Servant’s Heart
Imagine! Coming home for your 60th birthday! What joy! Now, spread that over an entire year, and you have some sense of the 60th anniversary of the Sorrento Centre, the Anglican retreat and conference centre on the shoreline of the beautiful Shuswap in the Diocese of Kootenay.
We’ll embrace old friends, some of whom have been coming home to the Sorrento Centre for many decades. We’ll welcome new friends, from near and from far away, to events and activities throughout the year.
Here are some of the highlights:
- A reunion in May of youth staff from over the decades.
- Five glorious weeks of summer programming in June and July.
- A special Labour Day festival with a celebration of Secwepemc and Indigenous culture.
- Thanksgiving event with National Indigenous Archbishop Chris Harper.
Plus so much more: photography, and basket-making, expressive arts in all their glory; music and spiritual contemplation, pilgrimage, and theological inquiry.
What ties it all together?
The Sorrento Centre aspires to be more than just a comfortable and affordable place to visit. We seek to nourish body, mind and soul, not only for our Anglican and other guests, but also the wider community.
We are a powerful expression of diaconal ministry in our Church and in the world. Since the time of Stephen in the Book of Acts, deacons have stood at the intersection of Church and community, offering loving kindness, practical acts of service, speaking truth to power, feeding the widows and orphans (and their modern-day counterparts), and always seeking justice and love, while engaged in humble service.
As part of our loving service, we offer our guests rest and relaxation, spiritual growth and transformation, family fun at the waterfront, and much more. As part of our loving service, we offer tasty and nutritious meals prepared daily in our kitchen and delivered seven days a week to people who are homeless and those facing other challenges. We’ve delivered more than 30,000 meals in 2022 and more than 75,000 since the start of the pandemic in 2020.
We are a vital hub in our community for isolated and neglected seniors, as well as a home to the local 4H group. In mid-December, hundreds of students from Sorrento Elementary raised their voices in song for their annual Christmas concert on our campus in mid-December.
At the Sorrento Centre, we embrace our deep roots in the Anglican tradition. We were founded by a group of visionaries in 1963 and have grown to host many events and activities on-line and in-person. We are a holy place of transformation for learning, healing and belonging.
We invite everyone in the Diocese of Kootenay to discover their home at the Sorrento Centre, and for those who have been home to our beloved Centre before, to re-discover the joy during our 60th anniversary.
The medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen tells us: “There is the music of heaven in all things.”
Each year, we commission an incredible fibre artist named Kathy Kinsella to create a prayer flag that captures our dreams and aspirations, as we lift them up to the divine one. For our homecoming year, our 60th anniversary, Kathy has created a flag of joy.
You are most welcome to come and live into the joy during 2023.
