The Company of Mission Priests (CMP) is a "dispersed community" of male priests of the Anglican Communion, who want to consecrate themselves wholly to the church's mission, free from the attachments of marriage and family. CMP was founded in 1940 by the initiative of the superiors of the Anglican religious orders of the Community of the Resurrection, the Society of the Sacred Mission and the Society of St John the Evangelist.
CMP follows a Vincentian rule of life. It is not officially classified as an Anglican religious order by the church, but as an "acknowledged community". Members give simple promises, (cf. simple vow) which are renewed annually. The whole community meets in General Chapter once a year, and the Regional Chapters more frequently.
CMP is known for its work in Guyana and Madagascar and for its work in staffing "needy" parishes in England with two, three or more priests, who live together in a clergy house. CMP was one of the founding members of Vincentian Millennium partnership in AD 2000.
The warden from 2005 till 2012 was Father Timothy Pike CMP, who has now been succeeded by Fr Beresford Skelton CMP and the episcopal visitor is the Right Reverend Lindsay Urwin OGS, formerly the Bishop of Horsham, and now the Administrator of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.
Famous quotes containing the words company of, company, mission and/or priests:
“Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of insanities would come up!”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself—a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)
“We never can tell how our lives may work to the account of the general good, and we are not wise enough to know if we have fulfilled our mission or not.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)
“It is evident, from their method of propagation, that a couple of cats, in fifty years, would stock a whole kingdom; and if that religious veneration were still paid them, it would, in twenty more, not only be easier in Egypt to find a god than a man, which Petronius says was the case in some parts of Italy; but the gods must at last entirely starve the men, and leave themselves neither priests nor votaries remaining.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)