Why Did Church of England Leaders Lose the Evangelical Plot?
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COMMENTARY
By David W. Virtue, DD
March 25, 2026
Sarah Mullally and Justin Welby, the current and former Archbishops of Canterbury, share a telling common ground: both began their journeys as evangelicals, only to become something else entirely — corporate managers, glorified administrators, theological compromisers, and champions of inclusion over conviction. In Welby’s case, add to that a penchant for performative self-flagellation on the world stage.
Welby came from a privileged but deeply broken and dysfunctional family. Mullally, by contrast, came from a working-class background — but a happy one.
Welby’s spiritual biography is well documented. His conversion to Christ came during his university years — a transformative encounter that he described as pivotal, and that seemed to set the course of his faith and his commitment to Christianity. Dame Sarah Mullally’s conversion came at age 16, in a vividly evangelical context, and similarly shaped her values and her early years of leadership.
Both conversions took place during a period of genuine evangelical vitality in the Church of England. Preachers like John Stott, Dick Lucas, and Michael Green were proclaiming the gospel with force and clarity. Martyn Lloyd-Jones — outside the CofE but inescapably part of that world — stood as a rock of Reformed conviction. Christian Unions were full. Evangelical missions thrived. Britain was exporting its brightest and best across the globe. Stott disciples such as Ted Schroder and John Yates built large, flourishing churches in the United States.
It remains as true today as it was then: the best Anglican preachers and theologians tend to be English-born and -trained. They command the language with uncommon facility. They can articulate the gospel as few others can. Their preaching and teaching carry weight across the Anglican Communion — they are listened to, and they deserve to be.
John Stott preached his last sermon at 86. He never lost his evangelical luster, never traded the clarity of the gospel for institutional comfort.
But another generation followed, and it brought scandal in its wake. John Smyth, Jonathan Fletcher, and Mike Pilavachi — all identified as evangelical leaders — used their influence to abuse young men for their own perverted ends. The damage to evangelicalism’s reputation within the CofE was severe.
Into this wounded landscape stepped Justin Welby. A vulnerable man from a broken family, he rose swiftly: Bishop of Durham, then Archbishop of Canterbury, succeeding Rowan Williams as the 105th holder of that ancient see. Evangelicals believed they had one of their own at the helm.
They were wrong. Somewhere in the corridors of Lambeth Palace, Welby lost it. His catastrophic safeguarding failure over John Smyth was either the tip of the iceberg or the final straw — perhaps both. He prostrated himself before a shrine in India. He staked his legacy on Living in Love and Faith (LLF), believing it would produce a peaceful settlement over same-sex unions. It did not. He publicly declared that he had been “thick” not to recognize the “huge blessing” of faithful same-sex relationships, and he openly rejected the Church’s historic teaching that sexual intimacy belongs exclusively within male-female marriage. He resigned in disgrace. Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics alike felt betrayed. His departure was, on balance, a relief.
As it turned out, the LLF process satisfied no one. Welby disappeared, retreating into irrelevance — yesterday’s news.
Enter Dame Sarah Mullally, heir apparent to Lambeth Palace. Sarah came to faith in an unmistakably evangelical setting and carried that faith through her nursing training and the early years of her professional life. St John’s Woking, where she found Christ, was a thriving evangelical congregation — running regular guest services, bringing in evangelists, sending teams out on mission to other parishes. The young Sarah Bowser was formed in an atmosphere of intense evangelistic fervor. (She is, incidentally, officially dyslexic.)
She owned that heritage for herself, not least by serving as President of the Christian Union at the Polytechnic of the South Bank, where she studied nursing.
But over time, Mullally came to believe that what mattered was not the Great Commission but the art of consultation and team-working. The “go along to get along” philosophy — that cozy Anglican virtue of social harmony and institutional conformity — gradually displaced the urgency of the gospel.
Recently, she compared Lent with Ramadan and offered congratulations to the Muslim community on its observance. But the two are not comparable, let alone compatible. It is rather like comparing a chicken and a Boeing 787: both have wings, but no one is flying to London on the back of a chicken.
Is it any wonder that the Global South has lost confidence in a Canterbury-led Communion and moved to distance itself by forming the Global Anglican Communion the brainchild of GAFCON. Or that deep Anglican theological minds like Michael Nazir-Ali and Gavin Ashenden have found their way to Rome? One struggles to imagine Thomas Cranmer approving of the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral living openly in a same-sex relationship — without fleeing the building in expectation of divine judgment.
Several reasons account for why the evangelical mantle slipped from these two leaders (though notably not from George Carey, who has maintained his evangelical convictions):
• A failure to hold Scripture as authoritative on all matters of faith and practice.
• A belief that God had changed his mind about sexual ethics.
• An unwillingness to stand against the prevailing culture.
• Allowing the state to dictate to the Church what it must believe about social morality.
• A near-total capitulation to secular norms, overriding biblical teaching.
Today, the Church of England lies in disarray. £100 million has been pledged to “Slavery Reparations,” diverting funds from struggling parishes to an ideologically driven national project. The parishes — where ministry actually happens — are chronically underfunded, leading to priest shortages, church closures, and forced mergers. One churchman described the imbalance as “shocking.” Central bureaucracy continues to expand even as local budgets contract.
Evangelism and discipleship have dropped off the agenda, largely because no one in leadership knows how to evangelize their own neighbors. The pews grow emptier; those who remain grow older.
How can you impart a gospel you no longer carry in your bones? Being a “broad church” has come to mean latitudinarianism in doctrine and practice: an embrace of “diversity,” a perpetual search for middle ground between High Church Anglo-Catholics and Low Church Evangelicals, and the elevation of personal conscience over revealed truth. It is, in short, a recipe for institutional decay.
One thinks of Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
John on Patmos wrote this of the Church of Laodicea: “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm — neither hot nor cold — I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked…” (Revelation 3:14–22).
It is not that evangelicalism has failed — it cannot fail. It is the leaders who have failed evangelicalism. The Church of England is now rampantly progressive in its theology. It has become, in every meaningful sense, Laodicean. It awaits the judgment of God.
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