The Rt. Rev. K. Reuben Mark, Bishop of Karimnagar, was elected as the Church of South India’s moderator and primate at its synod in Chennai on July 21. The former seminary professor will lead the united Protestant church of 4.5 million members, the largest Anglican province in Asia, for a term of three years.
Mark’s elevation comes against the backdrop of the dramatic fall of his predecessor, Dharmaraj Rasalam, who was removed from office on corruption charges by the Madras High Court in 2023, and whose 2020 election as moderator was invalidated by India’s Supreme Court in May. Rasalam remains under investigation for taking bribes in exchange for promises to admit students to a church-run medical college.
Because of allegations of pervasive corruption, the Church of South India’s finances have been administered since April 2024 by two retired judges appointed by the High Court, R. Balasubramanian and V. Bharathidasan. The Supreme Court forbade synod elections last year, but with Mark’s election, which was overseen by Bharathidasan, authority was returned to its elected clerical officers.
Mark was elected as deputy moderator alongside Rasalam in 2020, and is seen by critics as a close associate of the disgraced former primate. He fended off an electoral challenge from the Bishop of Vellore, the Rt. Rev. Sharma Nithiyanandam, an advocate for constitutional reform, and was elected by 61 percent of synod members.
Binu Samuel Thomas, a member of the advocacy group Corruption Free CSI, accuses Mark’s supporters of vote-buying in a post on the group’s Facebook page.
“That Bishop Mark won may not be altogether a negative outcome. Because it helps keep the focus on the grave financial issues that have dogged the current Synod Administration for the last five years (2020-2025) they have been in power. There are some burning questions the current officers of the Synod, who are also ex-officio officer bearers of the [church’s trust association], have to answer,” he wrote.
Mark was ordained in the Diocese of Karimnagar, in Telangana State in central India, in 1988. He pursued advanced studies in homiletics at several universities in India and in Denmark, and was professor of homiletics at the ecumenical Protestant Andhra Christian Theological College for 20 years before his election as Bishop of Karimnagar in 2015. In addition to his duties in Karimnagar, Mark is acting Bishop of Medak and oversees dozens of congregations in North America in the Church of South India’s Diaspora Diocese.
The Church of South India was founded in 1947 as a merger of missionary-established Anglican, Methodist, Congregationalist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches in India’s five southern states, the most intensely Christian part of the country. About half of the church’s congregations were Anglican at the time of its formation. Hailed as a landmark achievement of the ecumenical movement, united Protestant churches were founded on the same model in North India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh in following decades.
With 4.5 million members, the Church of South India is the largest member church of the Anglican Communion in Asia, more than twice the size of the next-largest, the Church of North India. It is about three times the size of the Episcopal Church.
The church has 26 dioceses, 25 of them in five Southern Indian states and one, Jaffna, in Northern Sri Lanka. The church also has congregations in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as 31 in the United States and Canada that call themselves the Diaspora Diocese. Over 3,000 ministers oversee its 14,000 congregations, and the church operates 2,000 schools, 130 colleges, and 104 hospitals. Many of its institutions were founded in the colonial era and are endowed by historic trusts.
The church also has extensive land holdings, whose ownership and management have been contested in numerous court cases in recent decades. Last year, the Madras High Court considered, before ultimately rejecting, a petition to bring church properties under the control of a central statutory authority like those that currently oversee Muslim and Hindu properties in India. According to Corruption Free CSI, the church’s trust administration has never published a register of the properties it owns.
The Church of South India is episcopal in polity and has a threefold order of clergy, but its foundation was controversial among some Anglo-Catholic and evangelical Anglicans, and it only became a full member of the Anglican Communion in 1988. It is also a member of the World Methodist Council and the World Communion of Reformed Churches. The Anglican Church of India, a small denomination not in communion with the See of Canterbury, gathers Anglicans who resisted merger into the Churches of South and North India.
The Rev. Mark Michael is editor-in-chief of The Living Church. An Episcopal priest, he has reported widely on global Anglicanism, and also writes about church history, liturgy, and pastoral ministry.
