Bishop Richard Condie’s Presidential Address to the First Session of the 56th Synod of the Diocese of Tasmania, which was held in Launceston on 13 and 14 June 2025.

 

You are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. (Ephesians 2:19-22)

What an encouragement to us as we commence our Synod to know we are joined together as citizens with God’s people, as brothers and sisters in his household, and indwelt by the Spirit of God himself, gathered around Jesus as our cornerstone, our guide and the reference point for all that we do. Over these next two days, may we be that holy temple of the Lord.

Welcome to the first session of the 56^th Synod of the Diocese of Tasmania. This is a unique and important gathering of leaders from across the diocese, as we set direction and speak about matters of importance to our common life. Here we work to guide our mission and ministry priorities in light of our overall Vision. This is the place where we take counsel with each other and make significant decisions about the direction of the diocese.

Anglicans are said to be episcopally led and synodically governed. That is, in each diocese a bishop leads the ministry as the “chief minister and pastor”. In Tasmania, this means I have a particular responsibility for maintaining the teaching of the apostles and doctrinal orthodoxy, for leading in mission, for the conduct of worship and for the appointment of our ministers. But Anglican bishops don’t have absolute power; we are governed by the constitution, canons and ordinances, (ie laws and rules) that are put in place by the whole church through their synods. Synods are made up of clergy and lay people so that each perspective gives direction to the whole, and bishops heed the advice of their people through the voice of the synod and comply with the ordinances that are agreed by them.

Gathered here are people from across the diocese: all the clergy who made a commitment at their ordination to participate in the life and councils of the church; many of our lay ministers serving in parishes; chaplains in our schools, hospitals and prisons; lay representatives from each parish; our youth representatives (and a handful of lawyers to help keep us on track). Please stand if this is your first Synod meeting. Welcome to you to the formal gathering of the wider Tasmanian Anglican family. We are so glad you are here.

Sometimes Synod gets a bad rap, as being boring and irrelevant. There is no doubt that some things that happen in a meeting like this will be a bit technical, and some of our meeting processes will be hard to follow and seem unnecessarily formal. However, I want to encourage your full participation. Please don’t take this meeting for granted. Some other denominations don’t have a chance like this to hold their leadership accountable and to speak into the direction and priorities of the whole. This is your opportunity to put your views forward, your opportunity to shape direction, your opportunity to be involved in the life of our diocese. We want to hear from you. So please bring your best self to the task. Participate. Follow the debates. Ask questions. Form an opinion. Be courageous. Share it with us. Bring your expertise, your experience, and your own discipleship and contribute what will be best for the whole.

I particularly want to encourage the younger voices in the Synod. While many in the room are older, we love hearing from young people. You bring a perspective that benefits us all, and you are just as much a part of this, as someone who has been coming for 40 years. To everyone, please don’t be worried about the formality of the meeting. You will hear some wonderfully crafted speeches, but you don’t have to live up to that standard. Just telling us why you are leaning towards a particular opinion is really helpful. If you don’t understand what is happening, ask someone at your table. We will help you with process, and we want everyone to feel comfortable.

Please be at prayer for our gathering. The psalms remind us that “unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain”. We need to ask for God’s wisdom in decision making. We need his grace in our interactions with each other. We need his provision for our plans. We need his power for our ministry. So let’s continually call out to him. We will break at different times in the Synod to spend time in prayer.

Why?

“Start with why”. This is the title of book by Simon Sinek, where he says before you start thinking about what to do, you must think about how to do it, and before you think about how to do it, you must settle why you do it at all. Why are we here?

As part of my 10-year tenure review I was recently re-reading the 2017 Diocesan Vision. It was extremely encouraging as I saw that some of the things we set out to do have become a reality – the strengthening of a gospel culture in the diocese, the growth of parish ministry, stronger, more effective parishes, growth in chaplaincy and work with our agencies and schools, the transformation of the clergy team, just to name a few. There have been a few curve balls and distractions in that time, but by and large we have achieved a lot of what we planned.

But more important than that, I was struck by the “why”. Our Vision and the Convictions it is built on construct that “why” that drives us. So, I thought it might be helpful at the start of a new Synod to revisit some of these things as the guiding principles for what we are trying to achieve.

Convictions

Back in 2017 we settled on 5 convictions from which our diocese would operate. These are statements that we believe to be always true and provide guidance for us.

• Jesus Christ is the head of the Church …
• And He has sent us to make Disciples …
• We make disciples by Word, Prayer and Service …
• Supported by fruitful godly Leaders …
• God being our provider, and us stewards of his gifts

 These are great convictions. This is what we said:

• Jesus Christ is the head of the Church …

We are confident because we know that God is working out his sovereign purposes, and that his church will prevail because Jesus is its Lord and Head. We respond in humble service to his Lordship in the power of his Spirit.

• And He has sent us to make Disciples …

Propelled by God’s love, the purpose of the Church is to go into all the world and to make disciples of Jesus, baptising and teaching them to obey everything that Jesus commanded. There are many good things we could do, but this is our primary task and the centre of all of our activity.

• By Word, Prayer and Service …

God builds his church by preaching the Word, and through the prayers of his people, supported by their loving service of the world. Spiritual vitality is found in the biblical gospel, and is expressed in our ministry of Word, sacraments, and prayer and through acts of service.

• Supported by fruitful godly Leaders …

God uses faithful people who have a mission heart to lead his church into growth. Therefore, we need gifted clergy and lay leaders to serve in and through our churches.

• God being our provider, and us stewards of his gifts

God owns all the resources for ministry in Tasmania and is able to bless and resource the ministry to which we are called. We need to be good stewards of these resources, unlocking and deploying them for His service.

We still believe these things and trust that God is working in line with these convictions for our good and his glory.

Vision

They all come together in our Vision for the Diocese: to be a church for Tasmania, making disciples of Jesus. As I have said many times before we want to be FOR this great state of Tasmania, for Business, Government, Healthcare, Education, Media, Arts, Families and Individuals. Many people in Tasmania are for these things, but the thing that we can do for them that no one else can do, is make disciples of Jesus. And we believe from our convictions that this is the best thing that we can possibly do.

Mission

All of this “why” drives our “how” and our “what”. How we go about living out these convictions to be a Church for Tasmania, making disciples of Jesus is still well expressed in our 4 areas of mission.

1. Building a network of confident flourishing parish centres
2. Developing partnerships with Anglican agencies and schools
3. Growing missional chaplaincy in hospitals, aged-care facilities, and prisons, and
4. Being a people of blessing to our communities

A Network of Confident Flourishing Parishes

Under the Parish heading we said this:

We will concentrate on developing parishes in our main centres that are strong, healthy, and growing, rather than simply maintaining Sunday worship in as many places as possible. We will build resilient rural ministries, with appropriate models of disciple- making. We will plant new churches as we are able.

We recognised at the time that just conducting Sunday worship services was not the mission, but seeing churches grow as strong and healthy disciple-making communities was the goal. We had seven expectations about what that strong healthy growth might look like. And you can think about your own parish as I describe this:

• Active disciple-making pathways: Each parish will have an executable plan for providing a clear pathway for people of every age and stage of life to become disciples of Jesus, who make disciples for Jesus. It will have clear strategies to engage with people of little faith or none, to evangelise them, to establish new Christians in the faith, and to equip them for our mission of making disciples.
• Active ministry to young people and families: Each parish will prioritise effective ways to minister to young people and families, with making disciples their chief aim. To this end we will also support the work of Anglican Camping Tasmania.
• Transformative public worship aimed at discipling: Each worship service, regardless of style, will be focused on the glory of the Lord Jesus, and aimed at growing our discipleship.
• A transparent culture of safety for all: The safety of all, especially children and vulnerable people, will be embedded in our leadership, governance and culture.
• Avenues of intentional prayer: Every church will have a variety of prayer opportunities on Sundays and through the week and include an intentional prayer strategy that is linked to disciple-making.
• A commitment to world mission: Our churches will not only care that the gospel goes forward in our local communities, but also in the rest of the world, by supporting mission agencies that are focused on the gospel.
• Leadership from well-trained biblically orthodox clergy: All the clergy in the Diocese will have a lively and growing relationship with Jesus and be convinced of the bible’s centrality, with a commitment to preaching and teaching it. Rectors will be highly skilled leaders of change, mission, and disciple-making ministries. They will be committed to ongoing personal and professional development, and review.

We have made significant progress in seeing these things become part of Parish life. For example, I would say that every parish has a well-developed culture of safety as we have seen safe church ministries embedded in our diocesan life. Our clergy are well-trained and biblically orthodox, with a lively growing relationship with Jesus, and a commitment to personal and professional development. Many are skilled leaders of change leading good work. We have invested heavily in the training and professional development of our ministers.

Many parishes now can tell you how they are moving people along a discipleship pathway. I can think of a number of Parishes that engage their communities through playgroups or Mainly Music, who evangelise through Alpha or Christianity Explored, who establish people in the faith in small group bible studies, and who equip people for leadership through the Ridley Certificate and local training opportunities. But there are many parishes where this is not the case, who need to develop these pathways. Those who have a clear pathway need to be encouraged to review and refine it so that they are more effective.

Some of us can point to ministry with young people and families. It was so encouraging to have over 70 volunteers and leaders at our children’s ministry conference last year, many in places where children’s ministry was fairly new. While we have a good children’s and youth ministry strategy in the diocese, there is much work to be done here. Too many of our parishes have little or no contact with young people and families, and we need to find ways to change that.

Some changes to public worship have occurred, but its connection to discipling is not often apparent. Again, we have a growth in the amount of prayer and world mission support, but we have so much more to develop here as well.

These are the basic building blocks of our Parish ministry. A renewed commitment to them and focus on developing them where they are not present, and strengthening them where they are, will need to be our ongoing focus.

I want you to consider your own Parish as we think about these priorities. Where are your strengths and growth areas? Where do you need assistance and help to fill in some gaps? Are there any ways this synod can help enliven the ministry happening in your part of Tasmania? How might what we are doing here this weekend help grow these things in your local parish? We want you to adopt these priorities because we believe they will strengthen our mission, and we want to support you as you do.

Church Planting

We decided back in 2017 that we wanted to plant churches where we were able. In God’s providence we were able to plant a church in the Southern Beaches of Hobart as part of the South East Tasmania parish, which is continuing to grow under the leadership of Dave Horne. St Clement’s Kingston planted a new congregation at 4.30 just before Covid hit, and that has continued to grow from strength to strength. St Stephen’s Wynyard planted a new Sunday afternoon congregation in 2022 but with the change in leadership in that Parish, the congregation has decided to close. We had a go at planting in Brighton, that was not successful for a variety of reasons. We are thankful to our partnership with BCA for their support of the Brighton experiment and for the Southern Beaches. Even though some of these new congregations haven’t lasted, we really want people to have a go at trying something new.

Over the last couple of years, the Church Planting Working Group has been trying to see what opportunities may arise to plant new churches in Hobart and Launceston. We know we need 5 things to establish a new church: a Planter, a Place, a Plan, People and Provision. A Planter to lead the plant, a Place for the new church to gather for worship, a Plan for how we are going to grow it, People to be part of a planting team and the Provision of seed funding to make it all happen. We believe that it doesn’t much matter which one of these things you begin with, but that all need to be present and undergirded by Prayer.

So today I want to update you on a couple of developments. The first one is that earlier this year we met a new Planter, who expressed a desire and calling to join us in Tasmania to plant a church. He has some unique giftings and a cultural background that opens up a new possibility for us. Neeraj and Manju Gautam are Nepali by birth and upbringing, educated in the US and Australia, and have a great heart for Nepali people living around the world. It so happens that the third most spoken language in Hobart is Nepali. We believe that a unique opportunity exists for us together with Neeraj to plant a multi-cultural church in Hobart especially reaching Nepali and other sub-continental people living there. We have secured sufficient provision from the New Ministry Development Fund and a number of other supporters including a generous grant from the Diocese of Sydney. So, we have a plan and planter, and all we need now is for Neeraj to be able to get a visa to work in Australia and we will be underway. I am pleased to report that just last week, our Visa Sponsorship status was granted by the Department of Home Affairs, and now we can apply for his Visa. Please join me in praying that this visa is granted and a new congregation can be planted this year.

The second development is also very exciting. We continue to be challenged by the fact that the municipality of Brighton is one of the fastest growing in Tasmania, with 20,000 residents, and that there are no protestant churches in the area at all. We had an attempt to plant there a few years ago, but now believe the time is right to try again. For the last 6 months or so, a group of people have been meeting each week in the municipality to pray for the Lord to move and pave the way for a new plant, but of course many have been praying long before that. A Committee of Management for the Parish of Brighton has been set up to provide oversight.

It gives me enormous pleasure today to announce that The Revds Joel and Tegan Gillie, who are currently assistant ministers at St Mark’s Bellerive, have accepted my invitation to lead the new church plant in Brighton. Joel and Tegan are both very gifted and come to the task with a strong recommendation from their Church Planter Assessments. Tegan has been a church planting intern with City to City, and I believe they will be able to lead this plant well. St Mark’s Bellerive will support Joel and Tegan as they prepare to be sent by them at the end of this year. I am also pleased to let you know that a week or so ago, we purchased a house in Brighton for the Gillies to live in. We have a plan for funding the plant in the initial stages and are now looking for people to join their planting team. We hope they will commence at the end of this year and start a new worshipping community by the middle of 2026.

Would you please pray for Tegan and Joel and their preparation this year, and for the Lord to go before us to prepare the way for a new church. Would you please be open to them visiting your church to encourage prayer and to raise up a team to go with them to plant? And would you consider, and ask others to consider, joining them in this exciting new venture?

The Church Planting Working Group will continue to encourage us to consider how we might plant more churches in the years ahead.

Leadership Pipeline

If we are going to strengthen discipleship pathways, start and grow ministries to families and young people, and plant churches, we will need a strong pipeline of leaders being produced to lead us forward. We have been working hard on this in the last few years. At one end of the pipeline are our parishes who are in the business of raising up leaders. I am encouraged as I move around seeing people, especially young people, stepping up to positions of leadership.

The growth of the Leaders in Training camps (LiT) is a key part in the plan. This year’s LiT for young leaders in school year’s 9-12 was at capacity, and in the 2026, we plan to expand that to two camps – one in the north and one in the south. These young people are already leaders in their local churches and will continue to be the leaders of tomorrow’s church. I am delighted that some of those LiT leaders are now youth representatives in this Synod.

I have been running young leader dinners a couple of times a year to encourage people to consider vocational ministry as an avenue of service. Last year’s southern dinner was the largest yet. Some of our young people have been going along to the Challenge Conference and considering the possibility of serving God in a more intentional way.

We are also investing in traineeships in a variety of different contexts – local parish, youth and children’s trainees, and this year for the first time a young ministry trainee placed in one of our Anglican schools. Sometimes these traineeships lead on to more formal study for qualifications in ministry. Some of our former ministry trainees have decided to pursue ordination and are now studying full time in preparation for a life of dedicated ministry service.

The pipeline finishes as these young people return to Tasmania to take up training positions as Curates and assistant ministers in a variety of different contexts. You don’t have to be a youth to get on board. Late vocations to ministry are also encouraged as people consider how they might serve God in their lives. We also still depend on people coming from interstate, and we are constantly talking to students at Ridley, SMBC and Moore College about coming to serve in Tasmania. It is working well, but we need more people to step up to it, and that means that every one of us needs to be praying in our local context for people to join the pipeline. Stephen and I are always keen to talk to people about ministry opportunities.

Last year at Synod we passed a motion asking the Diocesan Council to develop a strategy to fund theological training and ministry development and the provision of grants for stimulating ministry in Parishes. We have reported elsewhere on that project, but I thought it was important to say something here.

We have decided to fundraise directly to support the leadership development programs of the diocese – our grants program, and this leadership pipeline. Very soon each member of Synod and other leaders in the Diocese will be invited to become direct donors to a special fund for these purposes. We don’t want to cut into Parish giving, so we are seeking new and extra contributions to this leadership pipeline. Even if you don’t have anyone in your parish to send to LiT or to serve as a ministry Trainee, I hope you can still see that if we work together to raise up and support young leaders, we will see the leadership pipeline strengthened, which will, over time, lead to a stronger and more resilient Tasmanian Anglican Church. The Diocesan Newsletter is soon to land in your inbox, with an invitation to contribute. We hope by casting the net wide this can be a genuinely shared priority in the diocese. Please consider your generous support of this program.

Anglican Agencies and Schools

Schools

We continue to work with our Anglican Schools. Recently the Principals and Board Chairs met and reaffirmed our Anglican Ethos statement. It reads as follows:

Anglican Schools in Tasmania provide excellent education within the framework of the Christian faith, building upon the vision of our founders. We invite all members of the school community to live a life in response to Jesus Christ. This takes place in all aspects of our school life. We welcome people of all faiths and none in a nurturing and inclusive context.

I am pleased to give you a copy of this statement for your own use but also some for each of your parishes. Our hope is that this will appear in the school prospectuses. I have begun working with the chaplains on a video presentation for staff in our schools about this ethos and the values of Love, Grace, Humility, Costly Service and Hope that underpin this Christian ethos.

In addition to this, I am hoping to launch the Bishop’s Leadership Program next year. Each year I plan to invite student leaders from across the three schools to come together with me and some others to develop their leadership and teach them some more about the Christian foundations of our society and good leadership. Please pray for this initiative to come together.

You might also pray for the distribution of Luke’s Gospel to all of the middle and senior school students at our three schools. This is part of the Hope25 initiative. I have already distributed gospels to Grade 9-12 boys at Hutchins and will go to Collegiate and Grammar in the coming weeks. Please pray that the students receive the gospel and read it for themselves.

I am pleased that the new Principal of St Michael’s Collegiate, Dr Julie Wilson Reynolds is able to address us tomorrow about her vision for that significant Anglican School. I hope that you will grant leave to suspend our standing orders to allow this to happen.

Anglicare

We continue to value our relationship with Anglicare in the important work they do among vulnerable Tasmanians. The Board is excellent and represents our Anglican community well. It is a constant challenge to raise up the right leaders for this important area of service, so please keep praying for our Boards.

Anglicare work in many different fields and I encourage you to be familiar with their work through subscribing to their newsletters via their website. I have been so encouraged by their tenacity in holding the government to account over their failed promise to deliver a mandatory pre-commitment card for poker machine users. The work they do with supporting people in their homes through onsite aged care services is so inspirational. I commend the Anglicare report in our Reports Booklet to you, and especially the Anglicare Winter Appeal. It would be great if every Anglican church in Tasmania was behind this, donating food and money for people during the cold months of winter.

Agencies

We continue to value and have input to our mission agencies. Our partnership with BCA is a special one and we are thrilled that they are supporting a new appointment on the West Coast of Tasmania. This ministry in Queenstown and Strahan has been led by the tireless work of honorary ministers Kevin and Colina Bailey who have served for 19 years. They retired from this role in March, when we were joined by The Revd Katherine Hilton, who has been locum minister. A new partnership with BCA will commence in September this year, and I am thrilled to announce today that David Williams has accepted our invitation to serve in these remote communities. David will be ordained Deacon and Commissioned in September. We were also pleased to announce the joint BCA appointment of The Revd Tom Killingbeck to be Rector of King Island commencing in August this year. The parish has been vacant for 2 ½ years, so this is a great encouragement.

As beneficiaries of BCA’s support in these remote communities, along with supporting our work on the Southern Beaches, it would be great if BCA were on our regular mission support budgets in our parishes. Please have a chat with our Regional Officer, Josh Skeat about supporting BCA.

We continue to support the work of CMS Tasmania and have been delighted with the growth of the number of Tasmanian missionaries that the fellowship has sent. I commend the CMS summer Spur Conference to you as a great way to engage in global mission, which we know brings health to local mission.

And our very best wishes go to the Anglican Board of Mission who this year celebrate 175 years of work with First Nations people in Australia and around the developing world. Some of you will have been to the celebratory lunch today, but we do hope those parishes that support ABM will mark the anniversary on Sunday 26^th October. Again, we are privileged to have Megan Schwartz speak to us at this Synod about the work of ABM. I commend the ABM display to you.

Chaplaincy

I am delighted that we continue to expand our work with missional chaplaincy in our aged- care facilities, hospitals and prisons. We have a dedicated team of front-line workers in these ministries, who share gospel hope through practical help, a listening ear, and missional conversations. I was pleased as part of Hope25 to speak at the Royal Hobart Hospital chapel on a couple of occasions, and to meet with chaplains in the middle of their busy days. Please pray for Anglican Health and Welfare who have oversight of this ministry, and for direction for the way ahead.

Hope25

I couldn’t give this address today without a mention of Hope25. The General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia decided to have a season of intentional evangelism this year. In God’s grace that task was given to Mission and Ministry Commission of the national church that I chair, and the idea of Hope25: Hope in an uncertain world was born. We worked hard to resource churches across the country to proclaim the hope we have in Jesus. I am delighted that many in Tasmania have picked up the work, and we have been busy in sharing hope between Easter and Pentecost.

I’d like to share the short version of the Hope25 Thanksgiving video with you now. I commend the motion giving thanks for Hope25 later in our business paper. I hope then that we will share more of what we have done and give thanks to God together.

Looking forward

As we look forward to next year, there will be many challenges. Australia remains a tough place in which to do gospel ministry. Our wealth, comfort and complacency make it difficult for people to see the need for God. The secularists and hedonists have promised much to people and blinded their eyes. We will need to persevere sometimes in places where there is little fruit. The Lord calls us to faithfulness and courage as we continue get on with the job.

But there are signs that cracks are appearing in the façade of the secular agenda, where people are beginning to realise that they have been sold a lie, and that the promise of bliss in a godless world is not actually true. Our job is as it has always been, to be prepared to give an account of the hope that is in us to a questioning world. And as those cracks widen, my prayer is that we will be ready and waiting to fill them with words of truth and comfort. We have a wonderful gospel to proclaim. A Gospel of hope and life and love and beauty that is a salve for sin sick souls.

The Diocese of Tasmania is positioned well for whatever happens. We have a deep trust that Jesus is the head of his church, and that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. We know the work to which we are called, making disciples of the Lord Jesus. We know how to do it, by word, prayer and service. We have a great team, and the presence of God with all his resources in our midst. So, we can confidently be a church for Tasmania, making disciples of Jesus.

Let me close with these words from Ephesians 3

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen. (Eph 3:20-21)

 

The Rt Revd Dr Richard Condie
Bishop of Tasmania
13 June 2025