Last spring, Chine McDonald was in an all-day board meeting of the charity Christian Aid, then headed by Dame Sarah Mullally, when her phone rang. The caller, her builder, informed her that her kitchen ceiling was about to collapse. During a break, McDonald told other trustees what was happening and burst into tears. Then she felt an arm around her shoulders.
“I was distraught and Sarah looked at me and said, ‘You need to go home. Home life is more important than this meeting. You have to look after yourself and your family’,” recalls McDonald, director of the religious think-tank Theos. “I don’t know if it’s the difference of having a woman at the top of an organisation, but she is incredibly steady and kind.”
These qualities will both be required of Mullally as she takes the helm of a far larger and more complex institution: the Church of England and the 85mn-strong global Anglican Communion that looks to it as “mother church”.