LICHFIELD DIOCESAN SYNOD PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
Tuesday 30th June 2026
My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, as you will have heard, this will be the last time that I preside at a meeting of the Lichfield Diocesan Synod. I want to thank you all for your contributions, wisdom and support over the past ten years. Over the last decade, we have faced some real challenges together, and we have experienced some real blessing together; by God’s grace, we have continued to follow Christ in the footsteps of St Chad, as we take counsel for the life of the Church of England in this part of Mercia.
I do not know when the first meeting of this Diocesan Synod took place in its current constitution; no doubt some of you will be able to tell me, but I anticipate that it was probably in 1970, as diocesan synods were introduced into the life of the Church of England by the Synodical Government Measure in late 1969. That probably means that we are somewhere around our 200th meeting this evening. However, in this diocese in particular there is a distinguished prehistory of gatherings of this kind. In June 1868, my illustrious predecessor George Augustus Selwyn convened in this Cathedral a meeting of clergy and lay people under his presidency which he called a Diocesan Conference – he wanted to call it a Diocesan Synod, but that was felt by some to be too Romish-sounding, and to derogate in some way from the Queen’s Majesty (I would be glad of explanations as to why that was felt to be the case). In doing that, the bishop was acting as a pioneer in the Church of England of his time, was putting Lichfield firmly in the vanguard of the movement to synodical governance coupled with episcopal leadership.
The background to Selwyn’s innovation came from the fact that he had just that year, 1868, become Bishop of Lichfield, after spending an extraordinary 28 years as the first Bishop of New Zealand. He was a remarkably energetic missionary bishop, even by the highly activist standards of the Victorian age, devoting himself to evangelisation both of the Maori people and of European settlers. If you have never seen it before, I urge you to go and look at his memorial in the Lady Chapel of this cathedral, the colourful tiling on the walls depicting Maori warriors at one and Staffordshire miners at the other. One of the achievements of which he was proudest, though, was that in 1859 in Auckland he convened the first General Synod of the New Zealand Church – unusually involving lay people as well as clergy sitting alongside their bishop to govern the church together. I mention this because Selwyn’s Lichfield Diocesan Conference has a double significance for us tonight. First, it is the direct ancestor of our Diocesan Synod meeting here tonight – a reminder that Lichfield can be at the forefront of change in church life. And second, because this was an idea which came from Selwyn’s time in the church overseas: a striking reminder of the learning that can come from overseas links, which form the first item on our agenda this evening.
Sixteen years after that first Diocesan Conference met here, a well-connected English priest named Adalbert John Robert Anson was consecrated bishop and went out to establish a new diocese in the heart of the Canadian prairies, in what is now the Province of Saskatchewan in western Canada. Bishop Anson was a local man, a son of the Earl of Lichfield; he served curacies in Wolverhampton and Bilston before his ministry in Canada, and at the end of his life he came to be Master of the ancient Hospital of St John the Baptist in this city, still standing with its magnificent chimneys on St John’s Street. Anson enthusiastically exported his Staffordshire connections and ways of doing things to Saskatchewan; I am glad to tell you that in St Paul’s Cathedral in Regina there is a prominent portrait of St Chad, looking actually rather more like Adalbert Anson than an Anglo-Saxon monk. And the link between this diocese and the Diocese of Qu’Appelle has continued ever since, and is still alive and full of potential today: Bishop Matthew and I led a group there last month to deepen our relationship and plan ahead for the future. In Anson’s case, the flow of ideas and energies was initially from here to there: Lichfield was at the outset the mother diocese for Qu’Appelle.
Selwyn and Anson together show, though, that diocesan companionships flow in both directions, and as links endure and grow it becomes wrong to speak of either partner being the dominant or the junior: it is in both giving and receiving that we all find ourselves enriched and strengthened in our mission. What was true of New Zealand and remains true of Qu’ Appelle has been true also of our other links: the longstanding friendships we still have in South East Asia, with the Dioceses of West Malaysia and Kuching in particular – no longer official partnerships, but still marked by continuing contact and enduring prayer for one another; our ecumenical link first with the church in Mecklenburg and now in its wider belonging with the Nordkirche across the north of Germany; the vital companionship we enjoy with the Diocese of Matlosane in South Africa; and our more recent links with the United Diocese of Cork, Cloyne & Ross in Ireland and with Hyderabad in Pakistan. In all of these, as in the many, many other informal links which churches here enjoy with partners around the world, there is both giving and receiving; there is the mutuality and reciprocity which always marks the true Church of Jesus Christ, because it shows the pattern of mutual love which our Lord enjoined on those who would be his disciples.
The paper supporting this agenda item reminds us that ‘as in the days of the New Testament, so now today also we need to make this sense of worldwide belonging – which is core to our identity – visible, tangible and practical through working to create a density of sustainable relationships with particular dioceses in particular places. … Rooted as we are in every local community in this part of England, we are also linked by bonds of prayer and love with the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church spread across the whole face of the earth; to celebrate that wider belonging can profoundly enrich our parochial and diocesan presence.’
Amen to that, and I trust that this evening we will wholeheartedly affirm the importance of the companionship links in our life together; as the paper demonstrates, they can play an important part in our own strategic journey, and they can also be a blessing to our overseas partners. But that reciprocity of giving and receiving of course is not limited only to our international belonging. It needs to be the hallmark of all that we do and all that we are as a diocese. So, for example, the principle of mutual support is written into the way in which we organise our financial life; the outworking of our ministry is built on a parity of esteem and a shared responsibility between clergy and laity; the different theological spiritual traditions to which we subscribe, while sometimes they bring us into disagreement, are at their best when we allow them to be the means by which we can both learn from and respectfully challenge one another; and the life of this Synod itself is at its best – and by and large we have been at our best for most of the last ten years – marked by a readiness to listen carefully to experiences, views and priorities different from our own, and so to discern the mind of Christ for all his people today.
Since March last year, I have had the opportunity, together with others, to visit all five of our current diocesan companionship links. On each occasion, I have learned a great deal from our fellow Christians, and I have glimpsed some things that they might learn from us too; I have been enthused by the possibilities of both giving and receiving open to us both. And each time I have come back to this beloved diocese, and I have seen you, my brothers and sisters, ready and willing to work together in the same way, bearing one another’s burdens, recognising that each of us has needs to meet and gifts to offer, and rejoicing that the Lord is shaping us into a people for whom Paul’s words in Romans 15 ring true – words that the God of the lectionary appointed to be read in the at Evening Prayer tonight:
Each of us must please our neighbour for the good purpose of building up the neighbour … May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ … Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you.
My dear friends, thank you for welcoming me over the past ten years; and, as St Paul goes on to say,
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
+Michael Lich:, 30.06.26