KAGAWONG—The 11th Bishop of Algoma, Anne Germond, was on hand as the Anglican Churches of Manitoulin Island gathered for an Island-wide service at the St. John the Evangelist Church of Kagawong, which is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year, this past Sunday.
“It is wonderful to have all of you here today and to be with you in Kagawong with members of all five Anglican congregations on the Island,” stated Bishop Germond, who is the first female Bishop of Algoma. “It is pretty amazing that this church history goes back to apostle time,” she said, noting, “I continue to be overwhelmed, perplexed and amazed that God called on me to be the bishop of Algoma.”
Bishop Germond is in her second year of travelling around the world with other bishops visiting Anglican churches. She is among 33 bishops that have visited 17 countries. Among the places she has visited, “I just returned three weeks ago from the Holy Land. I spent time following the footsteps of Jesus in Jerusalem. It was amazing that with all the negative things taking place in the world, all those things seemed not to be as important as I stood on the steps from where He was crucified.”
Bishop Germond told the congregation that on her recent trip to the Holy Land she visited a garden which had the Lord’s Prayer written out in 160 different languages.
“I’m sure most of you know the history of the Algoma Diocese,” she noted. “The Missionary Algoma started in 1876 and the first bishop, Frederick Dawson Fauquier, travelled by boat and was responsible for a vast region, with seven clergy at nine outpost congregations from Thunder Bay in the west to Englehart and Temiscaming, Quebec in the northeast and south as far as Gravenhurst.”
In the summer Bishop Fauquier’s custom was to visit the islands in the great Georgian Bay and the stations along Lake Superior. He sailed from day-to-day in an open boat accompanied by a missionary, sleeping under canvas at night sometimes in clothes never quite dry.
“The second bishop for Algoma, Bishop (Edward) Sullivan was gifted a boat; it was he who in 1956 declared the (Algoma) diocese would become self-supporting,” said Bishop Germond.
Bishop Germond is the first female bishop selected for the Algoma diocese and was installed in this position on February 11, 2016. She had previously been the archdeacon of the Sudbury-Manitoulin Diocese.
Bishop Germond is originally from South Africa. She and her husband moved to Sudbury in 1986 because of a job her husband Colin had been hired for. She went to Thorneloe University in Sudbury to pursue her Anglican studies and was involved in Sunday school as a teacher, but having a higher calling in the church she was ordained as a deacon in 2001 and became a priest in 2002, spending 16 years at the Church of the Ascension in Sudbury.
