Mary Ann Sieghart
Can we start by talking about the job and how it’s turned out for you? How has it been compared with your expectations?

Rowan Williams
Never boring! That’s one thing I always say to people when they ask. I think the sheer level of attention is one of things I hadn’t quite expected and perhaps that was silly of me. The fact that you are pretty heavily on the public stage all the time. The other really different thing is moving from a context where the basic stuff, day by day and week by week, was pastoral work in the parishes of the diocese to a situation where that’s not the primary thing, in terms of time consumption, anyway.

MAS
Do you miss that?

RW
Yes, I do. It’s very good to go down to Canterbury, usually once a fortnight for a few days and just go to the parishes and try and make contact.

MAS
Is the job harder than you thought it would be?

RW
Yes. I think anybody in ministry will experience a kind of upward gradation in terms of attention from other people, expectation and projection. It happens to anybody as soon as they’re ordained, it happens a bit more when you become a bishop and obviously a bit more again when you become an archbishop. That kind of intensification – what I sometimes used to call with my clergy in Wales, “living other people’s dreams” – that becomes a factor.

MAS
Do you feel you can’t live up to other people’s dreams?

RW
I think you’re very stupid if you try. You have to recognise that it happens and you have to try and live with it and you have to try not to let that determine everything you do or think or say. There is inevitably a measure of struggle involved in that.

MAS
Do you find you encounter a lot of disappointment then?

RW
I think that comes with the territory. And again, even when I was Archbishop of Wales and working with new bishops, I used to say, not realising quite how true it was, “One of the things you will do as a bishop is disappoint people.” And, you know, you get used to it, because you also exceed expectations when it has nothing to do with what you do.

MAS
In what areas do you think you’ve disappointed people, and where have you exceeded expectations?

RW
I don’t know about exceeding, but I think there’s bound to be an expectation that new archbishops make a difference rapidly. And because you’re not the elected leader of a new government with a manifesto to implement and a structure designed to do that for you, the rate of change is bound to be slow. And I’ve said from the start that my job isn’t to be a kind of government leader, to impose a line. And that’s one of the challenges: what does leadership mean in the context of the Church? It involves a great deal of listening, trying to make sense of people to each other, and out of that trying to find what’s possible, in your own prayer and discernment, as to how to nudge things forward. So it can be a slow process, it can be a frustrating process but I think that’s partly the way Christian leadership anyway is set up and very much the way in which Anglicans have tended to do the job [laughs].

MAS
When you talk about change, you say it has to be slow, but in what direction do you see yourself changing the Church?