Do bishops want a covenant?

I was looking through some old blog postings and I found this prescient piece by Jonathan Clatworthy. It was first posted on 4 August 2008 on the now unused Only Connect blog.

I thought it could do with being aired again:

When the bishops at the Lambeth Conference got round to their formal discussions about the Covenant, opinions were divided; but the impression I got from those I spoke to (and this seems to have been the impression of the media) was that opinion was coalescing around two points.

1. There will have to be a Covenant. This is partly because Archbishop Rowan Williams has invested so heavily in it, and many of his supporters will support him even if privately they think otherwise. Others claim it’s the only way to hold the Communion together.
2. Not all Anglicans will sign up to the Covenant. Some will refuse. There is much speculation about who the refusers will be and what they will do.

Put these two points together and we get an interesting result. We need a Covenant to keep us together, and it won’t keep us together. Just remind me why we are to have one...

It’s an absurdity. How to explain it?

The key is that word ‘us’. Your perspective determines who needs to be kept together and who counts as dispensable. To some, GAFCON are on the dispensable fringe; to others the Americans are.

Which means it’s a political game; not so much an attempt to discern the will of God, more a power struggle. This surely explains why there is precious little serious analysis of the theological positions and astonishingly little concern for gays and lesbians themselves.