The job of archbishop of Canterbury shares some key characteristics with that of prime minister: they both involve leadership over an entity that has seen better days and is riven by polarising forces, they both lack popular support, and they both appear to the outside world to be mired in bureaucracy and indecision.
The archiepiscopal advantage is that, once in the post, there isn’t an election to face; and while God is rumoured to be omniscient, no one blames His Anglican mouthpiece for the state of the economy. Aside from that, Sarah Mullally, who was named in October as Justin Welby’s successor, faces a challenging time ahead.
To be the first female archbishop of Canterbury in the post’s 1,400-year history presents obvious difficulties in a church that remains divided over whether women should be allowed to be priests – around 600 parishes in England, and much of the Anglican communion in Africa, do not accept women leaders. Questions of gay recognition and rights are even more schismatic.
On top of that, there is the long-term trend of falling church attendance figures, with Sunday services dropping from 908,900 in 2010 to 582,000 last year (though numbers have rallied slightly since pandemic restrictions ended), and an opaque system of governance that lends itself to stasis, intrigue and paranoia.
There are also the continuing accusations of sexual abuse and their neglect, which caused Welby’s ouster, and from which Mullally has not been immune. Finally, she must deal with the deep-seated tensions between conservative evangelists and Anglo-Catholics, on one side, and progressive liberals and the evangelical tendency on the other.
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Even the Right Rev Guli Francis-Dehqani, who had been favourite to lead the church after Welby’s resignation in November 2024, recently called the job an “impossible” one with “inhumane” expectations.
Mullally, however, is cut from a different cloth from Welby. Not only is she a woman, but she attended a comprehensive school and London South Bank Polytechnic (as the university was then known), in contrast to her predecessor’s education at Eton and Cambridge. So at the very least she doesn’t look like an establishment insider, as Welby could be accused of appearing to be.
And while Welby was in the oil industry prior to his ordination, Mullally worked her way up from being a cancer nurse to become, in 1999, the youngest chief nursing officer and director of patient experience for England in history. Leaving a well-paid and respected government post in 2004 to take up full-time parochial ministry was, she has said, “the biggest decision” she ever made.
But her progress was no less rapid than it had been in the NHS and the civil service. After graduating in 2006 with an MA in pastoral theology from Heythrop College, University of London, she became rector at St Nicholas Church, Sutton, and then canon treasurer of Salisbury Cathedral. In June 2015 she was named bishop of Crediton, in the docese of Exeter, and later that year became the first woman to lead an ordination service.
A couple of years later, she gained promotion to become bishop of London – the third most senior bishop after those of York and Canterbury, and a post that also provides a place in the House of Lords. She was the first woman in the role. One of her rivals for the position, who was backed by Welby, was Paula Vennells, later disgraced for her leading part in the Post Office scandal.
To her critics, this inexorable rise through the ranks of public service and then the church is the mark of a natural institutionalist, what one conservative writer called “the distilled essence of the hectoring lanyard class, a bureaucrat, a proceduralist and a progressive down to her fingertips”.
But that certainly is not how Mullally sees herself or the struggle she has faced in making her way in a male-dominated environment. In 2018 in St Paul’s Cathedral she told the congregation: “I am aware that, as the first woman bishop of London, I am necessarily subversive, and it’s a necessity I intend to embrace.”
In one sense the most subversive thing she can do, aside from just being a woman, is the dull business of getting to grips with the administration and governance of the church, which has been subject to running criticism.
The bishop of Ramsbury, Andrew Rumsey, says Mullally has “institutional courage”. “The C of E can be a confounding thing to comprehend, let alone carry,” he says. “But Sarah has a capacity to be a steady centre in all that while retaining her humanity and good sense.”
When she was bishop of Crediton, Mullally wrote a piece in the Church Times in which she despaired at the lack of accountability in the church.
“I have gazed into the heart of the Church of England and found, at its core, incoherent governance structures, in which a number of bodies which need desperately to be joined up are free-floating,” she wrote.
She isn’t the first in the role to want to reform the church’s governance, but the arcane and embedded modes of organisation are easier to diagnose than to change. Will she be different?
“Yes,” says Rumsey, “she’s at home with complex systems.”
Giles Fraser, the broadcaster and vicar of St Anne’s Church, Kew, agrees. He believes her predecessor was distracted by overseas duties but that Mullally’s focus will be set firmly on internal issues.
“She’s a very good administrator,” he says. “She’ll steadily rebuild confidence by paying proper due attention to her red boxes.”
Rumsey is confident that her experience in the London diocese, the most diverse in the country, will enable her to hold together the various factions “without trying to make everybody the same”.
That may be a delicate balancing act, but Fraser is hopeful that church members across the spectrum will rally around her.
A major governance concern has been the issue of safeguarding, following a number of disturbing cases of sexual abuse within the church. Most observers agree that the appointment of a woman improves the optics and will help create a more open image.
Yet despite a large increase in funding for safeguarding measures, brought in by Welby, survivors continue to complain that allegations fall foul of internal power structures. Mullally herself has not escaped censure.
Andrew Graystone, a survivors’ advocate, said that some had greeted her appointment with “real shock and dismay”, noting that the London diocese had “a disastrous track record of safeguarding failures.”
Lambeth Palace admitted that a complaint made against Mullally over the way she dealt with an abuse allegation should have been considered as long as five years ago but was not, owing “to administrative errors”.
Her supporters point out that she inherited a dysfunctional diocese from the previous regime, whose head of operations was imprisoned for fraud. Mullally has acknowledged that the complainant was “let down by the processes of the Church of England”.
It gives a sense of how far-reaching the problem is – or at least the perception of it – that the final arbiter of the complaints process is the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, who has himself been criticised for his handling of a sexual abuse case.
Set against these scandals is a renewed interest in cultural Christianity, some of which has been tied to a reawakened sense of nationalism. Mullally has voiced her disapproval of Christian symbols being used by rightwing agitators.
But Prof Linda Woodhead, head of the department of theology and religious studies at King’s College London, has called on Mullally to combat deepening cultural divisions and “reconnect the Church of England with English society”.
If she can combat the divisions in her church, that will be a success; those in wider society, she may have to leave to the prime minister.
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