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.

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.

The action came just weeks after the repressive government of President Daniel Ortega revoked the legal status of 1,500 other churches, most of them evangelical and Pentecostal. Since 2018, 5,552 organizations — about 70 percent of the non-governmental organizations that existed at that time — have arbitrarily lost their legal status in the country.

The action was announced in the government’s Official Gazette, which cited the diocese for failing to file financial reports with the Ministry of the Interior in 2019-23 and for failing to register the members of its board of directors after March 2023. Similar charges were lodged against the other dissolved organizations, which included the Evangelical Alliance, Christian Reformed Church, and Moravian Church.

The Rt. Rev. Harold Dixon, who has served as Bishop of Nicaragua since 2019, told TLC on September 7, “With God’s help we are okay. Thanks to the Almighty, the churches are working normal. They don’t take anything from us. We will begin from zero. The good Lord is always with us.”

“Pray for us, that is the key,” he added.

Ramón Ovalle, provincial secretary for the Anglican Church in Central America, of which the Diocese of Nicaragua is a member, told TLC that the church’s primate, Archbishop Juan David Alvorado and the former primate, Bishop Julio Murray of Panama, plan to visit Nicaragua next week to meet with the church’s leaders so they can understand the situation more fully.

The Anglican Consultative Council issued a statement of support for the Diocese of Nicaragua at their 2023 meeting in Accra, urging Anglicans across the world “to join in prayer for our brothers and sisters in Nicaragua, that they may live in peace and justice with respect for their dignity, and guarantees for their human rights.” They also commended the bishops of the province “in their pastoral and prophetic efforts to raise a voice as a sign of hope for the people of Nicaragua.”

A March report by Nicaraguan journalist Francisco Bautista says that there are about 9,000 Anglicans in the nation of 6.9 million, and that they gather in 16 church buildings and several mission congregations. Its oldest church, St. Mark’s Cathedral in Bluefields, the capital of Nicaragua’s South Caribbean Autonomous Region, has an active Facebook page, and hosted a gathering of the diocese’s Anglican Church Women in June.

Anglican mission along Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, the “Mosquito Coast,” dates back to 1742, shortly after the region became a British protectorate, named for the Miskitos, a mixed Indigenous-African people, who were the dominant power in the region. The British transferred authority over the region to Nicaragua in 1860.

The Church of England transferred the Nicaraguan churches into the care of the Episcopal Church in the 19th century. Nicaragua became a missionary district in 1967, and was made a diocese in 1980. In 1998, the Dioceses of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Panama were granted autonomy, and combined with the Diocese of Costa Rica to create a united province, the Anglican Church in Central America.

Most Nicaraguan Anglicans still live in the Mosquito Coast region, where English Creole is the predominant language and cultural ties to the Caribbean are stronger than to the Spanish-speaking interior. The Moravian Church, which was also dissolved by the government on August 29, is the dominant cultural force in the region, with congregations in nearly every community.

President Ortega, leader of the Sandanista National Liberation Front, first led Nicaragua from 1979-1990. He was democratically elected as president in 2006, but during his second term, he seized full control of all branches of government, the police, and the military, and, in the words of a 2019 Human Rights Watch report, “aggressively dismantled all institutional checks on presidential power.” He is labeled as a dictator by many journalists and foreign governors.

Since 2018, when protests against cuts in social security brought hundreds of thousands to the streets, the Ortega government has grown increasingly brutal and repressive. Hundreds were killed in crackdowns, and many activists and social leaders were expelled from the country.

Since then, the government has taken numerous measures to bring all non-governmental organizations under its strict control. These include the passage of Law 977 by the Ortega-controlled National Assembly in 2019. Ostensibly intended to combat money laundering and domestic terrorism, it requires onerous registration and financial reporting for all nonprofits. An additional measure passed in 2022, Law 1115, imposes further registration and reporting duties and imposes harsh penalties, including dissolution, on organizations that fail to comply. The August 29 dissolutions were triggered by failures to fully comply with these laws.

“Nicaragua’s government uses laws related to cybercrimes, financial crimes, legal registration for not-for-profit organizations, and sovereignty and self-determination to harshly punish religious leaders and laypeople and arbitrarily shutter religious organization,” concluded the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) said in a June report.

Before the most recent dissolutions, Ortega had mostly used state power against the Roman Catholic Church, whose leaders had been more willing to speak out against his abuses, while leaving Protestant churches alone. According to a 2020 survey, 44.9 percent of Nicaraguans are Catholic and 37.6 percent are Protestant.

Activist Martha Patricia Molina, who fled the country in 2021, claims in a report released last week that 250 Catholic clerics and religious have been forced out of the country, including three bishops and 136 priests who were expelled by the state. The government expelled the Jesuit order entirely, taking over its Central American University in Managua last year, claiming it was “a center of terrorism.”

The USCIRF report notes that Ortega government officials have used language demonizing the Catholic Church, describing it as a “mafia” and calling priests “representatives of the devil.” Public processions were banned during Lent and Holy Week last spring, and government plainclothes and uniformed agents have increasingly entered Catholic churches and schools to “conspicuously monitor” services and activities, in an attempt to intimidate clergy and congregants.

In 2023, similar kinds of monitoring, as well as threats and acts of vandalism, began to be used by the government against the influential Moravian Church. Last December, 11 pastors of Mountain Gateway Ministry, an evangelical church founded by a Texas missionary, were falsely charged with money laundering, and each was sentenced to 11 to 15 years imprisonment and fined $80 million. In June, the government closed and seized the property of the evangelical Martin Luther King University in Matagalpa, claiming that it had offered courses not authorized by the country’s rector of higher education.

“One of the government’s biggest fears is that through religious leaders, the people of Nicaragua can have change,” Félix Navarrete, an exiled Nicaraguan activist, told The New York Times. “They are trying to avoid that at all costs.”