VOCATIONS to the religious life are being undermined by a culture of “commitment-phobia”, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.

Writing in this week’s Church Times on the religious life, Archbishop Welby says that this phenomenon has deterred some “from just about the biggest commitment you can make: staking everything on God and joining a religious community for life.”

He continues: “With endless options and opportunities for pleasure, distraction, and personal advancement, fewer and fewer of us are willing to commit ourselves to something. Coupled with that, we have seen, in the West, more generally a trend towards people being more isolated, and communities more atomised.

“Religious community offers an ancient and powerful answer to that.”

The Archbishop marks “a revival of interest in community life in its different forms: celibate and non-celibate, communal and dispersed, traditional and experimental.”

He goes on to say that “religious life matters profoundly to the Church: it has always been the place where renewal begins.”
 

Read comment from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, on the challenges facing religious communities, PLUS, the start of our new series on the religious life