ACNA Priest Elected Bishop in Madagascar

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.

Posted Date : 2024-11-25 15:50:00

Photo: ANiC

By Mark Michael

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 made his first visit to Madagascar this past September, 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 Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC) parish he has served in Saint John’s, Newfoundland, for over two decades. (ANiC is a diocese of ACNA.) He also served as a delegate from the ACNA to last summer’s Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) Assembly in Egypt.

The call to Mahajanga, Critch told The Living Church (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 John’s.

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.

 

The Province of the Indian Ocean

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.

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.

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.”

ACNA priests serve in several other Anglican provinces. One of the bishops now serving in 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. He is currently Adjunct Professor in New Testament & Missions at Packer College in St John’s.  TAP

For Mark Michael’s full article in TLC see https://livingchurch.org/news/news-anglican-communion/acna-priest-elected-bishop-in-madagascar

Editor’s Note: In a letter to the Anglican Network in Canada, Bishop Dan Gifford wrote that as diocesan bishop, Darrell Critch will prepare the diocese of Mahajanga for the election of its first Indigenous bishop. “His new position as a missionary bishop in Madagascar is not meant to be permanent… Archdeacon Darrell will remain the priest in charge at Church of the Good Samaritan…. In this season when he is travelling significantly, I will appoint a Vicar who will be responsible for the day-to-day operations of Good Samaritan.”

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