When Sarah Mullally was installed as archbishop of Canterbury, it looked like a breakthrough. It was. But it didn’t happen by accident.

In this episode, Amanda Henderson talks with Catherine Pepinster, a journalist who reported on Mullally’s rise and the network who helped make it possible. Before women could even become bishops in the Church of England, a small group of clergy saw a gap: Being allowed to lead and actually getting there are two very different things. So they built Leading Women, a mentoring organization designed to prepare female candidates for leadership inside one of the world’s oldest institutional churches — one still embedded in British parliamentary life and still navigating deep divisions over sexuality and abuse.

Pepinster traces Mullally’s path from chief nurse of Britain’s National Health Service to the most powerful seat in Anglican Christianity — a woman who has reached the top of two professions in one lifetime. She also maps what Mullally is walking into: an institution in numerical decline that still sits at the center of British public life, now led by a woman who will serve only six years and inherit two unresolved crises her predecessor couldn’t survive.

This transcript was generated using AI tools and may contain minor transcription errors.

AMANDA HENDERSON: From RNS and the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture, this is Complexified, a podcast for the religiously curious and politically frustrated. I’m Amanda Henderson. It looks like a breakthrough, but it might actually be the result of something much simpler. When Sarah Mullally became the first woman to lead the Church of England, it was treated as a historic first. And it is. The Archbishop of Canterbury is one of the most powerful religious figures in the world, at the center of a church that is deeply tied to the British state and still shapes global Anglican life. But that moment didn’t just happen. For decades, women were excluded from the highest levels of leadership of the Church of England. And even after the rules changed, there was still no guarantee they would actually rise to power. So a small group inside the church began asking a different question: what would it take to prepare women, not just to be allowed to lead, but to actually get there. Today on the show, how that effort unfolded and what it reveals about how change really happens inside institutions built to resist it. I’m joined by Catherine Pepinster, a journalist who reported on Mullally’s rise and the network of women who helped make it possible. Katherine, welcome to Complexified.

CATHERINE PEPINSTER: Thank you, Amanda. It’s good to be here.

HENDERSON: Catherine, when Sarah Mullally was installed as Archbishop of Canterbury, what did that moment represent inside the church and beyond it?

PEPINSTER: Well, Amanda, I think it was really a historic moment. You mentioned earlier that women hadn’t been in positions of leadership for decades — actually it’s for hundreds of years, in the Church of England since it was founded out of the English Reformation. It’s not that long ago that women could become priests in the Church of England; that happened in 1994. And if you think that the last installation of an Archbishop of Canterbury in 2013 — there were no women bishops in the Church of England. Now one has what you might call the top job. That is really quite remarkable. And although there were some women bishops in other parts of what’s called the Anglican Communion around the world, there weren’t any in the Church of England. So it really was an historic moment, and I think many, many people felt that and recognized that. And even people who aren’t that religious in Britain, I think, were interested. It was such a landmark occasion.

HENDERSON: Yeah. The Church of England has a power in UK politics that listeners in the United States might not quite understand — that it is deeply embedded with the political structures in England.

PEPINSTER: Yeah. Because it was founded by Henry VIII, when he broke away from Rome, it was very much a church created by the monarch to kind of represent the nation, to work as part of what you might call the system. It has 26 of its bishops in the upper chamber of the UK Parliament, the House of Lords. The House of Lords used to be full of peers who got there because of inheriting their titles — that’s not the case anymore. They’re life peers appointed by governments, but there are these twenty-six bishops. And they’re not involved in party politics, but they have a voice and they can talk about all manner of issues, usually trying to bring what you might call an ethical position. So they might speak about poverty and how poverty affects children, or they might talk about the attitudes that people are displaying towards migrants. Or they might talk about something that’s seen as very much in their world, something like assisted dying or abortion — all kinds of things that they speak about.

HENDERSON: It is remarkable, then, to both have women who are serving as bishops and now to have a woman as the Archbishop. Are there tensions or opposition already visible around her appointment?

PEPINSTER: There’s been a limited amount of opposition to it in Britain. Very limited, I’d say. There are still some members of the Church of England who oppose women joining the Episcopate, but it’s more prevalent in other parts of the Anglican Communion. There are parts of Africa where they reject Sarah Mullally — not because she’s Sarah Mullally, but because she’s a woman. They don’t think women should be bishops. So I think her problems on that score are more beyond the Church of England and in the wider Anglican Communion.

HENDERSON: So we have this remarkable moment where she is installed this week as Archbishop. If you rewind from this moment, where does this story actually begin?

PEPINSTER: You could say it begins as far back as 1994, which is when women could first be ordained as priests in the Church of England. You could say it began in 2002, which is when Sarah Mullally became a priest herself, or you could say it began in 2015, when she was one of the first women to become bishops in the Church of England. I think she would probably go back even further than that, because she’s now sixty-four. She became a Christian when she was sixteen, and her first career was as a nurse. And she’s often said that becoming a nurse was as much of a vocation for her as becoming a bishop or a priest. And she’s even gone as far as to say she would never have become a bishop if she hadn’t been a nurse. So I think for her personally, that spiritual journey is tied up with her nursing. She rose right to the top of her profession. So she’s not only risen once to the top job, but twice. Not many people do that.

HENDERSON: That’s remarkable. And it seems like there are kind of two things happening at the same time. One, she is developing as a leader — a spiritual leader, a religious leader. And the church is also changing, so that it can both accept women and prepare women for the kinds of roles that she’s stepping into. Can you talk a little bit about the ways the church has changed in ways that now make it possible for a leader like her to come into leadership?

PEPINSTER: Well, the Church of England has evidently changed. At the moment, about a third of its clergy are women, but still not that many women are bishops. So I’m not sure you could say that the institution has fully embraced women in positions of leadership. And people might say, no, come on, they’ve just appointed a woman to be Archbishop of Canterbury. But I think what really intrigues me about this story is that there were a group of women in the church who, when it was first agreed that women could become bishops, said: we’ve got to make sure there are women who can take on these roles, and we’re going to do something about it.

HENDERSON: Wow. Okay, tell me more about this group of women who saw this need and decided to do something about it.

PEPINSTER: The process for women to become bishops started in 2006 when it was agreed, and then it was ratified in 2008 by the body of the Church of England. And then around that time, around 2009 or so, some women who were already influential in the Church of England thought: let’s do something. Let’s try and prepare women for leadership. Let’s try and ensure that when the time comes — when people who deal with nominating bishops look at candidates — there are going to be some women who they really have got to take seriously, because they have some idea of what it takes. And they got together and created this body called Leading Women. And it was a mentoring organization. Now, what’s intriguing about this is that some of the women they talent-spotted as good candidates were people like Sarah Mullally, who had risen to the top of other professions. I think she’d been the chief nurse in the British National Health Service. You might think, well, she’s going to be bound to have leadership skills — does she really need to be mentored in the Church of England? Surely she’s got what it takes. But talking to some of the people involved in the early days of this organization, they said actually, if you’re coming into an organization like the church, which has got hundreds if not thousands of years of patriarchy embedded in it, that’s really something to overcome. And so I think they felt that they had to have this sisterhood behind them.

HENDERSON: That’s what I think is the most fascinating thing about this story, because so often people see a change and just think it just happened. And this is really an example of thoughtful, intentional efforts to not only prepare an institution, but make sure that there are leaders who are ready to step into that. And I know, as a woman, we have so many of these ideas of who we are and how we move in the world that are deeply embedded. And so this group saw the need to really prepare women thoroughly to be candidates and to do this work.

PEPINSTER: And I think also that they felt there was this solidarity — there were others who were supporting them and would be by their side. It was noticeable at the installation of Sarah Mullally that she mentioned the importance of other women in her journey and wanted women involved in the service.

HENDERSON: Beautiful. Let’s take a break.

HENDERSON: Catherine, once someone like Mullally is in that pipeline, how does the actual selection process for Archbishop of Canterbury work?

PEPINSTER: It’s a really long process. It’s remarkable. I’m sure some of the listeners will have been aware of what happened when we got a new pope last year.

HENDERSON: Yes.

PEPINSTER: And all those cardinals were locked in a room, and about forty-eight hours later —

HENDERSON: We’re all waiting for the white smoke.

PEPINSTER: Yeah, it’s nothing like that. It’s very, very lengthy and measured. There was some public consultation as well — I mean, I think anybody could write in and say my local vicar is the man or the woman for the job. But they had what they call a Crown Nomination Commission. They always have one of those for every bishopric that’s vacant. With Canterbury, there were seventeen members. Because it’s the Archbishop of Canterbury, there were representatives from the Diocese of Canterbury. However, there were fewer than there have been in the past, because they decided that this time round they needed to have representatives from the worldwide Anglican Communion involved as well. There were representatives of what’s called the General Synod of the Church of England, and one or two other bishops were involved, and then the chair of that commission — and this highlights how much the Church of England is entwined with the establishment — the chair of that commission is chosen by the Prime Minister. And he chose as the chair somebody who’d once been a top spy; he used to run MI5, which is our internal intelligence organization. So I don’t know if they thought that this guy had to gather intelligence in a similarly secretive way. But anyway, that was his background — very interesting. He’s a practicing Anglican and he’s in the House of Lords, so he’s very establishment as well. And it took about fifteen months for them to make their decision.

HENDERSON: Oh wow.

PEPINSTER: There was loads of speculation while this was going on about who it might be. Now, Sarah Mullally was mentioned, but she wasn’t mentioned as the favourite, because she’s sixty-four and there’s a mandatory retirement age for the Archbishop which is seventy, so she’s only there for six years.

HENDERSON: Wow.

PEPINSTER: A lot of people said, well, she’d be great, but she’s too old.

HENDERSON: Were there other candidates that they were really clear about?

PEPINSTER: I presume there were. They didn’t spend fifteen months deciding whether Sarah Mullally was too old. I’m sure they must have had other candidates to look at. What we don’t know is whether they thought her skill set, her experience, her pastoral qualities — everything — is so good that we’re going to not worry about the fact she’s 64 and can only serve six years. Or did they think, actually, we want somebody to only be there for six years.

HENDERSON: Interesting. It makes sense, honestly, with such a big change. Sometimes it’s easier to put someone in for a shorter time when you’re making a change like this. So speak a little bit more about how the institution itself has changed.

PEPINSTER: Well, in some ways you have to admit that the institution of the Church of England is in decline. At one time, people in England would by default have said, oh, I’m Church of England — but that’s not the case anymore. And despite being the established church, it only has about a million people a week who go to any kind of Church of England service, and they get about five hundred and eighty-two thousand people on Sundays. So it’s not big.

HENDERSON: How does that compare in the scope of other religious communities? Are there other religious communities present in England, and how does that compare?

PEPINSTER: Yeah. Well, the church it was meant to replace — the Roman Catholic Church — now has probably a million people going to mass on Sundays. So it’s bigger, probably, than the Church of England. There’s been some growth in evangelical churches, and then of course there are people who are Muslim, Hindu, Jewish — and then there’s a substantial number of people now in Britain who would say they were agnostic. Probably not that many who are firmly atheist, but a lot of people are very agnostic. So in terms of numbers, the Church of England isn’t substantial anymore. In terms of presence, it has a presence within what we call the establishment. I mentioned it’s got bishops in the House of Lords; the monarch has the title of Supreme Governor of the Church of England, because the church was set up by Henry VIII. So it’s very much at the heart of official life, if you like.

HENDERSON: Yeah, and political life — the UK still has a seat at the table in political life.

PEPINSTER: So in that sense, that’s the story. It’s in decline in terms of numbers. It still has an influence in public life in another way as well. A lot of churches are used for what you might call community work — they’ll be the centre of working with the homeless or with the elderly. They’re often at the heart of a community. You particularly get this in rural Britain. There might be people who don’t go to church, but they feel a strong connection with the church in their village, and it matters to them. It’s where their community has its home.

HENDERSON: Yeah, kind of a heart of the community. So given all of this, what is Mullally actually stepping into, and what will determine whether this moment brings some real changes to the institution?

PEPINSTER: Yeah. Well, there have been two really big issues in the Church of England that exploded during the time of the previous Archbishop, Justin Welby. One’s been going on for a long time, which is to do with sexuality — same-sex marriages or blessings, the way in which clergy in same-sex relationships are perceived. I think it’s fair to say that the church has tied itself in knots over this. At one point it said it was going to have same-sex blessings, and now it’s overturned that again. That’s caused lots of division. Then there’s been the whole terrible issue of child sexual abuse, which led ultimately to the resignation of Justin Welby — about how he’d handled a particular case — but there have been row after row about how the Church of England deals with abuse and what it’s put in place to enhance safeguarding. So those two issues are really important and she’s going to have to deal with them still. And then there are the small churches, the parish at the heart of every community. One of the problems is that so many church congregations are now very small, and it’s the responsibility of the people still involved in those churches to maintain them and look after them. Often they’re historic buildings, so they cost a fortune to keep running. And they’ve got to raise the money, and then they’re also supposed to send money to their diocese to pay for all kinds of things. And a lot of churches are struggling. Some people would argue the solution is to close some of those churches down, and that causes tremendous rows. So what’s happening to churches is really down to the deans and bishops, but I think she’s bound to get caught up in those kinds of debates as well.

HENDERSON: When you look at this story as a whole, what does it reveal about how change happens inside institutions like this?

PEPINSTER: Well, I think what’s interesting is that campaigns for women to be ordained went on for a long time, and then it happened. And I think now a lot of people see women clergy as completely normal — they’ve just become part of the way the church works. Women bishops: there’s still not that many of them, there are a few, but the fact that Sarah Mullally is the first Archbishop of Canterbury — I guess people will get used to it, certainly in this country, and it will seem normal. I mean, people can accept change very fast.

HENDERSON: Yeah.

PEPINSTER: I think people have got very used to us having King Charles. He’s been there three or four years, but it feels kind of normal now. Whereas people used to say, oh, the UK’s gonna have a nervous breakdown when the Queen dies, you know, they won’t be able to cope with having a different monarch. Actually, they coped easily.

HENDERSON: Yeah.

PEPINSTER: Sometimes change seems monumental, then it happens, and then life just goes on. People get used to it.

HENDERSON: This has been wonderful, Catherine. I’m so grateful for the reporting that you’re doing and for you taking the time to come and share about this long process that has led to the election of the first woman Archbishop of Canterbury.

PEPINSTER: Well, thank you. It’s great to talk to you.

HENDERSON: Complexified comes to you from the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture at Iliff School of Theology, in partnership with Religion News Service. Senior producer is Jonathan Woodward. Associate producer is Josh Perez. Consulting producer is Paul O’Donnell. I’m Amanda Henderson. The world needs us now. We need more thinking, more questions, more curiosity… more complexified. Share this episode with your friend who is most likely to drink tea instead of coffee. And email me right now at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. That’s This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..