Community of the Resurrection
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</div>An Anglican religious community for men founded in 1892 by Charles Gore and Walter Frere. Its mother house is in Mirfield, West Yorkshire where the overwhelming majority of its members now reside. Its rule is an attempt to create a communal life in which individual talents are given scope to develop. Members of the community commonly have the postnomial "CR".
Members of the Community take life vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience - although for many years after its foundation, they only took annual vows as Charles Gore disapproved of life vows.
Robert Felkin, founder of the Stella Matutina, a splinter lodge of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, undertook a retreat at Mirfield in 1903, and seriously considered becoming a member of the community, before going on to found the Stella Matutina in that same year and, later, the Whare Ra lodge in Havelock North, New Zealand in 1912.
Its main works include
- an influence far in excess of its numbers in the development of the Anglican Church in South Africa, especially in the ministry of Raymond Raynes CR and Trevor Huddleston CR in Sophiatown and in the influence of Huddleston and the Community of the Resurrection on Desmond Tutu. Desmond Tutu has links to one South Africa's most prestigious schools, the Anglican school of St John's College. Here the bishop penned an historic anti-apartheid letter to the then white government, as well as being the St. John's Visitor for many years. St. John's college's existence and ethos are also almost solely due to its founding fathers; Nash, Thomson, Alston, Hill & at least eleven others, all of whom were community members, moreover it has been a role model for many Southern African schools, thus further indirectly radiating the influence of the community . Further away, the community also managed Codrington College in Barbados.
- The foundation of the College of the Resurrection, Mirfield, which was the first theological college in the Church of England to admit ordinands irrespective of their means.
Other influential members have included Robert Hugh Benson, John Neville Figgis, Edward Keble Talbot, Martin Jarrett-Kerr, Harry Williams and David Lane.
[edit] References
- The Community of the Resurrection: A Centenary History by Alan Wilkinson, SCM Press, London, 1992.


