What Will Rise From the Tomb?

As Canterbury prepares to install its 106th Archbishop, Sarah Mullally, on March 25, 2026, Rowan Williams has said he does not know whether the Anglican Communion will survive. That is not a small remark from a former Archbishop of Canterbury. Nor is it mere melodrama. It is an acknowledgment that succession can continue even while confidence in the form we inherited collapses.

He may be right.

But survival is not the deepest Christian question.

The deeper question is whether a church that has spent too long confusing self-preservation with faithfulness is still capable of repentance, and whether anything holy can rise if the form we inherited is finally brought low.

That will sound harsh to some. It is not written as cheap provocation. Christianity is not a religion of institutional immortality. It is a faith in which judgment, death, repentance, and resurrection are not decorative words. They are the way God tells the truth.

For too long, much of Anglicanism has been sustained by a quiet fiction: that if we can keep the structures standing, keep the language dignified, keep the process moving, and keep the tone measured, then perhaps we can call that faithfulness.

We cannot.

A church does not live because its liturgies are elegant, its bishops articulate, or its history venerable. Those things may be gifts. They may even be genuine glories. But they are not life. Institutions can preserve beauty long after they have lost courage. They can maintain seriousness of tone while hollowing out seriousness of soul. They can speak of grace while operating by fear.

And when that happens, decline is no longer merely numerical or structural. It is moral.

The crisis facing Anglicanism is not only the familiar catalogue of disputes. It is not only schism, sexuality, post-colonial realignment, falling attendance, or contested authority. Beneath all of that lies something more searching: an inability, in too many places, to repent truthfully. Current arguments over Canterbury’s future role only sharpen that larger question. The Church of England itself now frames the installation as the formal start of Sarah Mullally’s ministry as Archbishop of Canterbury. But an office beginning is not the same thing as a Communion being healed.

We have become very good at process.

We know how to commission reports, convene panels, draft statements, and express regret in language grave enough to sound substantial. We know how to acknowledge pain without yielding power. We know how to speak of safeguarding, justice, inclusion, and accountability in ways that often leave the machinery of self-protection fundamentally intact.

That is not renewal.

It is managed survival.

And managed survival is not the same thing as resurrection.

There comes a point in the life of any institution when the question is no longer whether it can continue, but whether its continuation, in its present form, has become a way of avoiding judgment. Christians, of all people, should know that not everything ought to be preserved unchanged. The New Testament does not present death as the ultimate tragedy. Sometimes death is the precondition of new life.

So yes, perhaps some version of Anglicanism as we have known it should die.

Not the Gospel. Not prayer. Not sacramental life. Not the deep and chastened beauty that still lives in the tradition at its best. But the habits of evasion should die. The reflex of protecting office before truth should die. The culture that treats wounded people as liabilities to be managed should die. The instinct to mistake delay for discernment and optics for repentance should die.

Let that die.

Because what the church needs is not a better brand, a more media-literate episcopate, or another round of ecclesial choreography designed to reassure anxious insiders that continuity itself is a virtue.

What the church needs is something smaller, humbler, poorer in pretension, and richer in truth.

A church that tells the truth before calculating reputational cost.

A church that understands repentance is not performance.

A church that would rather lose money, buildings, influence, and status than betray the vulnerable again.

A church that does not punish memory for speaking too clearly.

A church that remembers holiness is not the same thing as institutional continuity.

That church might yet live.

But it will not be raised by sentimentality about inheritance alone. It will not be saved by deference, nor by nostalgia for a gentler Anglican synthesis that no longer exists. It will only be raised, if it is raised, on the far side of truth.

That is why Rowan Williams’s remark matters now. Not because it is sensational, but because it lands on the eve of installation. Canterbury will proceed. The rite will happen. The office will endure. But the deeper question remains unanswered: what if succession without repentance is only continuity in robes?

The question, then, is not simply whether the Anglican Church will survive.

The question is what must be allowed to die.

What must be judged.

What must be buried.

And what, by the mercy of God alone, might still rise from its tomb.

Because resurrection is not the reward for institutional self-preservation.

It is what God does after truth.