AT HER installation in St Paul’s in 2018, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally told the congregation: “Let me reassure you, I don’t come carrying bombs — or perhaps not literal ones, anyway. But I’m aware that, as the primary woman Bishop of London, I’m necessarily subversive, and it’s a necessity I intend to embrace.”
The reference to bombs related to the campaign of the suffragettes, who, 150 years ago that week, had placed a bomb under the Bishop’s throne (News, 18 May 2018).
On Friday, Bishop Mullally was named because the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. She might be first woman to be placed in St Augustine’s Chair and hold the oldest office in Britain.
Her comments from the pulpit of St Paul’s point to something necessary about her character. Alongside the platitudes that may accompany efforts to preserve unity within the Church, Bishop Mullally has shown a willingness to call the Church’s pricklier outlines.
In a 2009 interview with the Church Times, given after she was the Chief Nursing Officer for England — the youngest holder of that post — she spoke of re-reading Charles Handy’s book on leadership, The Elephant and the Flea. “Big organisations are slow, thick-skinned, strong, powerful,” she observed. “Fleas are frisky, agile, vulnerable, and aggravating. I see myself more as a flea now.”
TEN years into her episcopal ministry — she was consecrated to be Bishop of Crediton in 2015 — the problem of acting with agility, let alone friskiness, has presumably turn into apparent. Writing for the Church Times in February, she diagnosed a sickness throughout the Church of England’s governance (Comment, 14 February).
“In the NHS, I used to be clear to whom and for what I used to be accountable, and I used to be supported, challenged, and appraised by them,” she wrote. “I actually have tried to seek out this same accountability within the Church, however it doesn’t appear to exist. . . I actually have gazed into the center of the Church of England and located, at its core, incoherent governance structures, wherein a variety of bodies which need desperately to be joined up are free-floating.”
Amid debates in regards to the importation of secular models into the Church — an approach ceaselessly criticised through the Welby archiepiscopate — Bishop Mullally is prone to side with those chary of “exceptionalism”.
Her comments chime with the evaluation offered by Lesley-Anne Ryder, one other woman with extensive experience in the general public sector, appointed to contemplate independent safeguarding, who told the General Synod this 12 months that, “in the actual world”, the Church’s terms of service “don’t make sense”.
In the wake of high-profile safeguarding scandals and her predecessor’s resignation, the following Archbishop will take office under immense pressure to revive trust. “Over the past ten years as a bishop, I actually have sought to roll up my clerical sleeves and put myself to the work of creating the Church safer,” she wrote in February.
IT IS an admission that’s unlikely to placate critics of her safeguarding record. It is now 4 years since a coroner sent a Prevention of Future Deaths report back to the Archbishop of Canterbury after Fr Alan Griffin, a Roman Catholic priest who had formerly served as an Anglican within the diocese of London, took his own life over false allegations of kid sex abuse (News, 23 July 2021). The coroner, Mary Hassell, warned that more clergy deaths would follow unless motion was taken to enhance C of E safeguarding procedures.
At the center of the case lay a “brain dump” of safeguarding concerns provided by Martin Sargeant, a former Head of Operations within the diocese (subsequently imprisoned for fraud), whose departure from his post was connected to Bishop Mullally’s “insistence on greater accountability”, a lessons-learned report concluded.
The information from this meeting — a few of which was “gossip” and none of which was accompanied by signed statements setting out distinct allegations — became the Two Cities audit report, naming 42 priests within the diocese.
False allegations about Fr Griffin were passed on to the Roman Catholic Church and he found himself to be under investigation for greater than a 12 months, without ever having the allegations and their source plainly set out for him. A vulnerable man, whose history included an try and take his own life, he did so in 2020.
The case raised Church-wide questions on the risks posed by a zeal for safeguarding unmoored from pastoral provision and a commitment to due process.
Concerns were aired within the House of Commons within the weeks after the coroner’s report. Lord Lexden — a university contemporary of Fr Griffin — resigned from the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament, lamenting that the Church had “acted on the premise of mere gossip and innuendo” (News, 24 September 2021).
In 2022, Bishop Mullally apologised unreservedly after an independent review found “significant areas of learning” for the Church, including in relation to an absence of planning, direction, and leadership. “I do know that, at times, I actually have failed, and for that I’m profoundly sorry,” she wrote in her February Church Times piece.
Speaking to the Dean of Southwark for the cathedral podcast in June, she said: “I’m very conscious that each one of us have made mistakes, and I feel that there must be a greater honesty about after we’ve made a mistake, to begin with, to apologise, to try to put a few of it right, and when we will’t, to know you reside with that, but additionally to learn from it. . . I do know the mistakes I actually have made.”
AN INVESTIGATION into Sargeant, published in The Fence last 12 months, portrayed the diocese that Bishop Mullally inherited as deeply dysfunctional. Sargeant’s behaviour, the investigation found, had been enabled by the types of failures of oversight diagnosed by Bishop Mullally in February. It also reported misogyny within the diocese: clergy were referring to her by nicknames akin to “Bedpan”. One priest observed: “They can’t get away with nearly as much as they used to.”
During a 2021 debate on the Five Guiding Principles, she told the Synod: “My presence implies that areas which have been fudged up to now can now not be fudged.” Women priests were more often abused on social media, she said.
In the Southwark Cathedral podcast (“The world needs more poetry”), Bishop Mullally spoke about “Ask me” by William E Stafford, which incorporates the lines “some have tried to assist or to harm: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made”.
It was necessary to not gloss over hatred, or to speak only of resilience, she observed, “because actually it shapes us as much because the love does sometimes and to disregard it, I feel you construct up trouble for ourselves”.
She recalled presiding in St Paul’s and being struck by the various people receiving communion from her, “because, actually, my first response is: people don’t receive from me. Or I’m going right into a place, and truly there are those who will, you realize, the people aren’t at all times nice to me in the back of church, because I’m a girl and a female bishop. So I realised that . . . often I’m guarded, and I feel that’s not good. That is because I’ve absorbed a few of that and never handled it, and that isn’t good for my ministry.”
Earlier that 12 months, she wept on the Synod while speaking in regards to the “micro-aggression” that girls experienced within the Church, wherein “women’s voices proceed to not be heard” (News,.19 February). “People will say I actually have manipulated you,” she said. “I actually have not manipulated you.”
In 2018, she told The Observer that she had been asked at a college “if a refusal to simply accept my ministry was perpetuating inequality. My answer is, there may be a tension; to disclaim that might be flawed. My challenge [to traditionalists] is to ask: how are you encouraging women in your church, how are you ensuring you’re not discriminating against them? But I respect those that can’t accept my position, and we’ll make provision for individuals who, for theological reasons, don’t need to be ordained by me because I’m a girl.”
Lambeth PalaceBishop Sarah as a trainee nurse at St Thomas’ Hospital, in London
It isn’t only her gender that she has identified as a explanation for self-consciousness. “I don’t necessarily at all times see people like me within the roles that I’ve done,” she told Dean Oakley within the podcast.
“Comprehensive girl. I’ve got dyslexia. You know, I used to be a poly nurse. I did a non-residential theological training programme, and there may be a way wherein I barely feel the Church has never quite worked me out.” There was at all times, she acknowledged, “a slight insecurity about who I’m” held in tension with a way that “God called me, not despite all those things, but due to all those things.”
WHEN she is installed in Canterbury Cathedral next 12 months, Bishop Mullally will succeed an Old Etonian whose earliest memory is of tea with Winston Churchill, and who’s a Cambridge graduate and worked within the oil industry before ordination. The daughter of a hairdresser (a career that she desired to take up as a youngster), Bishop Mullally is unusual among the many Bishops in having been educated within the comprehensive-school system.
She trained as a nurse at St Thomas’ Hospital, in Lambeth, and did a level on the South Bank Polytechnic — something that few nurses undertook on the time. Having worked as a cancer nurse, she rose quickly through the ranks of NHS management. She first appeared within the Church Times in 1998, when promoting for chaplains at Chelsea and Westminster NHS trust, where she was serving as Director of Nursing and Quality.
Having served as a senior civil servant within the Department of Health, she was not well-known throughout the career when she became the youngest-ever Chief Nursing Officer and Director of Patient Experience for England in 1999, and held the post until 2004. She was appointed DBE for services to nursing and midwifery in 2005. Among the challenges facing NHS management at the moment were the emergence of the Shipman scandal, and the high rates of infection in hospitals.
Ordained in 2001, she served as a self-supporting minister (SSM) until 2006 within the parish of Battersea Fields, in south London. “The Church doesn’t at all times understand the experience and gifts that they create,” she said of SSMs in 2019 (News, 8 March 2019). She took up full-time parochial ministry in 2004 in the identical parish, and was consecrated bishop in 2015, becoming the Church of England’s fourth woman bishop and the primary to not have a clerical husband.
Within a 12 months, she had been given the duty — on the request of the survivor concerned — of implementing the recommendations of the Elliott review, which considered the Church’s response to allegations of sexual abuse by the late Garth Moore, a priest and the previous chancellor of several dioceses (News, 18 March 2016).
A survivor gave a critical verdict on the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse three years later: “She was kindly, with good intentions, but she was in a short time hoovered up into the institutions. She didn’t want to know the broader issues. . . I finally got very frustrated” (News, 5 July 2019).
FOR the past few years, Bishop Mullally has played a number one part in steering the Church’s deliberations on same-sex relationships. Appointed in 2017 to steer the Social and Biological Sciences working group of the Living in Love and Faith process (News, 30 June 2017), she went on to chair a bunch of bishops tasked with encouraging people to have interaction with the materials that emerged.
In 2023, she presented to the Synod the proposed Prayers of Love and Faith for same-sex couples, offering reassurance that the Bishops desired to create space for conscience, with “freedom and protection” for clergy (News, 10 February 2023). Conflict over sexuality had tarnished the status of the Church of England, and distracted it from its mission, she warned, “casting a shadow over our witness to Christ”.
Years of steering the method have given Bishop Mullally an insight into the depth and extent of divisions within the House of Bishops. Her account of the method up to now has emphasised the necessity for patience and maintaining unity, alongside a pragmatism in regards to the impossibility of resolving difference.
Last 12 months, she warned that calls for more theology could turn into a “displacement activity”, on condition that, even with more theology, people would still disagree. Theology was not only words, but deeds.
Her position — that making “pastoral provision” for same-sex couples in the shape of services offering Prayers of Love and Faith isn’t contrary to the doctrine of the Church in any essential matter — is a contested one (News, 24 November 2023).
But her record up to now shows a readiness to work alongside others who don’t share her theological convictions. A big variety of parishes within the diocese have passed resolutions under the Bishops’ Declaration, including a few of the Church’s flagship conservative Evangelical churches. She has formed a robust relationship with the Bishop of Fulham, the Rt Revd Jonathan Baker, and in 2018 appointed the Revd Dr Jason Roach, then serving at St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, as an adviser. After Bishop Mullally’s appointment, Bishop Baker reassured traditionalists that he was “entirely confident” in her commitment to mutual flourishing (News, 5 January 2018).
Graham Westley LacdaoGraham Westley Lacdao
“Finding ways to walk along with our diversity and differences isn’t comfortable,” she said in 2023, after a gathering with clergy concerned in regards to the LLF direction of travel. “Yet I do know that to separate, to walk apart, would greatly impoverish and harm the Church of England, which has at all times been an intentionally and uniquely broad Church” (News, 3 March 2023).
Nevertheless, she has not been afraid to indicate her mettle when attempts to undermine her authority have been made.
In her February piece for the Church Times, she drew attention to the “de facto distancing of churches from dioceses and the appointment of overseers through opaque means and without clarity of whom they’re overseeing”, suggesting that this posed a safeguarding risk. Last 12 months, seven men were “commissioned” for leadership positions within the Church of England at St Helen’s, Bishopsgate.
When it involves provision for those against the Prayers of Love and Faith, she opposes the concept of a “third space”, warning that it will amount to “dividing up the household of religion” (News, 12 July 2024).
IF, BY background, Bishop Mullally represents a radical break along with her predecessor, the charge of managerialism is one which has been laid at each their doors. What some praise as “professionalism” and “competence” others regard as a continuation of a technocratic approach to leadership.
“I hear and understand the explanations for criticism of over-management in a top-down Church,” she wrote in February. But, “without clarity of accountability, process, and management, the people who find themselves Christ’s body on earth don’t fall through the cracks within the system: they free-fall into voids. The longer we take to deal with all of this, the more people we’ll proceed to fail, hurt, and damage: the individuals who serve the Church and the people the Church is here to serve.”
Since taking over her post in London, Bishop Mullally has been on the forefront of attempts to reform and modernise various features of the Church. She was the co-author of a 2022 leaked paper on the long run of episcopal ministry which argued that God was calling the Church to “embrace significant change”, including a discount within the variety of dioceses (News, 8 February 2022).
Chairing the Advisory Group for Appointments and Vocations, she led proposals calling for reform of the Crown Nominations Commission, including the removal of the key ballot (News, 13 September 2024). It raised concerns about “pre-judgements, tribalism or politics”. Her appointment — and that of other women bishops — through this process may vindicate those that questioned the diagnosis. The proposals were roundly rejected by the Synod.
Further leadership responsibilities fell to her in 2020, when she was tasked with heading the Church’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic (News, 15 May 2020). In her own diocese, she ordered the closure of all church buildings, even for personal prayers (News, 27 March 2020). The remainder of the Church swiftly followed suit. Some defied the ruling (News, 24 April 2020).
Later that 12 months, she joined Archbishop Welby in criticising the Government’s response to the pandemic as illustrative of a wider “addiction to centralisation” (News, 18 September 2020). Public worship was “a vital sign of hope”.
BISHOP MULLALLY’s translation to Canterbury will happen in a Church that has not yet recovered attendance levels because the pandemic, wherein many dioceses hold lower than three months’ reserves, and wherein clergy are ever more thinly stretched. While a few of her colleagues have criticised the present funding flows — and for greater decentralisation and a restoration of religion in parish ministry — Bishop Mullally has up to now not joined with them.
Now 63, she is going to have the biblical variety of seven years to make her mark on the Church. Inevitably, there might be talk within the press of administering medicine to an ailing Church. In her maiden speech within the House of Lords, she said: “I’m the bishop I’m today due to that first vocation to nursing, and compassion and healing are constants at the center of who I’m.”
Today, each the NHS and the Church of England face a crisis of public confidence and low internal morale. Restoring these will take time.
“I is not going to at all times get things right,” she said on the announcement of her nomination in Canterbury. “But I’m encouraged by the psalmist who tells us that, ‘Though you stumble you shall not fall headlong, for the Lord holds you fast by the hand.”
