Description: Victor-David and Neneh-Briggite Mbuyi Bipungu.
By Sue Careless
THE Diocese of Montreal, facing allegations of misconduct against at least one of its candidates for coadjutor bishop, has elected the Ven. Dr. Victor-David Mbuyi Bipungu.
The electing synod met on May 3 and elected Mbuyi Bipungu on the fifth ballot. The voting began with a slate of seven candidates. He will succeed the Rt. Rev. Mary Irwin-Gibson, who has served as Bishop of Montreal for the past decade and will retire in October.
Mbuyi Bipungu was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and served as a Roman Catholic priest before being received into the Anglican Church of the Congo in 2014. He now serves as priest in charge of the French-speaking Église de la Nativité, in Rosemère and the English-speaking Parish of St. Simon & St. Bartholomew, in Laval. As Archdeacon of St. Andrews, he is also responsible for churches in the north of the diocese.
After he was elected, Mbuyi Bipungu addressed the synod, saying he had told his wife, Neneh-Briggite, that morning that it would be a miracle if he was elected.
“I’m the one born the farthest from here. I’m the least fluent in English. And you have chosen me—you have such courage,” he said to hearty laughter. “But I trust you because I believe in the Holy Spirit. The first victory today is everyone is here and we are the church. We have to learn from the past so we can look to the future to proclaim the good news of God’s salvation.”
Mbuyi Bipungu will be consecrated at Christ Church Cathedral on October 3, and will be installed as the 13th Bishop of Montreal. He will be the first Black person to serve as a diocesan bishop in the Anglican Church of Canada. (Peter DeCourcy Fenty, born in Barbados, was consecrated as an area bishop for the Diocese of Toronto in 2013. He retired in 2020.)
To elect an Anglican bishop, the candidate needs a majority of votes from the clergy and a majority of votes from the lay delegates.
In this election, the clergy expressed a clear preference at the outset—over one-third of their vote on the first ballot went to Mbuyi Bipungu. The Rev. Dr. Teresa Danieley, the Rev. Canon Dr. Bernard Olivier, and the Rev. Graham Singh were dropped after the first ballot.
The Rev. Rodney Clarke and the Rev. Canon Dr. Neil Mancor were dropped after the third ballot.
On the fourth ballot, the Rev. Dr. Deborah Meister and Mbuyi Bipungu were tied at 44 votes. She had 25 lay and 19 clergy votes while he had 19 lay and 25 clergy votes. He achieved majorities in both orders on the next ballot.
Just 24 hours before synod opened, two women spoke up on Facebook about the difficulties that they had faced in lodging safe-church complaints against one of the candidates, whom they did not name publicly.
In March the search committee announced the slate of candidates but said it would not endorse it. The committee said it had experienced “external pressures” that affected “the integrity of the ballot.”
On April 6, 39 delegates wrote a letter to diocesan authorities: “Ongoing uncertainty surrounding the election of our next bishop … has left many people feeling hurt, confused, and unheard.”
They also requested more information about the “external pressures” described by members of the search committee, nearly half of whom resigned before submitting their final report, as well an enumeration of the committee’s concerns about diocesan canons and safe-church policies.
Since then, Bishop Irwin-Gibson corrected her earlier statement that “no one had made a formal safe-church complaint against the candidates.” She has now acknowledged a harassment claim associated with Christ Church Cathedral that was resolved in 2021.
But two members of the search committee have since told TLC that the committee had serious concerns about allegations against another candidate. The committee voted unanimously to ask that candidate to decline nomination, both members said, but diocesan authorities forced the committee to leave the name on the ballot.
As the crisis developed, several priests who recently served in the diocese spoke out publicly about significant problems they see in Montreal’s safe church policies and challenges they have faced in filing complaints.
The diocese replied that the “Safe Church policy is to be reviewed by the Diocesan Council following the episcopal election” and that it “will look at reviewing our existing safe church protocol to ensure that our policy evolves and reflects best practices.”
The Rev. Canon Jesse Zink, principal of the Montreal Diocesan Theological College and canon theologian in the Diocesan of Montreal, said the leadup to the synod “has been hard and necessary” but he now sensed “resolve and determination.”
“In all of the side conversation that happened [at synod] and in the vote itself, it seemed that the message the synod was sending was, ‘We know we have a lot of things to work on and we want to work on them with you, Victor-David.’”
Zink posted online (https://riskingchurch.substack.com/p/a-new-bishop-of-montreal): “This is an excellent result. Victor-David has served on the board of the Montreal Diocesan Theological College for a number of years and I know him as a funny, prayerful, smart, thoughtful, collaborative, and humble person, who preaches well and presides beautifully in worship. He is a delight to work with and will be a wonderful bishop.”
Although originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mbuyi Bipungu has ministered and studied in Québec for 21 years.
He was raised in the modest home of a devout Roman Catholic family. He discerned a calling to the priesthood through his involvement in youth associations and an acolyte club. In 1996 he was ordained in the town of Luebo, DRC, and earned his doctorate in philosophy from the Université de Montréal in 2013.
After 17 years as a Roman Catholic priest (ten of them in Québec) he was received as an Anglican priest in Kinshasa in 2014.
In his cover letter to Montreal’s search committee, he wrote that his transfer was “inspired by the synodical conception of governance” he saw in Anglicanism “and the more evangelical and attentive openness to the changes our world is undergoing.” In the ten years he’s been with the Diocese of Montreal, he has appreciated “the great openness and collective readiness to recognize our diversity as a gift from God. He wishes to “welcome everyone without discrimination.” The denomination’s future in Québec depends on continuing to “tackle the roots of the racist and colonialist attitudes that have shaped our history.”
He added: “Drawing on my immigrant status as someone born outside the natural and original environment of the Anglican tradition, and whose primary language is not English, I am excited by the possibility of enriching our common mission with a broad perspective drawn from my formal education, my knowledge of the other parts of the Anglican Communion through my African culture, and my ability to understand French-speaking Québec.”
Besides being a francophone, Mbuyi Bipungu is fluent in three Congolese languages (he spoke Lingala as a child at home) and is conversant in Haitian Creole and English. He and his wife have three children. And for relaxation he enjoys playing soccer and jogging.
In written answers to the search committee’s questions, Mbuyi Bipungu said he believes a bishop’s role should be based on vison. “It is not about power” but “visionary leadership” that with teamwork will “bring about invigorating change.” Neither a priest nor a bishop should be a “supreme leader who makes all the decisions,” he wrote, but all the baptized share in “proclaiming the Gospel of Christ and caring for the faith community.”
When questioned about financial resilience, he said the synod office should “live within its means” and “a Diocesan Finance Team Advisory Board should be appointed to help parishes meet the minimum requirements for their operation. If necessary, the bishop should encourage parishes to make better use of their church halls, which are often leased at lower rates.”
If necessary, “a system of redistribution would have to be set up to enable less privileged parishes to survive, for example through diocesan subsidies to cover insurance and renovation costs or ministers’ wages. Selling off buildings should not be the first option.”
The Diocese of Montreal is no stranger to having bishops and clergy from overseas, though in the past they usually came from England and Ireland. But in recent years, new clergy have come from places like Costa Rica, Congo, Haiti, and Kenya, reflecting the global nature of Christianity.
Mbuyi Bipungu is not the first African bishop in the Anglican Church of Canada. The acting primate, Bishop Anne Germond, is from South Africa.
Zink said he was aware that “organizations long dominated by white men tend to turn to ‘first’ candidates (first woman, first black person, etc.) when they are in distress. Victor-David is not and won’t be a miracle-worker and we can’t expect him to be.
“We can carry on with ministry here in Montreal with new heart, new courage, new clarity about the work that needs to be done—and a new bishop.”
The diocese encompasses the City and Island of Montreal, the Laurentians, the South Shore opposite Montreal, and part of the Eastern Townships. It has 82 clergy in active ministry and 72 parishes with about 9,000 members on its parish rolls.
In earlier times, when Montreal was the largest Canadian city and the centre of commerce in the country, the diocese thrived. In recent decades, however, as Toronto has overtaken Montreal in size and influence, the English-Canadian population in the diocese has shrunk dramatically, forcing the merger and the closure of many parishes.
The diocese’s original membership of 25,000 150 years ago has shrunk by over one-third, even as the total population in the civil region has expanded from about 70,000 to over 3 million—a 9,000 percent decrease in its proportional importance. Hence the diocese’s decline far exceeds Montreal’s relative loss of prestige to Toronto.
The wider Montreal metropolitan area of 4.3 million people is considered the fourth-largest French-speaking city in the world. According to the 2021 census, there are almost 179,000 Canadians of Haitian origin in Canada, 87 percent of whom live in Québec—mostly in Montreal.
A francophone bishop who also speaks Haitian Creole and who would be willing to seriously address safe-church concerns could be a gamechanger. TAP
This article first appeared in The Living Church and is reprinted with their permission.
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