Iona Community

▪ religious community, Scotland

      missionary group of clergy and laymen within the Church of Scotland. It was founded in 1938 by George MacLeod, a parish minister in Glasgow who hoped to infuse a new vitality into Christianity. He was convinced that the wide gap between actual life and theoretic religion should be closed and that, as in the ancient Celtic church of St. Columba (Columba, Saint), the Irish missionary who established a monastery on the island of Iona, the spiritual and the material should be intertwined. The pitiful condition of many of the ancient buildings on Iona offered MacLeod and his seven comrades an opportunity to show something of the spirit that had impelled Columba and his 12 followers, more than 1,300 years earlier, to leave their native Ireland to spread the gospel. With the approval of the Church of Scotland, they began their work of restoring the ruins, and in 1959, when the cloisters, the sanctuary, and the sacristy were finished, the abbey was consecrated.

      Iona Community members spend most of the year working on the Scottish mainland, chiefly in industrial parishes. The primary conditions of membership, however, entail residence for part of the summer on Iona and personal participation in the physical work of restoration. The members adhere to a community rule of prayer and Bible study rather than to any particular ritual. Christian groups, young people, and individuals of all denominations visit Iona every summer for recreation of body, mind, and spirit.

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