Diocesan Synod met at Christ Church, Orpington on Saturday 5 July, at which Bishop Jonathan gave his Presidential Address.
Read it in full below.
Good morning, Synod.
I would like to begin by talking about my recent visit to Zimbabwe, and to our partner Diocese of Harare. My wife Toni and I travelled to Zimbabwe as part of a group of seven lay people and clergy from the Diocese of Rochester, from 11th to 21st June.
The particular occasion for the visit was that I had been invited to preach at the main eucharist at the Bernard Mizeki commemoration, which draws around 20,000 people from across the five Anglican dioceses in Zimbabwe.
Our group as welcomed with great warmth and generosity and Bishop Farai was keen to use the visit to introduce us to a number of different aspects of the life of the Diocese of Harare, including his vision for the Diocese and its work in parishes, schools and children’s homes.
The challenges faced by the church and the people of Zimbabwe are enormous. It is a country of great beauty and great natural resources, both in the form of minerals of many kinds and in the fertility of the land.
And yet so many of its people are living in dire poverty and great hardship, as the potential of the land is either not being exploited or else the profits from industries such as mining are not benefitting the vast majority of the people. In this context, the church is seeking to offer faithful Christian witness in the midst of a complex and difficult political and economic context.
What is very clear is that the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe greatly values its partnership with the Church of England and the Diocese of Harare especially values its partnership with the Diocese of Rochester. I am delighted that Bishop Farai will be visiting us in November, giving us the chance to explore further how we can partner together, supporting and learning from each other.
This is and must be very much a two-way relationship and we have much to learn from our Zimbabwean sisters and brothers, especially with regard to the depth of their faith and their resourcefulness in making the best use of often very limited resources.
Their generosity to us in this context was all the more remarkable and a great example and challenge to us.
A good deal of our visit was focused on the care and education of children and young people.
As well as the children’s home we visited, where the physical conditions were deeply challenging, we also spent time at a phenomenal secondary school two hours’ drive from Harare.
There we were met by highly articulate and motivated students, who told us not only about their academic work but also about the skills they were acquiring in welding, horticulture, and chicken and pig-rearing, including a graphic description by two fifteen year olds of how they slaughter the pigs.
Not something I could imagine on the curriculum of any of our diocesan schools!
We were particularly struck by the visionary leadership of the school, and I know that their Diocesan Director of Education is keen to explore how we might establish a partnership with our DBE and some of our schools here in Rochester.
The concern for the well-being of children was also reflected in the theme about which I was asked to preach at the Mizeki festival, where I was asked to address head-on the issue of child abuse and our Christian duty to ensure the well-being and nurture of children.
I also spoke about domestic violence and the responsibility of men to use their power and strength to nurture and care for their wives and partners, as well as their children.
This message was particularly well received by the members of the Mothers’ Union, which is led by Bishop Farai’s wife, and which plays a huge part in the life of the Church in Zimbabwe, as it does across the whole of Africa.
There are of course many, many problems facing the people of Zimbabwe, and the issues of child abuse and domestic violence are every bit as serious there as they are here, but I was struck by some fundamental differences in culture and attitude between Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom – or indeed between Africa and the western world.
One such difference focuses on the concept of Ubuntu – a word shared across several African languages – which loosely translated means “I am because we are”.
It is an affirmation that as human beings we are formed and nurtured and shaped through our relationships with other. We belong to one another, and we exist for each other.
This is in many ways a profoundly Christian concept: we are the body of Christ and members of one another. But it is a concept that has been profoundly undermined in our increasingly atomised and individualistic western culture, as we have been starkly reminded, I believe, by the passing of the Assisted Dying Bill by the House of Commons, and by the deeply troubling amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, in respect of women seeking to terminate their pregnancy after the legal limit of twenty-four weeks.
Every one of us would, I am sure, have deep care and compassion for women facing incredibly difficult situations, perhaps of domestic violence or coercion, but the loss of focus on the life of the unborn child is deeply concerning and to my mind represents the triumph of an ideology of autonomy and choice over mutuality and responsibility for the needs of the vulnerable.
Sisters and brothers, these are deeply sensitive and highly complex issues, but I do believe it is our Christian responsibility to raise them and to encourage debate about what kind of society we have become and what kind of future we want to bequeath to our children.
We have much to learn from the concept of Ubuntu and from an African understanding of humanity as a community of mutually connected beings and not just a collection of autonomous individuals.
Turning to the agenda before us today, I would like to express my huge thanks to everyone involved in producing the Annual Report and Accounts for 2024.
The report tells the story of much that is happening across our Diocese and needs of course to be read alongside the annual reports of the parishes and other organisations that go to make up the life of the Church of England in this Diocese.
The report demonstrates the vibrancy of the Church here in Rochester and the way in which we are increasingly coming together and supporting one other in the implementation of our Diocesan Vision and Strategy – not as some kind of a top-down plan but as part of our commitment to enabling the church to flourish in each and every place.
There are of course enormous challenges. As you will have seen, the Diocese is still facing a significant year-on-year financial deficit, though one that is showing signs of reducing. There is also a large number of vacancies in clergy posts across the Diocese. As the answer to a synod question indicates, Rochester is not alone in this regard.
It is a problem that is being experienced across the whole of the Church of England. When I was ordained in 1989 there were a little over 11,000 stipendiary clergy; now that figure is under 7,000. A great many clergy ordained in the 1980s are now retiring, and the Church has not managed to recruit sufficient numbers of clergy to replace them – quite apart from the fact that the average age of ordinations is now significantly higher than it was, meaning that we need more clergy to keep the same number of posts filled.
At the same time, of course, we now have a larger number of retired clergy with permission to officiate and we also have many more self-supporting clergy as well as licensed lay ministers than was the case thirty and more years ago. All of them make an absolutely vital and wonderful contribution to the life of our parishes.
But as we all know, the reduction in the number of stipendiary clergy has resulted in a really challenging situation, especially for the churchwardens and other lay people who are left trying to keep the show on the road for increasing periods of time – and I am so grateful for all that you and they are doing!
I can assure you that the Archdeacons, who oversee the appointment process, are doing everything they can to expedite things, but the reality is that there are simply not enough clergy to go around nationally, and that means we have to find new ways of doing things.
As you will have seen from the written answer, we will be holding a “Come to Rochester” day in September, underpinned by national advertising, and of course as part of our vision and strategy we are developing a well-being programme to support both clergy and lay leaders as they cope with the pressures of ministry.
There is one particular matter that I do want to draw to your attention, and it concerns the number of curates – and especially stipendiary, full-time curates – in this Diocese. Last Saturday I ordained seven priests and six deacons – wonderful candidates, all of them. But only one of the deacons is full-time stipendiary.
We desperately tried to recruit more stipendiary candidates, but this year it was not possible. For next year, we have potentially seven stipendiary deacons, all of them excellent candidates, and we would love to be able to offer them training posts – and we have more than enough parishes who would love to have them!
But the problem is that at present we cannot afford them – we simply do not have the money to pay and house them. So as things stand, we might have to say goodbye to some of them and let them go off to posts in other dioceses – which means we won’t have them in three or so years’ time to fill vacancies as Incumbent – and that would be tragic!
Now, I can assure you that Matthew has done everything he can to try to persuade the national church to give us some additional funding for some extra curacy posts. There has been some such funding available – but the way it has worked and the changing of the rules around the time we submitted our strategic funding bid has meant that we have not been able to access any of that funding.
This has been a source of considerable frustration, to put it mildly!
We are also looking at whether we can use some of the savings resulting from our current vacancy rate to cover these costs, and we will continue to pursue all such possibilities, but the reality is that unless we ourselves can find more funding locally, then we will have to let some of those curates go – and that they would therefore not be here in three years to help fill our incumbency vacancies.
And if you look at the accounts, you will see that we do not have the money because the level of Parish Offer that the Diocese is receiving from the parishes remains significantly below what it was before the pandemic.
And Parish Offer is the only realistic source of the additional funding that would be needed to enable us to retain those curates and those who will come after them in years to come.
Sisters and brothers, I know how hard it is to enthuse people about giving and I know how hard it is to balance the books and all the competing priorities that PCCs face year by year. I was a parish priest for twenty-five years and we went through some very lean and difficult times, even having to make staff redundant in the parish, which was very painful indeed.
All I would ask is that you go back and talk to your PCCs and your congregations and your colleagues in your Deaneries and other networks, and urge them to look afresh at what we are seeking to do – at what we believe God is calling us to do – in this Diocese and encourage them to consider once more what they can contribute to help that vision become a reality.
A vision of thriving growing churches in every community, from the richest to the poorest, from the inner city to the rural, from the high to the low. That vision is predicated on having a sufficient number of clergy – and especially full-time stipendiary clergy – not to do all the work but to work with and help lead and encourage and nurture the whole people of God.
And to make that happen, we need the resources – including the financial resources – to do all of these things!
Brothers and sisters, may I come back to that concept of Ubuntu: “I am because we are.” We belong to one another, we need one another, because we are the Body of Christ and members of one another.
Of course we have our differences, and we have to work out how to live with those differences, sometimes in difficult and painful ways. But this is about looking beyond our own needs and our own immediate situation, to recognise how much more we can achieve through our working together, releasing the resources to enable God’s work to flourish in every place.
As things stand at the moment, every time there is a vacancy in a parish, we are having to consider whether we can replace that post like for like, or whether we may need to look at a reduced clergy allocation – such as a part-time post – or pastoral reorganisation.
That is not something we want to do, because part-time posts are very hard to fill and because sharing ministry across parishes inevitably means, even with the best will in the world, less time and energy going into each place.
We are absolutely committed to doing everything we can to maintain clergy numbers across the Diocese – and that must include in places that are socially and economically challenged, not just those that are wealthier and more well-resourced.
When our parish was facing serious difficulties during the 2008/9 financial crisis, we took the tough decision to cut our own staffing rather than to reduce our parish share payments, because we were in a relatively wealthy area and we simply could not have looked our neighbours in Birkenhead and Wallasey in the face, knowing that by cutting our diocesan contribution would mean reducing support for them.
There are so many exciting things happening across this Diocese. There are great stories of work among children and young people, among deprived communities, among the elderly, and much more.
You can read about some of these in the annual report and on the Diocesan website. The strategic funding that we will be receiving will enable us to increase our capacity for mission across the whole diocese.
But we also need to ensure that we have the people on the ground – and especially the stipendiary clergy – to sustain the work of our local churches and to help lead the mission of the Church. We simply cannot do without that core capacity – and the only way to pay for that is through the contributions of our parishes through their Parish Offers.
Synod, I was so inspired by what I saw in Zimbabwe – by how much is achieved with so little. The dedication, commitment and generosity of people who have so little materially but who are so filled with joy and so full of hope.
We have much to learn from our African brothers and sisters, about their zeal for the gospel and their willingness to suffer for their faith – as some of you may be aware already, their congregations and clergy were exiled and excluded from their churches for five years between 2007 and 2012 through the political machinations of a corrupt leadership.
Wonderfully the Church grew through that time, both numerically and spiritually, until they finally won back their churches and came home rejoicing.
We are facing our own challenges in the Church in this country, both internally and in the wider culture of what we are part. It was by holding together, by digging deep and by focusing on the work of the gospel that the Church in Zimbabwe endured and indeed thrived during their time of exile.
My hope and prayer are that the churches in this Diocese will rise to the challenges we are facing, that we will recognise that God is doing a new thing amongst us and across the people of this land – and that he wants to do so much more. Thank you for your support and that of your parishes in helping to ensure that our vision may become a reality.
We are the Body of Christ: we belong to one another for all our differences and difficulties. Ubuntu – “I am because we are". Thank you.
The Rt Revd Dr Jonathan Gibbs
Bishop of Rochester
5 July 2025