his impatience. When it came to anything he perceived as standing in the way of education and of sharing the educational resources of wealthy, resourced schools with less resourced ones, you noticed his reaction instantly. At that time, St Andrew's wanted to buy Good Shepherd School – as they had when they took over WPPS – and to plant a seed of excellence at Good Shepherd. But red tape was in the way now, which was sad. And perhaps Mr Brockman was trying to articulate the question: “What mustard seed is God calling you to scatter, no matter how small? It will germinate, for it is from God and God will teach you to nurture it.”

I am a relatively anxious person, and am glad there was no Ritalin in my day, when teachers and parents had other ways to deal with anxiety and distraction. It shows especially when I am watching sport. This past week, watching Rafael Nadal, my favourite player, lose the Australian Open Championship, I could not hide this anxiety. At the gym, I kept on correcting his double faults, his serve and his backhand until I nearly fell off the treadmill. My daughter, who was listening to her loud music through earphones, said: “Dad, you are talking loudly and disturbing others.” Such was my anxiety over wanting Nadal to win.

I have the same level of anxious energy and urgency when it comes to education. I connected deeply with, and appreciated especially, your school's diversity statement. At its core, it asks the question: “How can WPPS help all South African children have access to first-class, well-rounded, valued-based education, regardless of their race, class and gender?” In biblical language, how can you demonstrate that in Christ there neither Jew nor Greek, Gentile nor slave, especially in the provision of education?

In socio-economic terms, the issue is how do we bridge the inequality gap? Your diversity statement is powerful and searching indeed. It says, “Seek to be principled and pragmatic.” The meaning of being principled as the followers of Jesus Christ is very clear: it means a commitment to sharing, loving and care for the poor and your neighbour. To be pragmatic, I want to suggest two or three challenges to you.

The Anglican Church of Southern Africa, of which you are part, has adopted as its Vision that we should be:

Anchored in the love of Christ,
Committed to God’s Mission, and
Transformed by the Holy Spirit.

Amongst our priorities is education. We have reconfigured the Anglican Board for Education in Southern Africa (ABESA) like you did 100 years ago and we are planting Anglican schools, through two organisations, Vuleka Schools and the Archbishop's Education Initiative.

Firstly, I hope you will support such institutions and initiatives. I am doing so through a trust called Archbishop Thabo Cecil Makgoba Development Trust (ATCMDT), which provides bursaries and scholarships to disadvantaged children. For example, St Mary’s School in Waverley, Johannesburg, has partnered with the trust to support disadvantaged learners in Alexandra Township.

In the Old Testament, the Lord says to Habakkuk, “Write down a vision; inscribe it clearly on tablets, so that it may be read at a glance” (Habakkuk 2:2). I have a dream, a vision for WPPS at this centenary celebration which I want to scatter before you. You know that dreams, visions and ideas don’t fulfil themselves. They need committed people. They don’t teach themselves, they need to be taught and learned by people. So here is my dream, and hopefully you will help me make it practical.

It is two-fold:

1. My dream is for the establishment of Centenary Scholarships for black disadvantaged, talented and academically able learners. I ask you to pledge a small account for this dream to put legs on your diversity statement. So I invite you all this Lent to take on the task of saving R10 a day for 40 days, or R400 per boy, per parent, per old boy, and for the next 40 years, to continue to give this Lenten gift to support these Centenary Scholarships for diversity at WPPS. God will multiply or diversify this seed capital enormously. My pledge, to remind you of this, will be a small seed annually of R400 for the next 10 years paid upfront at prizegiving this year to a boy who shows and reflects both an honour and character that promote all forms of diversity at WPPS.

2. The other side of the vision, one informed by scripture, is to ask you, in collaboration with your brother schools, St Andrew's, St George's, and Bishops (Diocesan College), to look at the waiting lists of our Anglican schools, and to ask yourselves: Is it not time to think in the long term of the possibilities of a WPSS (that is a Senior School) as part of our initiative to establish new schools? Vuleka, in partnership with ABESA and assisted by ATCMDT, is acquiring property in Gauteng to build the first school envisaged in this initiative: a boys' boarding school, a low fee-paying, value-based excellent school. Is a partnership with this initiative feasible, possible or desirable?

Congratulations on your first 100 years! Thank you, Lord for WPPS, its founders, owners, benefactors, parents, boys, teachers and old boys. Through this service and celebration, we rededicate it to you today. May it continue its witness in education as it informs, forms and transforms all into your likeness. Amen.

+Thabo Cape Town

'Give Education Privacy it Needs'

Education has been a key theme of our Provincial Synod. Bishop Peter Lee of the Diocese of Christ the King heads ABESA, the Anglican Board of Education for Southern Africa. Today he has the following letter printed in the Mail and Guardian:

Mail and Guardian, Letters to the Editor, October 4 to 10 2013

Give education privacy it needs

In their article “Privatisation vs the public good” (September 27)Salim Vally and Enver Motala rightly cite section 29 (1) of the Bill of Rights – “Everyone has the right to a basic education” – but appear to overlook 29 (3), which says “Everyone has the right to establish and maintain, at their own expense, independent educational institutions” (subject to certain conditions).

Anyone who studied for an HDipEd or equivalent in the 1970s would hear, in Vally and Motale’s article, an echo of the old case for comprehensive schools in the UK – plausible in theory but long ago abandoned, for entirely educational reasons, in favour of a more diversified and workable system.

Of course they are right to challenge the commodification and commercialisation of education; that understanding of ‘privatisation’ is hardly what the drafters of the Bill of Rights had in mind.

The education department is right to chase the sleazy pavement academies out of business. But it is a cheap shot to lump together “high-cost or low-cost private schooling” and state that these are all punted as “the solution to the problems of education systems”. There is a huge difference.

Most low-cost operations are costly non-profit experiments run by NGOs, churches or civil society groupings. They are not run as “the solution” but as one part of a mix which may be of help, both in adding to the stock of functional school places, and as possible upliftment models. These operations can demonstrate “another way” both academically and in other dimensions, of what schools might be in our struggling society.

The problem is that sometimes, and in some settings, independent models – and not just the elite ones – become educational lighthouses which show up the inadequacy of local public schools, and are then resented; hence the current efforts to “dumb down” independent education to the level of the lowest.

This is not about tooling up artisans to provide fodder for capitalist employers; it is about the right of our child citizens to an education adequate for survival in the global village.

And it is about having some respect for those child citizens in their own right – the very thing Bantu Education set out to destroy and which we have yet to set in place in our democracy.

Of course it would be ideal if the public schools were good enough to render independent education superfluous; that is why there are no independent schools in Canada.

But until the public system can fulfil its constitutional obligations to the great majority of our child citizens, we should all be bending our efforts to achieve that, rather than chipping at those entities that are already delivering this basic right to the children and their families – not for profit but for the common good.

We need a collaborative approach, not a hard-edged one.

Peter Lee, Anglican Board of Education for Southern Africa