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Journeys in Community
My journey to the Iona Community (John) My journey to the Iona Community started, like many people’s, first with meeting Iona Abbey, and only then the Community. The two events, however, happened virtually simultaneously and all within the space of three months, over the spring and early summer of 1958 as I turned 21, and had, for me, the force of a Damascus Road conversion. And if that sounds dramatic, all I can say is that’s exactly how it felt! It began, as many similar journeys did in those days, with George MacLeod. He came, as Moderator of the General Assembly and a former distinguished member of the Regiment, as the guest of honour to a dinner held by the 1st Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, where I was then serving as a National Service 2nd Lieutenant. The Chaplain knew I was thinking of ‘going in for the ministry’ and introduced me to the great man. George, always on the look out for potential recruits to his still fairly young Community, gave me his card and told me to phone him when I got out. Flattered, of course, at being at the receiving end of such attention, I called him – and he stood me to lunch in Glasgow. The outcome was that he arranged for me to go to Iona for three months to, as he rather vaguely put it, ‘help us to build a road’. At this point in my life, I may have heard of Iona, but never of the Iona Community. My faith journey up till then had led me from a pretty traditional middle-class church background, through a youthful evangelical conversion experience, followed by a sharp rejection of all things religious (mainly because I felt I was being offered answers to questions that I wasn’t actually asking), back to a vague desire to study theology and explore the possibility of
