Members of the 2017 intake of the Community of St. Anselm take a selfie after being commissioned at Lambeth Palace Photo: Lambeth Palace
The third intake of young people committing to spend “a year in God’s time” as part of the Community of St. Anselm have been commissioned at Lambeth Palace. The Community of St. Anselm was created by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby in 2015, as part of his commitment to prayer and the religious life.
This week, 27 young Christians from churches around the world “made a commitment to put Christ before everything else,” Welby said on his Facebook page. “It’s always an intensely moving and humbling thing to witness.”
Community members—residential and non-residential people age 20 to 35—spend a year at Lambeth Palace, the London home and office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and engage in a range of activities centred around prayer.
He continued: “The Community’s vision is simple. We seek to give people an opportunity to recognise two things: the complexity of each other, and the simplicity of seeking to put Christ at the centre of everything. It’s our hope and prayer that this experience stays with them for the rest of their lives.
“Community is so important in the life of the church, because it’s such a good place for learning how each of us turns away from God in various ways. But through that experience—if we respond to it with honesty, openness and humility—community becomes a crucible of hope and development.
“It becomes a place where we learn to live with each other in a spirit of love and forgiveness. A place where we recognise that reconciliation is not an optional extra to the Gospel: it is the Gospel.”
The archbishop asked people to “pray for these young people as they set off on this new journey with Christ together—and for all religious communities, traditional and modern, across the church and around the world.”