Rowan Williams and John Sentamu engaging in shouting matches with the opposition, bishops sulking in the lavatory and onlookers bursting into tears sounds like an episode of a TV reality show:  The Bachelor Bishop, perhaps. But no, it’s just another humdrum bishop’s selection committee meeting.

From here:

Church of England tied in knots over allowing gay men to become bishops.

The fraught divisions have been laid bare in the leak of an anguished and devastating memorandum written by the Very Rev Colin Slee, the former dean of Southwark Cathedral, shortly before his death from pancreatic cancer last November. Dr Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, and John Sentamu, the archbishop of York, vetoed candidates from becoming bishops of the south London diocese.

The document reveals shouting matches and arm-twisting by the archbishops to keep out the diocese’s preferred choices as bishop: Jeffrey John, the gay dean of St Albans, and Nicholas Holtam, rector of St Martin-in-the-Fields in central London, whose wife was divorced many years ago. Eventually Christopher Chessun, then an assistant bishop, was chosen.

[……]

“The archbishop of Canterbury was bad tempered throughout. When it came to voting, certainly two – possibly three – members were in tears and [Williams] made no acknowledgement but carried on regardless. At a critical point Archbishop Sentamu and three other members simultaneously went to the lavatory, after which the voting patterns changed.”

What an extraordinary mess – one created by the ambiguous attitude of the Anglican Church to the nature of homosexuality, an attitude that is unlikely to come down definitively on one side or the other of the issue any time soon.

So, at critical moments,  we can look forward to many more archbishops retreating to the toilet to powder their noses as the church continues to fracture, the pews empty and the Indaba groups multiply like maggots on a corpse.