A recent article in The Observer pointed to some of the challenges facing Sarah Mullally, when she becomes Archbishop of Canterbury in the new year.
First and foremost is the fact that she is a woman. “To be the first female archbishop of Canterbury in the post’s 1,400-year history presents obvious difficulties” the paper says, in a church where “around 600 parishes in England, and much of the Anglican communion in Africa, do not accept women leaders”.
The second challenge is shrinking congregations, with Sunday attendance “dropping from 908,900 in 2010 to 582,000 last year (though numbers have rallied slightly since pandemic restrictions ended)”.
Thirdly “an opaque system of governance that lends itself to stasis, intrigue and paranoia”. Fourthly “the continuing accusations of sexual abuse and their neglect” and fifthly, “deep-seated tensions between conservative evangelists and Anglo-Catholics, on one side, and progressive liberals and the evangelical tendency on the other”.
What the article goes on to say is that Sarah Mullally is cut from very different cloth from previous Archbishop, Justin Welby. While he was working in the oil industry, she was working her way up through the ranks of the NHS. That experience, the paper suggests, means she will bring a quality of organisational know-how which the Church has lacked in its leaders, what the article describes as “the dull business of getting to grips with the administration and governance of the church, which has been subject to running criticism”.
Read the full article in The Observer here.