ACNA Priest Elected Bishop in Madagascar

The call to Mahajanga, Critch told TLC, emerged from that gathering. Bishop Bill Atwood, who served until June as the bishop of the ACNA’s international diocese, said to Critch, “Father, can I rock your world? I think the Lord Jesus might want you to be a bishop in Madagascar.”

Atwood, Critch said, had been approached by the Province of the Indian Ocean’s primate, Archbishop James Wong, and the Rt. Rev. Gilbert Rateloson Rakotondravelo, Bishop of Fianarantsoa. “They reached out to Bill and said, ‘Do you have a GAFCON-minded guy who might be willing to come and serve as a missionary?’” Critch said.

The emergence of Critch’s call from the GSFA Assembly was also mentioned by GSFA’s chairman, Archbishop Justin Badi Arama, in a September 3 pastoral letter, which praised the election as an example of the “strategic connections” the GSFA aims to foster.

Serving ‘Pilgrim to Pilgrim’

Critch became one of four candidates in Mahajanga. The slate was approved by the Province of the Indian Ocean’s episcopal synod, which subsequently unanimously confirmed his election.

Critch told TLC that he didn’t think his standing as a priest of the ACNA was a matter of concern. “It did not come up,” he said. “The synod knew where I stood. … My assumption is if there were an issue, the bishops would have removed my name from the ballot.”

Critch will be the third bishop to serve the Diocese of Mahajanga since its founding in 2003. He succeeds the Rt. Rev. Samuel Speers, an Irishman who had served in the Church of England before his election. The primarily rural diocese in Northern Madagascar has 12 priests, who all serve without compensation. Most churches worship in Malagasy, which Critch has begun learning from a Christian couple in Saint Johns.

He’s not the first bishop to be called from the West to serve in the province in recent years. Since the 1980s, most bishops of the Province of the Indian Ocean have been natives of Mauritius, Seychelles, or Madagascar. But in 2004, the Diocese of Seychelles elected Santosh Marray, a Guyanese priest then serving the Bahamas, as its bishop. After leading the diocese for five years, Marray came to the United States, and has been the Bishop of Easton since 2016.

The Rt. Rev. Todd McGregor, who served as Bishop of Toliara in Madagascar from 2006 to 2020, was a lay Episcopalian from Florida when he came to the island as a missionary in 1991. He was later ordained as a priest of the Province of the Indian Ocean. Under McGregor’s leadership, the diocese grew from 11 to 108 churches, founded a theological seminary, and built a cathedral.

Critch said he was deeply humbled by the call to Mahajanga, and hopes to work with his new charges — “not in a colonial way, but pilgrim to pilgrim.”

“My heart is to come alongside these young priests,” he said. “They are joyous. They are Catholic. They are evangelical.”

He described being deeply moved by watching a video of an ordination in the diocese:

All the things we would do at Good Samaritan, in a very high church way, they do the same things; but the oils were brought in a Mason jar, and the vestments certainly weren’t Wippells or Watts, but there was a real continuity. I wept when they were singing the litany because the tones were the same ones we have sung at ordinations forever.

A native Newfoundlander and a graduate of Nashotah House Theological Seminary, Critch began his ministry in the Anglican Church of Canada’s Diocese of Eastern Newfoundland and Labrador. In 2008, he relinquished his license in the Anglican Church of Canada, and was received into the Anglican Network in Canada by his former bishop, the Rt. Rev. Don Harvey, whose pectoral cross Critch will wear when he is consecrated in Mahajanga in December.

He plans to divide his time between Mahajanga and Newfoundland, where his wife and 13-year-old son will largely remain, for the sake of his son’s education. He also expects to travel widely in North America to raise funds for new ministries in the diocese, following a model that proved successful for McGregor.

Critch says he is not concerned by the ways his new call intersects with the politics of Anglican realignment:

Serving the poor on the ground, and preaching the gospel on the ground, and digging wells in villages is more important to me than international politics. … If the Lord has called me to do this, and the bishops of the Province of the Indian Ocean have affirmed it, then so be it.

‘Hard to Know How to Adjudicate This’

The Province of the Indian Ocean is a church of eight dioceses, in the island nations of Mauritius, Seychelles, Madagascar, the Comoros, and Reunion. The six Madagascan dioceses have grown significantly in recent decades. Anglican mission in the region dates back to 1810, when England seized Mauritius from France during the Napoleonic Wars. The islands were served by both high-church and evangelical mission societies, a rarity for Anglican mission in the colonial period.

The province affirms traditional teaching about human sexuality, and has been involved in Anglican realignment in recent decades, while also participating in the Canterbury-based Instruments of Communion. Its 1973 constitution, written when it became independent of the Church of England, describes it as “being in full communion with the Church of England and the Anglican Communion throughout the world,” a definition that has clearly been tested by protracted disagreements over human sexuality in the last few decades.

In some ways, the Church of the Indian Ocean remains at the very center of Anglican Communion life. It sends delegates to the Anglican Consultative Council and a full contingent of its bishops attended the 2022 Lambeth Conference. Its former primate, the Most Rev. Ian Ernest, is the Archbishop of Canterbury’s personal representative to the Holy See and director of the Anglican Centre in Rome.

It has long been closely associated with the GSFA, and its current primate, Archbishop Wong, served a term as the vice-chair of the GSFA, and was among the group’s primary spokespersons at the Lambeth Conference. Wong was a regular participant in the Primates Meeting through most of his ministry, though he joined the other officers of the GSFA Primates’ Council in staying away from last spring’s meeting in Rome, in protest at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s complicity in the Church of England’s decision to allow the blessing of same-sex unions.

The bishops of the province also participated in the GAFCON gathering in Kigali in 2023, and some attended earlier GAFCON events. The church has applied to be a full member of the GSFA. In February 2023, it issued a statement reiterating its stance on human sexuality and saying that it had been “saddened” by the Church of England’s decisions about same-sex unions.

TLC repeatedly reached out to the Church in the Province of the Indian Ocean for comment on Critch’s election, and received no response.

Critch acknowledged to TLC that he knew his election was generating conversation online, though no Anglican churches have publicly criticized it.

“We do not comment on the affairs of other churches and therefore won’t be offering comment on this matter,” said Henrietta Paukov of the Anglican Church of Canada when she was contacted by TLC.

Archbishop Thabo Makgoba of the Church of Southern Africa, one of Africa’s senior primates, told TLC:

My strong desire for reconciliation in the Communion is a matter of public record and it pains me deeply whenever we fail to live up to the ministry of reconciliation. But since we operate on the principle that a Province should keep out of the internal affairs of another Province, I would prefer not to comment on an election in the Province of the Indian Ocean.

Christopher Wells, the Anglican Communion’s Director of Unity, Faith, and Order, told TLC,

All churches of the Anglican Communion are autonomous, and free to arrange their affairs ecumenically according to their own lights. The constitution of the Church of the Province of the Indian Ocean does not provide for a veto on episcopal elections — nor substantive consultation — with other churches or with the See of Canterbury.

Several member churches of the Communion have said that they are in impaired communion with Canterbury, and that they recognize full communion with the Anglican Church in North America. It’s hard to know how to adjudicate this, both relationally and theologically, guided by the Spirit. Ecumenical theology, and Anglican ecclesiological texts of recent decades, have rich resources to draw on here, as a forthcoming paper from the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCFO) will show.

There are good, scriptural, catholic, and evangelical reasons for the churches of the Communion to persevere together in charity and discernment, no doubt imperfectly.

IASCUFO, the Anglican Communion’s doctrinal commission, was charged by the Anglican Consultative Council in 2023 with developing resources to aid in “good disagreement,” potentially including guidelines for situations like Critch’s. Draft proposals for de-centering the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury as a focus of Anglican unity and identity were also discussed extensively with the primates at their meeting in Rome last spring.

Critch may be the first ACNA priest to be consecrated as a diocesan bishop for a church in communion with the See of Canterbury, but he is not the first to be elected. The Rev. Jacob Worley, a Trinity School for Ministry graduate and former Episcopal priest who led an ACNA church plant in Las Cruces, New Mexico, for five years was elected in 2017 as bishop of the Anglican Church of Canada’s Diocese of Caledonia.

The House of Bishops in the Canadian church’s Province of British Columbia and the Yukon refused to certify Worley’s election because he believed “it is acceptable and permissible for a priest of one church of the Anglican Communion to exercise priestly ministry in the geographical jurisdiction of a second church of the Anglican Communion without the permission of the Ecclesiastical Authority of that second church.” Worley then served an ACNA parish in the Diocese of Fort Worth, and is now bishop of the ACNA’s Diocese of Cascadia.

ACNA priests serve in several other Anglican provinces, and Atwood is a suffragan bishop in the Anglican Church of Kenya’s All Saints Cathedral Diocese. One of the bishops now serving Critch’s diocese, the Rt. Rev. Grant LeMarquand, was formerly an assistant bishop in the Diocese of Egypt, but he was canonically resident in the Episcopal Diocese of Albany when he was elected in 2012.

ACNA Priest Elected Bishop in Madagascar

PHOTO: Darrell Critch speaks about the church in Madagascar, which has called him as Bishop of Mahajanga. | Anglican Network in Canada

By Mark Michael
THE LIVING CHURCH
September 10, 2024

The Ven. Darrell Critch, a priest of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), was elected August 24 as Bishop of Mahajanga, Madagascar, a diocese of the Church in the Province of the Indian Ocean. Critch’s new diocese is part of an Anglican church in communion with the See of Canterbury, unlike the ACNA. This will likely make his ministry the first of its kind amid deep division across the Communion.

Critch, who will make his first visit to Madagascar this month, described the call to serve as a bishop on the other side of the world as “totally out of left field,” though he has been involved in mission work in Guatemala through the Anglican Church of the Good Samaritan, the parish he has served in Saint Johns, Newfoundland, for over two decades. He also served as a delegate from the ACNA to last summer’s Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) Assembly in Egypt.