Northern Leg of Student Cross

Last week Steph and I were walking Northern Leg of Student Cross, from just outside Nottingham to Walsingham in Norfolk.

http://www.studentcross.org.uk/

So why did we leave Corrymeela?

Corrymeela was an experience of positives and negatives. In my previous two posts I celebrated the positives. However I do feel it is necessary to share some of the negatives, the reasons why we left. As you read please keep in mind the positives I have already shared.

In a recent conversation a community member (who I will not name) summed Corrymeela up very clearly. “Corrymeela used to be a place where people were excited about the future, now it is a place where people reminisce about the past.” During our time at Corrymeela we heard conversation after conversation about how great things were in the good old days, but experienced very little energy for the future.

Corrymeela the organisation seems to have overtaken Corrymeela the community. Decisions have been made to expand and make more luxurious the residential units meaning that the residential centre has had to become more and more focussed on what it needs to do to generate income to sustain itself, rather than what it needs to do to live out the vision of the community. So too often as volunteers we were working with groups whose booking had been accepted because the centre needed to be filled, rather than because they fitted the stated aims of the Community.

Instead of being able to run and assist the running of meaningful programmes, we were instead too often providing hospitality for groups who had no real need of the subsidy provided by our voluntary work. There were too many occasions when we were told that money was running short without there being any real acknowledgement of the contribution being made by the twenty-three full time volunteers and many more part-time volunteers.

Corrymeela is a community whose vision I cannot fault (see link: Members Commitment). This was a visions which Steph and I were excited about being part of putting into practise. But we found ourselves in a place which was not really living out this vision, and which seemed unwilling even to  allow discussion of these subjects.

Too often as a volunteer I felt like the organisation was taking me and my work for granted. There was an assumption that volunteers would always be unquestioningly available. When I asked the leader if I could read the organisations strategic plan he seemed really surprised and shocked that I should ask, unable to give me a straight answer yes or no. This unwillingness to allow us to be part of creating plans for the future was very dis-empowering and dis-affirming.

And despite being a Christian organisation which proclaims prayer as a core practise of its life, the prayer life of the centre was far too often relegated to being a fringe interest. There were approximately forty people who lived or worked on site, plus up a hundred visitors, yet it was unusual for attendance at the twice-daily worship to be higher than ten and was frequently fewer than five. Very often meetings and events were programmed to clash with the worship times preventing staff, volunteers and visitors from attending.

So we found ourselves getting more and more frustrated with the organisation. As volunteers we were not able to really believe in the work Corrymeela is doing, nor were we enabled to be part of making it better.

I still believe in the vision proclaimed by the members commitment, but it is time to move on to new challenges.

I leave sad but wishing Corrymeela well.