By Gregory Shullai
It is common knowledge by now that the Church of North India is facing a crisis created by the Synod of the Church of North India – not only in the Diocese of North East India (DNEI) – but in just about all of the 28 Dioceses under its management and control. To manage and control with the objective of promoting the basic structure of the churches under the umbrella of the CNI is this not the contradictory promise of the Synod of the Church of North India? Instead, is it not a fact that the real problem that the CNI is facing is its lack of taking disciplinary measures against the erring bishops? And, this apparently being the case, is it not right and proper for every right-thinking individual to ask, “why has all this repression of everything noble and good set in? and why is the Synod not acting against the errant bishops?” What astonishes the congregations of the hundreds of Pastorates under the CNI is the religiosity that they were handed down and the tremendous amount of gratitude that emanated from it in the early years of the CNI – the kind of bishops who stood to represent the CNI were all very noble ones. It is only recently that the rabble and riff-raff have come to dominate the CNI; greed has overrun religion; and everyone among the bishops appear to be preparing for when they would become the Moderator.
Hitherto, about a decade or so prior, men and women great and small bowed reverently before the bishops and the Moderator as the enigma of self-constraint and voluntary renunciation: why did the people bow? They sensed in these holy men – presented by their fragile and simple appearance – the superior force that sought to prove itself through constraining themselves from the pleasures of this world and in preference of a lifestyle epitomised in the Sermon on the Mount (Mathew 5:1-10). In their bishops the congregations of the CNI recognized and knew how to honour their own strength and joy in conducting themselves in their daily chores: they knew that they honoured something in themselves when they honoured the Moderator and the bishop. In addition to this, the sight of their bishop or Moderator aroused in them a suspicion of the themselves because of the enormity of the denial of a better lifestyle and occupation which they understood could not have been chosen for nothing. The rich and powerful among the congregations saw a different power in the bishop, a power free from fear, a different power that could not be subdued…it was this inherent power in the bishop which compelled the congregation to bow before the bishop and the Moderator. Furthermore in the Old Testament, the Bible teaches that there were men of so grand a stature that no other nation throughout the world could stand beside them and so naturally one stands in trembling before these remnants and legends, and even more so when they read of the life of their Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who went even to extent of giving his life for the sins of the world.
Then why the decline today? The kind of bishops we have in the CNI now thoroughly refute the nature of the earlier bishops and Christ upon whom the church was founded. The bishops of today refute everything good, they do not have ears to hear nor eyes to see and if they heard and saw they still would not know how to help except if it be to help themselves. The worst thing is that the bishops of today, essentially the bishop of the DNEI, is more engaged in selling mortgaging and leasing the assets that were created by his predecessors, and he seems incapable of making himself understood as to why he is doing all these things; is he himself vague of what he means or is it that he is amassing whatever he can in preparation for his retirement? This is what I have come to understand in the course of the many conversations and from the asking and listening to be the cause for the decline of the CNI in the North East of India and throughout North India as well. It seems to me that the religious instinct in the CNI is indeed in a vigorous decline – it is very apparent to the inquisitive onlooker that the CNI today rejects any theistic logic with profound mistrust.
Earlier I had written an article on “The CNI Saw the True Cause but Followed the Worse” which was carried in The Highland Post Shillong on the 12th Dec 2023 in which I had stated, “They were aware of the infractions on the part of the Moderator and the Synod, and they had reported to and requested the Moderator and the Synod to inquire and take action against those that were flagrantly corrupting revenue earned from the Schools and Hospitals, they had even reported the selling off church lands in prime locations at ridiculously low prices to chosen individuals but their reports and appeals fell on deaf ears. The implied consent to the indulgence of bishops in the sale of church lands and the embezzlement of school and hospital revenues distracted the Synod from its duty towards record and account maintainance, hence the resultant revocation.”
One would have thought that with the kind of charges and the sentences that were raised and delivered respectively against the office bearers at the Synod in the past, (Moderator P.C. Singh and Co) some disciplinary action would have been taken against the errant bishop of the DNEI, but contrary to that hope, corruption continues unabated… instead has gone to greater “depths.” The problems faced and echoed by the congregations were not solved even to the minutest extent: the crimes of the bishop became all the more prominent, and bold and daring to anyone who appreciated investigating church fraud and forgetfulness of the promises made by him when he was consecrated as a bishop. Forgetfulness is not merely because of the lack of inertia on the part of the one to whom complaints were made, as many would imagine, but rather an active – and in this case, a definite case of repression of that which was brought to the notice of the Moderator and the Synod. It came to be understood that there was something like “I give you take – you keep shut” between the bishop and the Moderator so that what the Moderator was alerted to did not enter his consciousness, or if it did only as little as possible so that a subsequent “I give you take” deal was kept intact. This way the doors and windows to the consciousness of the fraud being perpetrated in the different Dioceses were and are being closed for as long as this give and take operation remains undisturbed; and the noise and struggle of the complainants makes no impression on the tabula rasa of the Synod or its authorities, thereby making room for bigger and meaner kinds of corruption, and above all for the ignoble functioning of the Moderator who went on actively forgetting so that this apparatus of discipline instituted is suppressed and damaged and ceases to function properly and which may be compared to someone disturbed by a constant attack of acute indigestion and acidity. Now this creature (authority) that is fed to remain forgetful grows and gains a robust health in that evil direction forgetting every promise made, breeding in himself an opposing faculty to those promises when the person was ordained or consecrated to the tasks of a holy deacon, presbyter or bishop.
It can be argued that to breed a man into becoming a priest one must first distinguish what it means to be a priest from an ordinary man’s point of view; which is that a priest essentially arouses in the common man a reminder of what is moral and immoral, and that in the elevation of their priest in society is, in a way, interpreted as ‘happening to us’. This is a very simplified way of putting a very paradoxical task that we have set for a priest and for ourselves. And it is bcoz of this that we (the laity) have created for ourselves some of the greatest problems we are facing in going about our daily lives at present. The current episode, Synod verses the Diocese of North East India, is one such problem. Let me give a brief summary of how all this came about and what it precipitated into on the 13th August 2025.
The laity of the DNEI have been complaining endlessly to the Synod against the misdeeds of Michael Herenz the bishop of the Diocese of North East India. These complaints resulted in the Synod sending an Inquiry team in January of 2025. The team visited many Pastorates, including the Shillong Pastorate, and every Pastorate echoed the same demand, “get rid of Michael Herenz as the bishop of the Diocese.” The inquiry team made promises that action would be taken in February 2025. February came and went …no action, to this day still no action. The Synod headed by the Moderator had become forgetful and was apparently being fed so well that forgetfulness became the most powerful muscle in the realm of the physio-psychic structure of the Synod. But this forgetfulness to act against Herenz was constantly being abrogated by repeated reminders from the congregation of the DNEI. It finally boiled down to the priests of the DNEI holding a meeting on the 18th of June 2025 in Gauhati in which a resolution was passed whereby the priests would visit the Synod in Delhi to air their grievances in public and in private if possible. This move awakened Herenz into action and in his twisted way of ordaining the future in advance, he made a reduction in the numbers of the licensed priests by suspending and terminating the licenses of the priests whom he knew would be among those that were headed to the Synod to complaint against him, but that didn’t deter the priests. Priests from all over Assam including priests from Jowai and Shillong joined in the ‘yatra’ to the Synod. To ordain the future in advance in this way Herenz needed to first learn to distinguish necessary events from chance ones, to think casually, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with certainty what is the goal and what the means to it is, and in general to be able to compute and predict properly. Herenz assumed that he could perfectly calculate the steps that the priests would take and that their steps would be just as certain as the image of the step he would take, in going about such a task, as if he were standing security for his own future which is what every devious soul normally does.
The end of this process was that the priests did what they thought was best and landed up in Delhi on the 13th of August 2025 in front of the CNI Bhawan. To cut a long story short, the Deputy Moderator came out and accepted the letter of complaint against Herenz and the priests returned to their respective pastorates in the DNEI. As of now there is no reaction that has come out from the Synod. If we place ourselves at the end of this tremendous process where the fruit of the repeated complaints are yet to ripen, we can perceive that the morality and custom of the Synod and its Moderator will eventually reveal what is their actual character.
