A court has appointed two retired judges to administer the finances and all temporal goods of the crisis-ridden Church of South India (CSI), asking them to oversee the formation of a new synod, the Church’s top decision-making body. Justices R Balasu-bramanian and V Bharathidasan reached the CSI headquarters in Chennai, the capital of southern Tamil Nadu state, on April 18 and took over the administration of the church, which has 24 dioceses in India and Sri Lanka. The Madras High Court, based in Chennai, appointed the judges on April 12 following admini-strative disputes. The court-appointed administrators will continue until a fresh synod is elected, the court said. The court asked the administrators “to ensure that the elections for all the Diocesan Councils are con-ducted and representatives of the Synod are also elected by the respective Diocesan Councils and a special meeting of the Synod is convened at the earliest possible opportunity to elect new office bearers of the Synod.” In 2022, the laity moved the high court against former moderator Bishop Dharmaraj Rasalam. The high court removed him from the mo-derator post in September last year. The petitioners have accused him and the Synod under him of arbitrarily amending the Church’s constitution and being involved in corruption and other irregulari-ties. The petitioners said ten cri-minal cases were pending against the moderator, and his continuance in the office would not be appro-priate. They expressed their ina-bility to remove him from office because the Church lacked a law to remove a moderator. The CSI was formed in 1947 after India’s independence from Britain as a union of all Protestant denominations.