PRAYER AND WORSHIP
If you join the Iona Community in worship on Iona, you will find a pattern of daily prayer and worship that reflects our life together. At our Camas Centre on Mull you will find us reflecting on each day in simple, down-to-earth ways.
In our Family Groups and Regions, you will hear us sing, pray, rage and reflect on gospel and life, many of us with doubts and questions. Through our Prayer Circle you will meet our global Members praying for peace and healing for individuals and nations. In our regular online gatherings for worship you will meet Members sharing a common language of faith rooted in action for justice and peace.
Through our Wild Goose Resource Group you will encounter creative approaches to old stories, deep truths and new ways to sing, along with an invitation to engage with us from your own context.
In all of this, we understand that prayer and worship, even when we are alone, is a collective task, focused on the needs of the whole world including our own, and that the way we pray depends on our context.
Prayers for Israel/Palestine
It can be difficult to know how to pray for the distressing situation in Israel/Palestine. You will find prayer resources over in the News section of the website.
There you’ll also find how the Community is responding individually and together to the ongoing horror.
Find out more about how to join our Common Concern Networks.
God were where you?
God of justice and mercy – God who sees the sparrow fall –
where were you when pitiless men
broke down the doors of safe rooms that were no longer safe?
Where were you God?
Now, as Rachel weeps for her children, where are you?
As those in power exact terrible revenge, where are you?
When brutalized generations grew up as angry children
in an unsafe world – while power games played out –
where were we?
(c) Jan Sutch Pickard
You can read the full prayer below.
Transformative worship
We affirm that worship can be a transformative experience when it reflects the dream of God for the flourishing of all creation. Our worship is rooted in our relationships with God, each other, and the world around us.
Our worship takes shape through imaginative engagement with scripture, Christian traditions, lived experience, and other sources of inspiration. We embrace the creative tensions within worship – structure and freedom; stillness and action; transcendence and immanence.
We seek to create and share in worship that embodies our commitment to justice, peace, and the integrity of creation. Therefore we seek to be radically contextual, inclusive, and participatory in our worship.
We are continually learning and growing, so our worship is continually evolving and being renewed.
‘Prayer is an auditing, hauling the boulders of self-absorption, fear and prejudice away from … blocking the flow of life.’
Kathy Galloway, ‘Living by the Rule’
‘The turn of a leaf in morning sun and the catch in our throat drives us to our knees and into prayer’
Yvonne Morland, ‘Pushing the Boat Out’
