Bishops, Character, and Communion: A Biblical Lens on Leadership Decisions

By David Straw

www.virtueonline.org

March 30, 2026

Not Another Debate on Women Clergy

Before anyone misunderstands, this is not simply another article about women in ordained ministry. It is not that simple, and it is not that small. The issue runs deeper. It touches the biblical pattern for choosing bishops, the meaning of apostolic leadership, and what happens when that pattern is quietly set aside in favor of something that looks more like institutional momentum than discernment.

That said, one fact cannot be avoided. Sarah Mullally is the first woman appointed to lead the Church of England. Several provinces in the Anglican Communion do not recognize women as priests, let alone bishops. That was known. It was not hidden. And the decision was made anyway.

So, the question is not whether the Church of England had the authority to act. It did. The question is whether it acted with any regard for Scripture, for history, or for the fragile unity of the Communion, or whether it simply chose a course that would almost certainly inflame it.

The Biblical Pattern for Leadership

In First Timothy 3, St. Paul does not give us a theory of leadership. He gives us a pattern. A bishop must be blameless. Not impressive, not strategic, not historically significant, but blameless. Sober. Steady. Given to hospitality. Able to teach. And not a novice. That last one matters more than we tend to admit, because leadership in the Church is not seized. It is not engineered. It is recognized, over time, by people who have had the chance to see whether a life actually holds together under pressure.

The same logic governs the diaconate. Let them first be proved. Then let them serve. Character before office. Reputation before authority. The order is not accidental, and it is not negotiable.

St. Paul goes further still. Give no unnecessary offense. God is not the author of confusion, but of peace. Leaders are not to be quarrelsome. The Church is warned against those who cause divisions. And in Acts 15, the apostles go out of their way not to burden the wider body in ways that would fracture it. Even when they were right. Even when they had authority. Even when the cause was just. They moved carefully. They wrote letters. They sent trusted men alongside the letter to explain it in person, because they understood that the manner of a decision is never entirely separate from the decision itself.

Put all of that together and the picture is clear enough. Leadership in the Church should strengthen trust. It should preserve communion. It should not knowingly create a crisis that everyone can see coming from miles away.

The Decision in Context

Set that beside the appointment of Archbishop Mullally.

It was historic. Everyone said so. It was public, it was celebrated, and it was made in full awareness of the state of the Anglican Communion, already strained, already fragile, already divided along lines that did not require much additional pressure to widen into something permanent. No one was surprised. That is precisely the difficulty.

Authority allows the Church of England to act. No one denies that. But authority does not remove responsibility. It never has, and the history of the Church is littered with decisions made by bodies that had every right to act and very little wisdom about whether they should.

So a simple question presses in. If a decision is made that predictably places entire provinces in a position where they cannot recognize the ministry of the Archbishop of Canterbury, can that decision be squared with the apostolic concern for unity, for peace, for leaders who are above reproach across the breadth of the Church’s life? That is not a political question. It is a biblical one. And the answer the New Testament gives is not complicated.

Lessons from the Early Church

The early Church understood something about this that we have largely lost. Bishops were not unknown quantities. They were not surprises, not symbols, not instruments of institutional change. They were men whose lives had been seen at close range, whose teaching had been heard, whose conduct under difficulty had been weighed, whose neighbors and colleagues and local clergy could speak to who they actually were when no one particularly important was watching.

Recognition was not automatic. It was earned, slowly, sometimes painfully, through years of ordinary faithfulness. Cyprian, writing in the third century, insisted that the bishop belonged to the people who would receive him, that election without the knowledge of the local church was no election at all. The Nicene canons built neighboring episcopal approval into the process for the same reason: a new bishop’s legitimacy depended partly on whether the wider body of the faithful could receive him. Not agree with every position he had ever taken. Receive him.

When that breaks down, everything else follows. Structures remain. Titles remain. But confidence slips quietly, and trust weakens in ways that no amount of carefully worded communique can repair.

Conclusion

The real issue is not simply the appointment itself. It is what the appointment represents. A church acting unilaterally on a matter it has repeatedly acknowledged belongs to the whole Communion. For years the Church of England said that the ordination of women to the episcopate affects the entire Communion. That unity is not optional. That provinces should avoid actions that impair it.

And yet.

It proceeded anyway. Not by accident, not through oversight, but with full awareness of the consequences and with the confidence, apparently, that the consequences could be managed. That is more than inconsistency. It signals a shift in how the Church of England understands its relationship to the rest of the Communion, a shift from mutual accountability to something closer to notification.

A church cannot appeal to the shared life of the Communion while acting as though that shared life carries no real weight. At some point the language and the actions have to line up, and when they do not, the gap between them becomes its own kind of statement.

Leadership matters. Character matters. Unity matters. These are not slogans. But they are also not self-executing principles that enforce themselves automatically. They require the willingness to bear a cost, to move slowly when speed is tempting, to forgo the historic moment when the historic moment would come at the expense of the body you were called to serve.

Scripture calls the Church to discernment, not to spectacle. That distinction has not aged. It has not been superseded. And it does not become less true simply because it was inconvenient.

The Rev. David Straw is Rector of Trinity Anglican Church and a lifelong Anglican, ordained in 2007. He graduated cum laude from the University of Southern Indiana and completed graduate work for ministry at Wesley Seminary in Marion, Indiana.