On June 25, at the close of a pilgrimage through Palestine and Israel, Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally — head of the Church of England and the first woman to hold the office — joined Jerusalem’s Anglican archbishop, Hosam Naoum, in a joint pastoral letter urging Anglicans everywhere to advocate with their political representatives “to take all necessary measures to establish a credible path towards ending the occupation.”[1, 2]
The letter followed a June 19–24 pilgrimage that took her from Jerusalem to Nazareth, Bethlehem, Birzeit, and Ramallah at Naoum’s invitation.[1, 2, 3] Along the way she met Palestinians attacked by settlers, and others detained by Israel without trial.[1] Preaching at St Peter’s, the Anglican church in the West Bank town of Birzeit, she praised Palestinians’ “faithful resistance” — and told them plainly what she hoped to help them reach:[1, 4]
The letter itself does not hedge. “We pray and call for an end to the enduring injustice in this land,” the archbishops write, holding that “war is never the answer.” They call for a viable two-state solution, with Jerusalem’s status “determined through negotiation as a shared capital” — and warn that they “fear for the long-term future of the indigenous Christian Palestinian presence in the Holy Land.” The letter opens from scripture: “Let us not love with words or speech, but with actions and in truth” (1 John 3:18).[2]
The visit drew a defence from within the church’s own ranks. In an opinion piece for Premier Christianity, Michael Coren — an Anglican priest who writes of his own Jewish heritage — argued that alarm at rising antisemitism and compassion for Palestinians are not competing loyalties, and that the archbishop’s pilgrimage modeled a church willing to acknowledge suffering on both sides rather than look away from either.[3]
The call is addressed to the whole Anglican Communion — every province, every parish, every member — and it is worth celebrating: the communion’s most senior cleric stood in the occupied West Bank and asked the whole church to work for the occupation’s end.
We are encouraged. And we hope the Anglican Communion goes further still — naming the genocide in Gaza plainly, and pulling its money from companies complicit in the war, as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has recently done. The letter’s own scripture points the way: not with words or speech alone, but with actions and in truth.