Lord Williams has given his successor at Canterbury a bracing public tutorial in failure, attack and grace.
Writing in The Spectator, the former Archbishop addresses Dame Sarah Mullally directly, just six weeks into her tenure, in a brief essay framed around the Annunciation and the shock of a life that “will never be the same again.” He imagines Mullally “feeling a bit of that never‑the‑same‑again apprehension” as she takes on a role whose demands are, in his words, “in every way beyond you.” The message is tender, but it is not soft. It is a sober reminder of what the office now bears.
The line that has travelled furthest is stark: “You will be exposed to unrealistic expectation and unreasonable attack. You know you are going to fail in all sorts of ways.” For a former Archbishop to say this in public, and to say it to a named successor, is unusual. Williams does not try to reassure Mullally that she will “rise to the challenge” or “prove the critics wrong.” He assumes instead that the criticism will be relentless, and that the failures will be real.
The note of hope lies elsewhere. “The weight and importance of what is put into your hands is such that it will survive your failures,” he writes, adding the quiet plea that there will always be friends to remind her of this. The consolation is not that the Archbishop will manage the office, but that the office, and the reality it signifies, will outlast the mistakes of its occupant.
That distinction matters. Williams is offering an ecclesiology before he offers therapy. Canterbury, as he presents it, is not the platform for a brand, nor the stage for an ecclesial celebrity. It is a trust. It belongs to the Church catholic before it belongs to the current office‑holder. The Archbishop’s inner life matters, but what is decisive is the resilience of the deposit she receives.
Williams broadens the lens to public leadership, musing on the misery of politicians who cannot believe in any kind of grace and so must act as if failure were unthinkable. That, he says, is a form of imprisonment. Leaders who cannot confess failure must settle for denial, distraction or blame. The connection back to Lambeth is clear enough. An Archbishop who cannot admit that she will fail will be driven, in the end, to managing appearances rather than bearing witness.
The column is, among other things, a dispatch from inside Canterbury culture. It encodes the experience of an Archbishop who lived through Lambeth 2008, the first wave of GAFCON, and a decade of attempted “holding together” that pleased almost no one. When Williams tells Mullally that she will face “unrealistic expectation and unreasonable attack,” the words carry the weight of that history. He knows what it is to be the screen onto which a fractured Communion projects both its hopes and its fury.
Mullally begins her ministry amid a Communion much more polarised than the one Williams left. GAFCON and the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches have already signalled that they do not look to Canterbury as the effective centre of their ecclesial life, and that they regard the Church of England’s recent path on doctrine and ethics as a departure from apostolic faith. For many of those leaders, the new Archbishop arrives not with a blank slate but as the inheritor of what critics call an “architecture of non‑decision”: years of managed ambiguity and partial settlements.
Williams does not name any of this. He does not mention GAFCON, GSFA, or the contested legacy of “good disagreement.” Yet his description of the attacks Mullally will face will sound familiar to anyone who has watched progressive campaigners denounce Canterbury as an obstacle to justice while conservatives condemn it as the engine of revision. “Unreasonable” here does not simply mean rude. It points to a pattern in which the office is held responsible for forces it cannot command and outcomes it cannot determine.
The column also gestures toward scripture in a way that sharpens, rather than softens, this realism. Williams notes that the earliest gospel ends with the women at the tomb saying nothing “because they were afraid.” It is a curious choice of text for an Archbishop‑to‑Archbishop exhortation. He seems intent on reminding Mullally that fear, failure of nerve, and silence in the face of a divine summons are not alien to the life of faith. They are part of its record. The Church’s story is not a tale of unbroken courage.
In that light, his counsel that “fear isn’t everything” carries more weight. The point is not to banish fear, or to pretend that the office of Canterbury can be exercised without it, but to refuse to let fear become the final interpreter of events. The Archbishop will be afraid. She will be tired. She will sometimes be wrong. The question, Williams implies, is whether she will remember that the Church is not sustained by her competence.
For Anglican readers, there is an additional layer. Williams chose to deliver this meditation not in a church newspaper or at a clergy conference, but in a general‑audience magazine. The piece has already been picked up by Anglican Mainstream and flagged in religion‑news briefings. It now circulates within the constituencies most likely to criticise Mullally in the years ahead. They are being invited to listen in as one Archbishop tells another that failure is inevitable and that the Church will survive it.
Whether that invitation is heard is another matter. Some will take the essay as a humane and necessary description of the strain placed upon a global figurehead. Others will suspect that it prepares the ground for yet more “managed” failure: another season in which Canterbury asks the Communion to bear with ambiguity in the hope that something, somehow, will hold. But the piece itself is clear. Whatever else may be said in the coming years, Mullally has now been told, in public, that her ministry at Canterbury will be marked by “unreasonable attack” and that the Gospel is robust enough to outlast it.
