The newly reinstated diocese of Moosonee has elected the Rev. Rod BrantFrancis, a Mi’kmaq priest currently ministering to a Mohawk parish in Ontario, as its first bishop in a decade. BrantFrancis was elected March 26 on the first ballot.
Financial problems forced the northern Ontario diocese to make itself a mission area of the Anglican Church of Canada, without its own bishop, in 2014. Its finances have since then recovered, however, and last June its synod voted unanimously to restore Moosonee’s diocesan status. Ed Madill, chair of the diocese’s search committee, told the Journal the election came nine months to the day after that vote.
“The election was a historic day for the diocese,” he wrote in an email.
In the interim, the metropolitan of Ontario, Moosonee’s ecclesiastical province, has filled the duties of bishop for the mission area. Most recently, that has been Archbishop Anne Germond, with help from former primate Archbishop Fred Hiltz who has shared the duties as Germond also served as acting primate of the Anglican Church of Canada.
BrantFrancis is Mi’kmaq, originally from Newfoundland, and has worked in parish ministry for 30 years. He currently serves the parish of Tyendinaga, in the Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, near Belleville, Ont., in the diocese of Ontario. He previously served in the dioceses of Fredericton and Moosonee for about a dozen years each. BrantFrancis was trained as a priest at the Church Army Training College, which was based in Toronto at the time. As a student, he worked as a prison chaplain, and later ministered to seafarers as a port chaplain in the diocese of Fredericton before beginning his parish ministry there.
In an interview with the Anglican Journal, BrantFrancis said his time serving in the diocese of Moosonee had given him a deep appreciation of the heart and life of the people there. When he and his wife first moved there 20 years ago, he says, they lived in a fly-in community which was unlike any ministry context they had been used to before. But they were quickly embraced by their neighbours and learned the strength of that community, even among the difficult circumstances that come with living in the vast and remote regions of northern Ontario.
The crux of his ministry when he is consecrated as bishop on May 28, says BrantFrancis, will be making himself present to the people of Moosonee. It’s a diocese, he says, hungry for a hand-on presence.
“People are looking for a bishop who’s going to come and spend time in their communities, listen to them and get to hear their concerns and their hopes, spend time to pray with them and to laugh with them and to sing with them,” he says.
Within minutes of being elected bishop, he adds, he had received several invitations to parishes around the diocese and questions about when he could come.
