Overwhelmed and Underwhelming: Mullally's Hollow American Tour

The Archbishop of Canterbury preached humility, dodged every hard question, and left the Anglican Communion exactly where she found it

By David Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | October 1, 2026

The Art of Saying Nothing

I have always been intrigued by leaders who stand in a pulpit and preach about the issues of the day without ever actually touching them, and then close piously with "pray for me" or "pray for wisdom."

Whether "pray for me" amounts to much, or whether the prayer for wisdom rises much higher than the chancel ceiling, only heaven knows. But it's the thought that counts.

The latest exhibit in the museum of the non-speech (or was it a sermon?) was delivered by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, at Christ Church, Greenwich, Connecticut, on Sunday, September 27, two days after she addressed The Episcopal Church's House of Bishops at Camp Allen in Navasota, Texas.

To be fair, she learned from a master. The undisputed genius of the genre was Rowan Williams, who said nothing so brilliantly that the lecture circuit snapped him up the moment he left Lambeth. He was adored for his rhetoric, especially when he discoursed on "the other." He might have been describing a mouse crossing the chancel floor, a visible reminder of the other, and it would still have been splendid rhetoric, and as dense as a bat in a belfry.

Here is the kind of sentence that made his name. It is my pastiche, but every Williams reader will recognize the cadence:

"Human identity is not a self-contained possession but emerges through relationships that both reveal and unsettle us; therefore genuine freedom is found not in autonomous self-assertion but in a continually renewed engagement with forms of meaning that precede and exceed individual choice."

Absorb that. Then try explaining it to your churchwarden or Mothers Union.

Mullally is no Williams. She lacks the eyebrows. But she has mastered the essential art of the English episcopate: wrapping her thoughts in pleasant rhetoric and vague hopes for a better tomorrow, even as the ecclesiastical ship slides beneath the waves.

A Song of Humility, Sung Off-Key

In Greenwich, Mullally took as her theme the "Song of Humility" in Philippians 2, the passage scholars call the Christ Hymn (Philippians 2:6-11). She said it "gives poetic form" to the dynamics of God's kingdom, a song much needed in our times. She is right about that. It was also the appointed Epistle for the day, so the lectionary chose the text. What she did with it was her own affair.

She began well enough.

"When we approach the table of the Lord to receive from our Lord's hands that which he sacrificed for us, we do so from the same level of the bowed knee, the humble-thankful heart, working out our own salvation with fear and trembling—knowing that God is at work in each one of us."

Fair enough. Paul would have nodded.

Then she went political, and the Apostle was left standing alone at the lectern.

"As our world grapples with the challenges of authority and power on a global stage, affecting communities caught up in armed warfare; as we witness the catastrophic effects of climate change and the imbalance of resources to address these disasters; as we see churches strive to be kingdom-people in a global economy that bows before wealth and fame; so we desperately need to hear the song of humility echoing down through the ages once again."

Paul was writing to a small, harassed congregation in a Roman colony about the mind of Christ, who emptied himself, took the form of a servant, and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. He was not remonstrating about climate change or "the imbalance of resources." Those are matters for governments and NGOs, of which the world has no shortage. What the world is short of is bishops who preach Christ crucified.

The Christ Hymn is not a policy platform. It is the gospel in miniature: incarnation, humiliation, exaltation, and every knee bowing at the name of Jesus. It is hard to think of a text less in need of a climate footnote.

By What Authority?

Linking Philippians to the Gospel for the day, Matthew 21:23-32, Mullally noted how people in Jesus' time struggled with his authority. "By what authority are you doing these things and who gave you this authority?" she said, echoing the chief priests and elders.

A fair question. Let us put it to her.

By what apostolic authority does Mullally speak? GAFCON, whose member provinces claim to represent the great majority of the world's worshipping Anglicans, greeted her appointment with "sorrow," declaring that the Bible requires a male-only episcopate, and many more balked at her support for blessing same-sex couples. She has no authority whatsoever in Nigeria, Rwanda or Uganda, where Anglicans fill churches in numbers the Church of England can only dream about. Yet she keeps up the pretense that these are minor blips on the road to a glorious Anglican unity.

At Camp Allen she told the American bishops that bishops are called to be "figures of unity." Figures, certainly. The question is whether anyone is still following them.

In Greenwich she went further:

"It is clear that Jesus posed a threat to those in position of power and influence, not by lording it over them, but because he uprooted their understanding of what authority and power looked like. What those in authority should do, whom they should eat with, and with whom they should associate."

Quite so. But Jesus did not claim a share of authority. He claimed all of it: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me" (Matthew 28:18). And he exercised it not by grasping but by emptying himself, which is precisely the point of the hymn she had just preached on. Power was never the measure of his ministry. Obedience was.

A Church That Has Lost the Plot

Meanwhile the Church of England is dying by inches. It is irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of the British public; barely one English person in a hundred sits in its pews on an ordinary Sunday. By some estimates, more Muslims attend Friday prayers in England than Anglicans attend Sunday worship. The Roman Catholic Church moves forward while the Church of England moves backward.

Where is the humility to admit that the Church of England has lost the plot? That many of its own leaders no longer believe the gospel, let alone preach it? That its bishops and vicars are more anxious not to offend the LGBT lobby than to proclaim the faith once for all delivered to the saints?

When did anyone last hear a vicar preach on the unsearchable riches of Christ, or defend substitutionary atonement, or (gulp) the bodily resurrection of Jesus?

Floating around the globe and dropping in wherever the welcome mat is out, hardly qualifies as "unity." It is selective Pharisaism: the best seats in the synagogue and greetings in the marketplace, but never the long road to Abuja, Kampala or Kigali.

Power, Lawyers and Mitres

There is no class of people more concerned with its own power and influence than bishops, whether in the Church of England, The Episcopal Church or, alas, the ACNA. All three have been undone by power-hungry bishops.

Let us see how long evangelical and Anglo-Catholic vicars in the Church of England last when they try to break away from an all-powerful structure backed by the state.

We have seen this film before. When orthodox Episcopal priests refused to buy into the new pansexual dispensation favored by the Presiding Bishop and a phalanx of progressive and revisionist bishops, did anyone hear "Go in peace to love and serve the Lord" from Frank Griswold or Katharine Jefferts Schori? Not a bit of it. Tens of millions of dollars went to lawyers. Properties were seized, pensions and jobs were lost, and faithful priests scrambled to find other work. Humility, it turned out, was for the other fellow. Now the churches are spending millions on sexual abuse cases. The fun never ends.

Nor is the ACNA in any position to cast the first stone. Its archbishop, Steve Wood, has been inhibited for nearly a year and went on trial on September 7 before the Court for the Trial of a Bishop, charged with violating his ordination vows, abuse of ecclesiastical power and sexual immorality. It is the young province's first trial of a sitting archbishop. A church court has found Bishop Derek Jones guilty of promoting schism, and three bishops who followed him out the door face the same charge. It is the kind of record that would make Cranmer, Newton and J.C. Ryle blush with shame.

Distributive Power and Other Fairy Tales

Mullally's visit came at the tail end of the United Nations' High-Level Week, when world leaders descend on New York to address the General Assembly, and she paid her own call on UN leaders on September 28. Taken whole, the tour was a study in showmanship and virtue signaling.

Bishop Ruth Woodliff-Stanley of The Episcopal Church in South Carolina, the same bishop whose August chapel dedication and shared Communion at Charleston's Porter-Gaud School landed ACNA Bishop Chip Edgar in hot water, took to social media about the visit. She said the archbishop reflected on AI and the "questions it raises about what it means to be human," and "about the gift of the Anglican Communion in a new era of collaborative, distributive power."

Collaborative, distributive power? That was tried, and it failed. In July, the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Belfast, with Mullally presiding, voted 72 to 8 to leave the Archbishop of Canterbury's role untouched. It shelved the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals, which would have shared out the leadership of the Communion, and called instead for three more years of "discernment and conversation." The matter will not come back until 2029. When the ecclesiastical establishment wants to kill something, it does not shoot it; it studies it to death.

So, Canterbury remains the unifying figure of the Anglican Communion. How is that working out?

Overwhelmed

In a 30-minute Q&A in Greenwich with the Rev. Marek Zabriskie, Mullally spoke candidly about her appointment as the first woman to lead the Church of England and her visit with Pope Leo XIV. She also offered views on artificial intelligence, assisted dying, Christian nationalism, and the political landscape in Israel and Palestine.

"I am absolutely aware that for many people, it is very significant inside the church and outside the church," she said. She added that in the United Kingdom she had been caught by surprise by the support she has received as the first woman archbishop. "It has been overwhelming. Absolutely overwhelming."

It is clearly her favorite word. She told the bishops at Camp Allen she had been "absolutely overwhelmed" by her welcome around the Communion.

Really? Days before she flew to Texas, a petition calling for her resignation drew thousands of signatures. On September 11, of all days, the 25th anniversary of the attacks, she had presented Lambeth's Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation to a Pakistani cleric, Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, who in 2007 reportedly hailed Osama bin Laden as "Saifullah," the Sword of God. Lambeth Palace withdrew the award once the remarks surfaced. Due diligence, it seems, is not among the gifts of the Spirit at Lambeth. Overwhelming, indeed.

"You're Still a Nurse"

When Mullally called on Pope Leo XIV in April, after their private conversation and exchange of gifts, the pope reportedly remarked, "You're still a nurse." One wonders whether she caught the message behind those words.

Leo XIV told her plainly that "new problems" had arisen between the two communions in recent decades, and everyone in the room knew what he meant. It was another Leo, Leo XIII, who in 1896 pronounced Anglican orders "absolutely null and utterly void." The present pontiff no more recognizes her orders than King Canute believed he could sit on the seashore and command the incoming tide to stop. Canute, at least, knew the limits of his authority.

Pray for Wisdom

When it came to the hot-button issues of the day, including artificial intelligence and assisted dying in the United Kingdom, Zabriskie asked the Anglican leader how she decides when to use her platform to speak out. "Pray for wisdom," was the first step, she said, along with a strategy of listening and building coalitions with people who share a common agenda.

And so we arrive back where we began, with a prayer for wisdom.

Fudge, dodge, prevaricate, but never declare your hand, if you have one, lest it offend someone. The gospel, after all, is an offense; Paul called the cross a stumbling block. But don't tell that to the church's collective bishops. It might ruin their afternoon tea and crumpets with the verger.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com