A banquet in the valley: Bishop Justin's 2026 Charge

The Church is in a season that will be harder, less comfortable and more uncertain than the one many of us have known. Still, it is also a season full of opportunity for the gospel. That was the message of the Bishop Justin’s 2026 Bishop's Charge.

He delivered the Charge to Synod at Elim Church in Porirua on Friday 16 October.

Justin reminded Synod of something he had preached often since the pandemic: the world had changed, and it would not go back.

"My analysis was that COVID did two things," he said. "It was the great reveal that the world was changing. We suddenly saw it was different. And secondly, it sped it up. COVID didn't cause it."

A few years on, he said, the Church finds itself in a situation he has never experienced in his adult life. Many people over 30 or 40 lived through "an unusual moment of human history", he said, marked by relative comfort, security and an expectation of steady prosperity.

"That moment has passed now," Justin said. "We're in a moment where we are facing significant global crises that we have no real ability to respond to."

He listed artificial intelligence, climate change, geopolitical instability and the polarisation "ripping us apart". He said many people have still not adjusted their worldview to this new reality.

To illustrate, he recalled a Christchurch friend's reflection after the earthquakes. People seemed to expect they would be as well off as before, or better. His friend had called that expectation absurd after a national disaster.

He told Synod plainly what to expect. "As a church, we're going to be ministering in a world where it will not be as affluent, it will not be as easy. It'll be more stressful than it has been before." He did not expect that to change in his lifetime. "I think we're back to how the world has normally been."

The good news, Justin said, lies in Psalm 23. He has been meditating on the psalm in his daily prayers for some weeks. He noted with a smile that Synod had just sung it in worship, and that Bishop Ana is shaping next year's Lenten studies around the same psalm.

"It's really clear that God says we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. There's no escaping that in the psalm," he said. "But as we walk through the valley, we find still waters and green pastures. You have to go through the valley. There is no choice, but in the valley is the provision and the grace."

He pointed out that the psalm's banquet is laid in the presence of enemies, not after they are gone.

"The world, my own life, and our lives together are so much more complex, so much more challenging, so much more difficult, and yet I find the still waters and the green grass, and I find the banquet," he said. "The two are not opposite."

Justin offered several reflections for parishes and church leaders.

First, he expects more to be stripped away. "More and more of our historical comforts and crutches that we took for granted, that we may have leaned on, will just be stripped away."

Second, his hope is in Jesus. "I don't have much hope in humans, but I have a lot of hope in Jesus," he said. "In a world full of comfort, where it just feels like progression, progression, progression, and luxury, luxury, luxury, who needs Jesus? I need Jesus. We need Jesus." Christians, he said, should not be people of despair. They should proclaim hope "by our lifestyles and what we say".

Third, he urged Synod not to be anxious. "Fear is rippling through our world," he said. "If you find yourself falling into fear and anxiety, can I remind you of the truth of Scripture? Do not be afraid, for God is with us."

Fourth, he called the Church to be a non-anxious presence and to protect its relationships. He said fear and anxiety are damaging relationships and tearing people down across wider society. "But not us. Not followers of Jesus."

Finally, he said he had never known a season when people were so open to the gospel. "We pray, God, revive your church. It's here. It's here," he said. "When the construct of the Western world that we grew up in, capitalism, materialism, has fallen, people are hungry for the good news of Jesus."

He spoke of how often he and his wife Jenny wish for "more workers in the vineyard". He suggested the valley itself may be where revival comes. "It may be that as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we find revival there," he said. "It's full of opportunity."

Justin closed with a story and a poem. A couple of years ago, just before Christmas, a funeral director phoned to say a woman in his neighbourhood had died and had asked for him to take her funeral. She had never met him, but had seen him out running. "I don't run, I jog," he joked.

He led the service on Christmas Eve at a beachside pavilion. There he read a poem by Catholic sister Carol Bieleck. In it, the speaker builds a strong house of rock beside the sea and keeps a respectful distance from it, until the sea slowly rises to the door. Flight and drowning both turn out to be the wrong answers. The speaker must instead learn to breathe underwater.

For a Church facing rising waters, Justin said, that is the call: not to flee, and not to despair, but to trust God and learn to live faithfully in the new reality.