The archbishop of Canterbury has urged the country to start 2019 in a “new spirit of openness towards each other” in an attempt to overcome the struggles and divisions of recent years.

Justin Welby was delivering a new year message from Lambeth Palace, his London base. Acknowledging that the festive period can be stressful for some families – “sometimes we get on each other’s nerves” – the archbishop drew parallels with wider society.

“We’re wonderfully much more diverse than we used to be. Yet we disagree on many things. And we are struggling with how to disagree well. Turn on the television, read the news, and you see a lot that could tempt you to despair,” he said.

“Hope lies in our capacity to approach this new year in a spirit of openness towards each other. Committed to discovering more of what it means to be citizens together, even amid great challenges and changes.

“That will involve choosing to see ourselves as neighbours, as fellow citizens, as communities each with something to contribute. It will mean gathering around our common values, a common vision and a commitment to one another.

“With the struggles and divisions of recent years, that will not be easy. But that difficult work is part of the joy and blessing of being a community.”

In recent weeks, Welby has spoken of the need to “calm down the hatreds” over Brexit, and for reconciliation and restraint, while acknowledging it could take 10 years for the fractures to heal after “so much bitterness”.

The archbishop is known to have voted remain in the 2015 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union but has said the outcome must be respected and people with different views must reconcile.

Reconciliation “involves regret and repentance, it involves acknowledging where things went wrong, where you went wrong, where the other went wrong, it involves truth seeking, it is a process that is cautiously piled layer upon layer upon layer until you’ve built this bridge across the gap,” he told ITV in the run-up to Christmas.

In his new year address, Welby spoke of the community of young people from around the world who spend almost a year at Lambeth Palace in prayer and contemplation, alongside charity work.

The St Anselm’s community comprises 15-20 people from different Christian traditions. Photograph: PA

The St Anselm’s community, which Welby set up three years ago, comprises 15-20 people from different Christian traditions who have given up conventional work and study. Last year, there were 200 applications.

Welby described the project as an experiment. He said: “Since 2015 we’ve been bringing together young Christians from around the world to live as a community for 10 months.

“They have an extraordinary range of backgrounds, cultures and opinions. They live together, cook together, volunteer with charities together, pray together and – because they’re human – they clash together.

“That can be over something as small as the washing-up, or as big as their politics. They are united by one thing: their faith in Jesus Christ … In this community, I find it so powerful that these remarkably different people decide to choose each other.”

In September, Welby said there was a renewed interest in religious communities in the UK.

“We are witnessing a revival of interest in community life in its different forms: celibate and non-celibate, communal and dispersed, traditional and experimental,” he wrote in the Church Times.

Religious community offered an ancient and powerful answer to modern-day commitment-phobia and isolation, he said.