Holding the Line: Leadership, Safeguarding, and the Cost of Avoiding Surgery

The Church of England is not short of care. It is short of courage.

Much has been made of leadership shaped by compassion, listening, and healing. Nursing language dominates the moment — accompaniment, reassurance, a steady pair of hands. Nursing is a vital vocation. It stabilises, comforts, and preserves dignity in the midst of pain.

But nursing is not surgery.

The appointment of Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury has been framed as a moment for care and repair. Yet this comes at a time when she herself has faced questions about safeguarding practice during her tenure as Bishop of London — questions that sit within a much wider pattern of institutional failure across the Church.

This matters, because the Church is not dealing with a superficial wound. It is living with deep, systemic safeguarding failures, cultures of self-protection, and a long history of prioritising reputation over truth.

Abuse in institutions behaves like cancer. It embeds itself, spreads quietly, and returns if it is only managed rather than removed.

This is not about gender, theology, or factional politics.

It is about whether those shaped by existing systems — however capable or compassionate, can dismantle the very cultures that promoted them.

Care matters. Compassion matters. But care without consequence does not cure institutional disease. Holding the Church’s hand while avoiding hard, reputation-costing decisions is not pastoral care. It is avoidance.

What this moment requires is not a nurse at the bedside, however skilled or compassionate, but a surgeon willing to cut out the cancer; decisively, painfully, and publicly — removing what has been allowed to fester for decades.

That means consequences, not comfort; accountability, not tone; truth that cuts deeply enough to heal.

Care matters. But care without excision does not cure.

History will not ask whether this moment was gentle.

It will ask whether it was brave.

~ Michelle Burns at Guarding the Flock

Writing this blog takes time, care, and a lot of tea. If it’s been helpful to you, you’re very welcome to buy me a cuppa as a small way of supporting it. No pressure at all – I’m just glad you’re here - Michelle