Iona Community - Community Life and Activities

Community Life and Activities

The Iona Community is a scattered community. Its members live mainly in Scotland, England and Wales, others live in Australia, Germany, Malaysia and the United States. In May 2009, there were 270 Full Members, "around 1800" Associate Members and 1600 Friends of the Community. Among them are Presbyterians, Anglicans, Lutherans, Quakers, Roman Catholics and people of no denominational allegiance. The community has a strong commitment to ecumenism and to peace and justice issues.

The Iona Community runs three residential centres: Iona Abbey and the MacLeod Centre on the Isle of Iona, and Camas Tuath on Mull. Weeks at the centres often follow a programme related to the concerns of the Iona Community, and people are invited to come and share the life. A regular feature of a visit to Iona is a pilgrimage around the island which includes meditations on discipleship; when the pilgrims reach the disused marble quarry or the machair, the common ground where the crofters once grazed sheep, for example, they stop for reflection on work and faithfulness.

The community has its own ecumenical liturgy which is used daily in the abbey and elsewhere.

Read more about this topic:  Iona Community

Famous quotes containing the words community, life and/or activities:

    The community and family networks which helped sustain earlier generations have become scarcer for growing numbers of young parents. Those who lack links to these traditional sources of support are hard-pressed to find other resources, given the emphasis in our society on providing treatment services, rather than preventive services and support for health maintenance and well-being.
    Bernice Weissbourd (20th century)

    I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical terms.
    Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)

    That is the real pivot of all bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreative body in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions and all the activities of the procreative body were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression. That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)