The Church’s worship should include the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, with the gathered people of God eating and drinking Jesus’ body and blood together in order to receive from him. The Lord is the host who has laid the table for us.
This is the plank of my eucharismatic manifesto which makes the charismatic evangelical most uncomfortable: a weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper is (at least) as important to the worship of the local church as hearing tongues and interpretations is.
My sacramental friends will splutter at the framing of that, because the Lord’s Supper is surely more important than that. I think I would agree, but the nature of the ‘eucharismatic’ contention is really about getting my charismatic circles to embrace a richness of sacramental life.
I can’t really argue for the other side because I am a product of my setting, as everyone is. I can only look at what we have (meaning here, reformed charismatic churches) and say, “what we have is great, we need this as well.” Someone out there in a sacramental, perhaps Reformed Catholic, world who becomes convinced of the need for worship and ministry as Paul outlines in 1 Corinthians 12-14, would be the best placed to argue the other side.
My argument is that the church in scripture ate the Lord’s Supper when they met together (1 Corinthians 11—it’s only expanding the chapters we focus on by one!). We notice in, for example, The Didache, that the early church ate the Lord’s Supper weekly as part of their worship. We can read a version of the early liturgies in that document.
There are historic reasons we don’t eat it weekly, but I don’t think they make any sense. I think the usual argument about why we don’t is ‘because we don’t’, but it might be extended to ‘because we’d have to cut this or that.’
If that’s true, and I’m not even remotely convinced that it is, why would we not do the thing that the earliest Christians did as they met together (Acts 20), and that Christians continued to do when they met through all the earliest ages of the church. Do we not want to be the body of Christ?
I’ve also heard people argue that it’s important to keep the Supper ‘special’ by eating it occasionally. Putting aside the medieval comparisons you could draw, this isn’t how people work. We love what we do. If you want people to think the Supper is special, eat it more. It becomes more meaningful, not less, with regularity.
What is the Supper?
The Lord’s hosting of us at his Table. In line with the rest of the theology I’ve spun, we approach the Table and discover that we are hosted by God rather than he by us.
We should embrace the mystery implied in saying that the bread is the body of Christ, and the cup the new covenant in his blood. We confess this with the Church down the ages whatever we think that means—you can do so without having to explain it away as though it means nothing at all. While what that means is important (I’m Calvinist on the question, if you were asking), it’s a long way away from the most interesting thing you can say about the Lord’s Supper.
We need to reflect carefully on who gets to preside, and in what settings outside a Sunday gathering the Supper is appropriate, but these are also not as interesting as thinking about bread, wine, and eating.
The social and ecclesial implications of the meal that God lays for us are important and we should think them through. The meal changes society, changes the city, changes the household, changes the act of eating, and changes hospitality—all of them in a fundamental way. The Table changes every table.
I know from experience that this contention clicks with some people implicitly—communicating as poetry, I suppose—and for others just sounds strange. This is the broad topic for the research degree I’m hoping to pursue, so more on this as I write it.
Charismatic Eucharist
I’d like us to learn to take the Supper like charismatics, maybe this says more about me than about all charismatics, but we really don’t know what to do with ourselves. We don’t have a formal liturgy, so we feel we have to innovate (please don’t), but don’t have any guidelines to innovate along. We don’t know what the posture is, but from my experience we act like maybe it’s meant to make us sad. Which probably explains why we don’t do it more.
The Lord’s Supper is a meal, a foretaste of the Wedding Supper of the Lamb. We don’t forget the Cross at the Table, but we are allowed to embrace joy in all its various forms.
Maybe it would be irreverent, but I think I’d prefer it if we were more at risk of our celebrations of the Supper turning into conga lines and having to reintroduce a little bit of order. It’s OK to enjoy it, you’re meant to.
Enjoying the Supper
Which brings me on to more contentious issues. If we’re meant to enjoy it, please don’t serve us precut bread that’s been drying out through the whole of our gathering. Please don’t serve us unpleasant grape juice.
Maybe we could get the best bread we can afford, or make ourselves, and make sure it’s as fresh as possible when we come to partake. Maybe, I know this is shocking, we could remember that Jesus doesn’t use wine for the covenant ‘in his blood’ because it’s red and so looks like blood, as though any red liquid would work. Wine has a set of biblical-theological images which are bundled with it that it activates for us: particularly blessing, joy, and judgement coming together. As ever, the Bible particularises doctrine in Story, and the details and contours matter to us. Give us wine. White wine is better than red grape juice.
I took the Supper the other day with brioche and madeira, because that was what we had to hand. Odd perhaps, but still bread and wine.
I’m aware there are some arguments people use to justify grape juice. I think they might make sense in certain contexts, I am unconvinced that they do in British urban ones. Even if you do this, don’t treat it like it’s a matter of no import and that you’ve lost nothing in changing the symbols.
Then, if you think that enjoying the Supper matters, think about what you put the bread on, think about the nature of the Cup you share. Are they made from quality materials that demonstrate what you think this is? It’s OK to invest in a little silver, even if that would make most charismatics a bit nervous that you’ll suddenly start elevating the bread.
What’s the table you put it on like? What’s it made from? Where is it situated in your room? Surprising though it might be, all of these things make theological statements and change the way we interact with the Supper. They matter.
It’s a meal
Most church plants start out by offering meals in someone’s home each week. Strangely in my experience, with some notable exceptions, without the Lord’s Supper. At the time you start running ‘proper’ meetings, the meal is dropped.
I don’t know that the church has to eat together each week, though I think you could if you wanted to, but I do think that divorcing the Supper from its context in a household meal changes its nature in ways that change us slowly, over time. This is probably unavoidable, but also needs to be carefully reflected on what we lose and how we might be able to regain it.
Eucharismatic worship will include the encountering of God in song, in prayer, in the preached word, in baptismal waters, and in bread broken and wine poured out. Visible words, the gospel you can eat, the body and blood of God.
Photo by Kate Remmer on Unsplash
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