The Religious Life evolved among Christians in the earliest centuries of the Church’s existence. The pull to the desert for solitude in prayer, the desire to study the Scriptures, the impulse to a communal life, the desire to serve the society around in apostolic works – all worked for the emergence of communities of monks and nuns, brothers and sisters. This phenomenon spread to Britain with the Church itself and there was a range of monasteries and communities throughout the country by the Middle Ages.
At the time of the Reformation, Religious Communities sadly became an issue amidst the tragic conflicts and theological arguments that raged through Europe. In Britain, this was followed by the dissolution of all Religious houses and the apparent banishing of Religious Life from the Church of England. Yet through succeeding generations, the values and even practices of Religious Life found echoes in the life of university colleges, cathedrals, hospices and the care of the sick, alms houses, in the communal life found among families and also in some missionary movements. With the increasingly Catholic theology and ecclesiology of parts of the Church of England in the 1830s and 1840s, the idea of reviving the Religious Life gathered momentum and within the following decades many new communities were formed, with a variety of ministries and charisms, to stand alongside those of the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and other traditions within Christianity.
It is now over a hundred and fifty years since the revival of the Religious Life within the Church of England, and the communities have become accepted as part of the Church’s life and history within the varied strands which make up the Anglican tradition. There are today over forty communities in the Church of England, with many more in other parts of the Anglican Communion.
In 1935, the Church set up the Archbishops’ Advisory Council on the Relations of Bishops and Religious Communities, a body which gave official expression to the approval of Religious Life within the Church of England. Since that time, and particularly since the 1960s, Anglican Religious Communities have strengthened the links between themselves and also with communities in other Christian traditions. In order to encourage these links further and to witness to their way of life both within the Church and to those outside, the communities have produced this Year Book. It aims to be both a directory, and also to give some idea of their varied work and the contribution they make to the life of the Church.