About a year after receiving the "Baptism in the Holy Spirit", Damian Stayne, our founder, felt a call from God to community. In response, during Lent of 1983, he left his job and traveled to Paris to visit some of the new communities which had been called into being in the "City of Light". His time was divided between the Emmanuel Community, a huge, mostly nonresidential, charismatic community with an emphasis on Adoration and Mission, and the Community of Jerusalem. This was a mixed monastic community whose emphasis was prayer, worship, beauty and simplicity. Both communities had a strong Eucharistic devotion.

Damian was greatly affected by his time in Paris, and became profoundly convicted that God desired a marriage between these two expressions of love for Him; a community which could offer the depths of prayer and worship to be found in the monastic and contemplative vocation and yet be engaged in Mission and embrace the Charismatic Gifts.

Soon after returning to London, says Damian, he knew in his heart that he would be involved in the founding of a new community which lived this marriage. Then followed seven and a half years of prayer, fasting and searching. This finally bore fruit in October 1990 with the founding of Cor et Lumen Christi (The Heart and Light of Christ).