What is the demanding common task?

As a new member of the Iona Community the phrase “the demanding common task”  baffled me when I heard it banded about by members without a definition being given. It is clear that there are many interpretations possible and I believe the meaning has changed considerably over the years and I would expect it to continue changing.

For George McLeod (though I never knew him unlike many of the senior members) it was a socialist agenda to relieve poverty in the areas of deprivation and make the church relevant to the poor. One of the ways of achieving this was by incorporating manual labour into ministerial formation. Restoring an ancient abbey was a byproduct of his dream by getting theologians and artisans working close together, sharing the work under his rules and strict discipline.

In our day things are very different. The community is not involved in ministerial formation, members are not forced to do manual labour and we have a large historic property by which the community is principally known to the world.

For me the demanding common task is following the agenda of justice, peace and the integrity of creation and at the same time bringing a creative spirit of renewal to the worship life of the church.

Some people over the long history of the Iona Community have been side-tracked in their definition of the demanding common task because a great deal of time has been taken up by the “millstone” of running a Christian holiday centre! Though it is rightly seen now as a resource for the social, political and spiritual goals of the community, it has often been too much of a focus on its own. 

The social, political and spiritual goals of the community are demanding for they are tasks which have no clear end as there is always more that could be done. It would be easy to become depressed at the slow speed of progress towards these ends. It is thus very important to have a community of likeminded people who share the vision to support you and encourage you. A community that has such wide, all-encompassing aims can have few members who are enthusiastic activists for every cause. Yet the community encourages and supports each member to follow their passions in their part of the common task. In this way community members all do different things, pulling in the same general direction, given unity by this shared trajectory and supporting one another in the same way that a rope is strengthened by each of the many strands that make it up.