The Anglican Communion’s newest province has elected its youngest primate. The Rt. Rev. Vicente Msosa, 43, was elected to lead the Anglican Church of Mozambique and Angola (Igreja Anglicana de Moçambique e Angola, or IAMA), by its provincial synod on November 15. According to the CIA’s World Factbook, Angola is the world’s third-youngest country by median age, and Mozambique is its eighth-youngest.
Msosa has served as Bishop of Zambezia, a missionary diocese in Northern Mozambique, since it was created in 2021. He was previously the fourth Bishop of Niassa.
He succeeds the province’s acting primate, the Most Rev. Carlos Matsinhe, who stepped down on reaching the mandatory retirement age in July. Last December, ten of the province’s 13 bishops called on Matsinhe to retire early after Mozambique’s National Elections Commission, which Matsinhe chairs, was widely criticized for ignoring vote-rigging in a landslide election that maintained the FRELIMO Party’s hold on power.
Msosa worked as a teacher before preparing for the ministry at the College of the Transfiguration in Grahamstown, South Africa. He pursued further theological study at Lake Malawi Anglican University in Lilongwe, Malawi, and Wesley Biblical Seminary in Mississippi, and is studying for a doctorate in mission, leadership, and development at the evangelical Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts.
He was serving at São Paulo Church in Lichinga and as Niassa’s coordinator for youth ministry and catechetical training when elected Bishop of Niassa by the Anglican Church of Southern Africa’s House of Bishops in 2016. Msosa was the youngest bishop in the Communion when consecrated in 2017 at 35.
Msosa was one of two bishops from Southern Africa to attend the third GAFCON Assembly in Jerusalem in 2018, and is said to be supportive of Anglican realignment. Along with most of the IAMA bishops, he attended the Lambeth Conference in 2022.
While committed to traditional teaching on human sexuality, the IAMA has not pursued affiliation with the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches and has not engaged significantly with GAFCON. Representatives of the province are active in the Canterbury-based Instruments of Communion.
The IAMA became the Anglican Communion’s 42nd member church in 2021, and gathers half a million Portuguese-speaking Anglicans in two non-contiguous African nations, both former Portuguese colonies. Eight of its dioceses are in Mozambique and four in Angola.
The Anglican presence in Mozambique is concentrated along the country’s southern and northern borders, because for most of the colonial period, Roman Catholic missionaries had exclusive rights in the region. Anglican missionaries from South Africa began working in Southern Mozambique’s Lemombo Mountains in the late 19th century. The Universities’ Mission to Central Africa established mission stations along Lake Malawi in the Niassa region at about the same time, sending out priests from St. Peter’s Cathedral on Likoma Island.
Archibald Patterson, an evangelical missionary from Liverpool, planted Anglicanism in Northern Angola almost singlehandedly in the 1920s. Supported only by his home congregation, St. Clement’s in Toxteth Park, he baptized thousands and trained local people as pastors and teachers.
Mission activity in both countries was severely limited by several decades of Marxist rule during the Cold War, and a series of civil wars and political crises. In the 1980s, as restrictions on religious activity began to loosen, Angolan Anglicanism, which had gone almost completely underground, was rediscovered. The first diocese there was founded in 2019.
In preparation for separation from the Anglican Church in Southern Africa in 2021, five missionary dioceses were created in Mozambique and three in Angola. Anglicanism has grown rapidly in the two countries, and has an increasingly nationwide presence in both.
In 2023, the IAMA elected the Rt. Rev. Filomena Tete Estevão — who serves the Diocese of Bom Pasteur, Angola — as its first woman in the episcopate.
