Northumbria Community
Who are the Northumbria Community ?
Jim is an active companion of the Northumbria Community. He regularly helps out at the retreat centre and Motherhouse in Northumbria.
Jim's life and work are embraced under Northumbria Communities care and support.
The Northumbria Community is Celtic Christianity focused on living out the gospel in everyday life, deeply rooted in the monastic tradition of ancient Northumbria, particularly figures like St. Aidan. It is characterised by a Rule of Life emphasising availability and intentional vulnerability, integrating prayer, work, rest, and hospitality into a rhythmic, ordinary existence to seek God as the "one thing necessary".
A core component is a living Rule of life of Availability and Vulnerability, which provides structure and a shared framework for living out faith in community that embraces being available to God, to others through hospitality, and to God's mission, coupled with intentional vulnerability to listen, learn, and grow.
Faith is integrated into ordinary life, the mundane aspects of daily life, seeking the holy in the ordinary rather than through escape.
The blends quiet, contemplative prayer with active, contagious faith, living as contemplative monastics in a world of action.
The community is Ecumenical and Dispersed from various traditions and is spread geographically, united by a shared spiritual quest with the core desire to call people back to a relational God, seeking Him daily in the "cell of our own hearts".
The heart and nature of Northumbria Community
The renewal of the church will come from a new type of monasticism which only has in common with the old and uncompromising allegiance to the Sermon on the Mount. It is high time men and women banded together to do this.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dynamic and erratic, spontaneous and radical, audacious and immature, committed if not altogether coherent, ecumenically open and often experimental, visible here and there, now and then, but unsettled institutionally. Almost monastic in nature but most of all
enacting a fearful hope for human life in society.
William Stringfellow
The Northumbria Community occupies an interesting 'Third Space' which is not the long established denominations or their traditional monastic communities, and nor is it a newer form of church or newer 'new monastic' community.
One of the gifts of the Northumbria Community to the body of Christ today is that it is rooted through its thirty plus years of exploration, and yet at the same time it is also still seen to be experimental and prophetic.
John Pritchard