Mullally’s appointment, counterfeiting the eternal banquet

History will remember 2025 as the year when Dame Sarah Mullally was appointed as the first ever female Archbishop of Canterbury.
Mullally’s selection as a global leader within Christianity requires serious reflection. However, there are some facts which already need to be named and owned.

Firstly, her appointment interests me because I was raised as a staunch Anglican. My family of seven were a pillar of our local parish church community, and some members remain so today. I have Anglicanism to thank for opening up the story of Jesus Christ in my everyday life.
Although exposed to Catholicism through high school from the age of thirteen, it took me another eleven years of faithfully practising Anglicanism before I entered into a relationship of surrender with Christ.

At 24, I made the Catholic Church my spiritual home mostly due to the clarity of teaching on human sexuality found in God’s Word which was rapidly being rejected by senior Anglicans and yet still adhered to by Rome. Clear teaching on sexuality remains a bedrock for my faith journey to this day.
Secondly, my interest comes from having spent most of my thirties working in public affairs for the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster which meant ongoing collaboration with the then-Archbishop of Canterbury and his staff and regular visits to Lambeth Palace, soon to be Archbishop-Elect Mullally’s principal residence.

At that time during the mid-noughties, I would also attend a quarterly private luncheon with the Appointments Secretary from Downing Street whose role it is to seek out future Anglican bishops.

Following the ordination of women as Church of England priests in 1994, merely a decade prior to our working lunches, the effect of female clerics within Anglican ranks increasingly became a major topic of conversation.

I gained a sense from these discussions where Anglicanism might be heading over the next quarter of a century: initially to female episcopal appointments (which duly took place in 2014), and then swiftly to the election today of a female Archbishop of Canterbury.

Surely a female appointment is no bad thing. Or so we are expected to believe.

Mullally’s election is being described by media outlets as “a significant step towards gender equality” and “a key turning point in the history of the Church of England”. She unquestionably qualifies as capable and intelligent, more than many of her male counterparts.
This, however, is where the problem lies. Christian leadership is not about capability or intelligence but about faithfulness and a continuous surrender to all that God is and says, revealed to humanity through Sacred Scripture.

Christian leadership is also about the pursuit of unity which reflects the essence of God, something which is rapidly diminishing from the Anglican Communion. Mullally’s appointment crucifies rather than resurrects any possibility of global communion.

In a Western culture increasingly confused about sex and identity, we need spiritual leaders who will remind us that our bodies are not just biological facts. They are theological signs which proclaim the good news and help us to make sense of who God truly is.

To fail to understand our bodies, and the reality that masculinity and femininity are not arbitrary but reflect divine design, means to fail to connect marital union to Christ’s love for the Church. To understand the very essence of marriage, therefore, is the interpretive key to understanding the Gospel in its fullness.

Being created male and female means reflecting a divine mystery. Sacred Scripture has been telling humanity for nearly two millennia that the union of man and woman in marriage points to the ultimate union between Christ and the Church. When male and female are rightly ordered, then and only then can we be led to God rather than away from Him.

Never has the Western world needed a clear theological framework that affirms the goodness of being created male and female. Church leadership should witness to this, and literally ‘embody’ it. Yes, even the physical body of the Archbishop of Canterbury should reflect this em-‘body’-ment.

As a former gay activist who lived a long-term homosexual partnership and struggled with gender dysphoria, and as a man who later married a woman and became a father, I can categorically state that there is an immeasurable physical and spiritual abyss between a committed homosexual partnership and the marital union of a man and a woman. The former is preoccupied with the mystery of ‘self’ and can bear no fruit, with the latter purposely by divine design turned towards the mystery of ‘other’ with the ability to fruitfully bear new life.

For Archbishop-Elect Mullally to have affirmed publicly blessings for same-sex relationships demonstrates her abandonment of Biblical teaching and understanding—and the failure to acknowledge the lived reality of those of us who have found redemption in Christ and who have been called away from all things even remotely homosexual or transgender.

There is little wonder then that Mullally’s appointment has drawn sharp criticism from the global Anglican movement, Gafcon.

The Most Rev Dr Laurent Mbanda, chairman of the Gafcon Primates Council, said that when Mullally was consecrated as an Anglican bishop in 2015, “she took an oath to ‘banish and drive away all strange and erroneous doctrine contrary to God’s Word’. And yet, far from banishing such doctrine, Bishop Mullally has repeatedly promoted unbiblical and revisionist teachings regarding marriage and sexual morality.”
Mbanda is correct.

Mullally’s appointment reminds me of the occasion a decade ago when I attended a local Anglican communion service with a family member.
As I watched the female priest at the altar represent Christ as the Eternal Bridegroom, raising up the bread and the chalice of wine as Christ’s body and blood before the congregation who represent Christ’s Bride, I felt as though I was present at a gross distortion of the Eternal Wedding Feast.
This instinctively felt like what we have today on earth erroneously named ‘same-sex marriage’ (for ‘marriage’, read ‘mirage’).
Nearly twenty years before the UK changed the Marriage Act to permit same-sex couples to ‘marry’ in 2013, Anglicans were preparing the way for this cataclysmic change in society by tainting the nation with a parody of God’s design for marriage—females representing themselves as the Eternal Bridegroom at the altar, inviting the Bride to come forward in communion.

When a woman of great earthly intelligence like Mullally fails to see and to honour the essence of Scripture and the heavenly realms as revealed through God’s Word over the centuries, then how can she be entrusted with sacred matters if her own credibility is already proven to be polluted by her failure to ponder upon, to treasure, and to surrender her own life to God’s distinct Word?

We are left with women spiritually cross-dressing, sometimes physically appearing like men, often with short haircuts and clerical collars, whilst attempting to take on bold leadership and decision making, not born out of redeemed testerone-infused masculinity and factual reality but out of an exaggerated feminine emotionalism which leans towards what feels right.

Clearly, I wish Mullally well. However, I fear that her failure to surrender prayerfully to all that God says through Sacred Scripture—which should result in her humbly rejecting the role of Archbishop of Canterbury—could result in yet greater division and increasing numbers being led away from God rather than to the reality of who He truly is.

1 For stories of former gays, lesbians and transgenders, see Changedmovement.com, Twoprisms.com, Sexchangeregret.com, FreeToChange.org, TrueLove.is, BrothersRoad.org, XOutLoud.com, WelcomeMvmt.com

2 gafcon.org/communique-updates/canterbury-appointment-abandons-anglicans/

3 www.christiandaily.com/news/mullallys-support-for-same-sex-marriage-blessings-makes-new-archbishop-of-canterbury-impossible-as-a-focus-of-unity-gafc

James Parker is a former gay activist and abuse survivor who supports people and their loved ones around sexuality, gender and identity. Today, he facilitates True Identity, an informal national network creating peer support for those struggling with porn and sex addiction, and with issues relating to sexuality, gender and identity.