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 people needed to be rehoused, but I feel disgusted and depressed when I see how they have done it. It did not suit the planners to think how they might deal with the community, or the individuals that made up the community. All they could think was, Sweep it away! The bureaucrats put their heads together, and if anyone had told them, A community is people, they would not have known what they were on about.”
—May Hobbs (b. 1938)
“The minutes wingd their way wi pleasure:
Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious,
Oer a the ills o life victorious!”
—Robert Burns (17591796)
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)