What is Communion? In part, it is about union with Christ Jesus, with God, with God’s people in Christ, across the globe and the ages.
As the Director of Christian Emphasis with the YMCA of Greater Fort Wayne, Indiana, and as one connected with other Christian Y workers around the state, country, and world, I muse often on why communion isn’t a more common practice within our association.
When I was first hired, and I proposed offering communion at different branches in the chapels for our members, I was discouraged from doing so. The main reason given focused on the non-unifying reality of communion, how it was not as inclusive as other Christian practices like praying, volunteering in the community, singing, or a Bible study.
Interestingly, this is a very similar reason given in the early days of my denomination, formed in the last decades of the 18th century, for why they only practiced communion quarterly as a church.
The Church of the United Brethren in Christ was formed amongst primarily German Protestants, led by a continental German Reformed pastor and a Pennsylvania German Mennonite minister. They had close ties with the British clergyman Francis Asbury of the Anglican-Methodist movement.
It was a heady day of revivals, of preaching to mass cr0wds in open fields or large barns. They sought to proclaim a simple message of salvation to churched-people.
The liturgy around communion in the Reformed, Mennonite, and Anglican churches became tainted with formality, a dead spirit, and legalism. A result: a de-emphasis on the role of communion in a Sunday morning worship gathering, and an over-emphasis on the proclamation of the word for the explicit result of the salvation of souls for Christ.
The YMCA movement in 1844, a British product of Anglican and Dissenter Christians, highly valued the revival style, with founder George Williams leaving a legacy of constantly witnessing to strangers for the salvation of their souls.
While the Y valued unity and harmony in the movement, as expressed in the 1855 Paris Basis, the emphasis was on the extension of the kingdom through revival-style tactics that led to the salvation of souls. It would seem that communion was delegated as a sacrament of the church, and the Y was not a church, but the Y could help the church out by saving souls, and then sending them to the church.
This became a complicated scenario. Often the young men saved by the YMCA didn’t want to join the stuffy old churches in town. So the Y had to provide discipleship courses and ministry training of their own. Springfield College provided a lot of this educational operations. But without the emphasis on communion, which was the role of the church.
The Y has moved on from offering Christian education courses as part of its core identity. Many other para-church organizations have sprung up over the decades to evangelize and disciple youth, men, and families. There is a current movement in the Y to strengthen the “C” – I’m part of that work; but: to what end? What can we learn from our past 176 years of Christian ministry work (evangelism & discipleship) and build on it, rather than repeat it or over-nostalgiaize it?
My own church tradition has a mixed relationship with communion, much like many other conservative Evangelical congregations. With a reductionistic-like focus on the salvation of souls as the highest, most important, very urgent priority – the role of communion is minimized. It’s not always clear how to connect communion to the salvation of souls, other than to over-emphasize the atonement for our sins made through the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus on the cross.
While that part of communion is true, there is more to the sacrament of communion than just substitutionary atonement, of justification by faith, of sanctification by grace. There is also the spiritual unity that is inherent in the name of the practice: commune + union = communion. And it is this element that the YMCA can retrieve and build upon, especially with our emphasis on unity, on being “for all” and building bridges.
Rather than skim the surface in connecting with the many different kinds of Christians in the YMCA, we could make thoughtful attempts to build stronger spiritual bonds through the practice of communion. It’s not just the sharing of a cup and bread that bind us together, but how we understand it, what it means to us, how it connects us to what God has revealed to his people through Christ, through the Scriptures, and the saints who have come before us.
Growing up in the UB church, we partook of communion quarterly. Because it was so special, we didn’t want to take it too often, as that might cause us to take it for granted. Also, we didn’t want to be like the Catholics or liberal mainline congregations who took it every week. But even as a youth, it seemed to me that if communion was as special as we said it was, shouldn’t we do it every week? When I started a church, we “compromised” and practiced communion every month. For certain sermon series, we might do it every week, which was a relief for some in our congregation, and a stretch for others.
The practice of communion continues to stick in my heart as a sacrament which I want to understand better, that I want it to mean more; it seems to me there is more to it than what I was taught or experienced growing up. Getting to know faithful Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, Presbyterian, Church of Christ, and Methodist Christians who took communion every week has helped a lot.
I realize that there are certain restrictions that some denominations place on their members when it comes to partaking of communion. Because it is so special, it is especically guarded, to help keep it pure and it’s meaning sacred.
My Protestant evangelical heritage prompts me to open up communion to the world, but to also pay attention to the concern to keep it special. I’d like to find a way where we could offer communion every week, maybe every day, in a way that it would be open to the world, and still be special. The YMCA seems to be a vehicle to attempt those experiences.
In our under-nourished Christian ecumenical work, once a hall-mark of our YMCA identity, and now in America almost largely forgotten, the sacrament of communion could be a spiritual practice which re-focuses Christian Y members on Christ in a new, ecumenical way.
Something like this is needed for Christians to fuel the existential/spiritual work of racial reconciliation in our communities, adapting to and recovering from the effects of the pandemic, and building bridges across polarized chasms.
Thi attempt/experiment is not a replacement for the different Christian churches and how they do communion. But maybe rather a re-connecting point for Christians who are not part of a church tradition for many reasons, some of them being the hypocrisy of the church, the irrelevance of the church, the spiritual-deadness of the church, and other reasons.
There is much that needs to be thought out on this idea. For me, I know it includes continuing to expand my understanding of what communion means to other Christians and their church traditions.
This morning I was reading For The Life Of the World by Alexander Schmemann, former Dean and Professor of Liturgical Theology at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary. The following paragraphs from chapter 2, The Eucharist, caught my attention, I had to re-read it several times, as it made fresh connections and new points about communion that I found to be inspiring, disturbing, and encouraging.
It opens up for me a richer vision of what is happening in communion, of it’s larger purpose, what it can mean for me and for us as participants, and what it can mean for the church and the world. This Orthodox perspective is new to me, so there is much I need to learn yet to keep it in context. Yet, I do know that I will never participate in communion the same ever again, having read this perspective by Rev. Schmemann. For me, it reads as a profound meditation on John 17:21.
“As we proceed further in the eucharistic liturgy, the time has come now to offer to God the totality of all our lives, of ourselves, of the world in which we live. This is the first meaning of our bringing to the altar the elements of our food.
For we already know that that food is life, that it is the very principle of life, and that the whole world has been created as food for man. We also know that to offer this food, this world, this life to God is the initial ‘eucharist’ function of man, his very fulfillment as man.
We know that we were created as celebrants of the sacrament of life, of its transformation into life in God, communion with God. We know that real life is ‘eucharist,’ a movement of love and adoration toward God, the movement in which alone the meaning and the value of all that exists can be revealed and fulfilled. We know that we have lost this eucharistic life, and finally we know that in Christ, the new Adam, the perfect man, this eucharistic life was restored to man.
For He Himself was the perfect Eucharist; He offered Himself in total obedience, love and thanksgiving to God. God was His very life. And he gave this perfect and eucharistic life to us. In Him God became our life.
And thus this offering to God of bread and wine, of the food that we must eat in order to live, is our offering to Him of ourselves, of our life and of the whole world. ‘To take in our hands the whole world as if it were an apple!’ said a Russian poet.
It is our Eucharist. It is the movement that Adam failed to perform, and that in Christ has become the very life of man: a movement of adoration and praise in which all joy and suffering, all beauty and all frustration, all hunger and all satisfaction are referred to their ultimate End and become finally meaningful.
Yes, to be sure, it is a sacrifice: but sacrifice is the most natural act of man, the very essence of his life. Man is a sacrificial being, because he finds his life in love, and love is sacrificial: it puts the value, the very meaning of life in the other and gives life to the other, and in this giving, in this sacrifice, finds the meaning and joy of life.
We offer the world and ourselves to God. But we do it in Christ and in remembrance of Him. We do it in Christ because He has already offered all that is to be offered to God.
He has performed once and for all this Eucharist and nothing has been left unoffered. In him was Life -and this Life of all of us, He gave to God. The church is all those who have been accepted into the eucharistic life of Christ.
And we do it in remembrance of Him because, as we offer again and again our life and our world to God, we discover each time that there is nothing else to be offered but Christ Himself – the life of the world, the fullness of all that exists.
It is His Eucharist, and He is the Eucharist. As the prayer of offering says – ‘it is He who offers and it is He who is offered.’ The liturgy has led us into the all-embracing Eucharist of Christ, and has revealed to us that the only Eucharist, the only offering of the world is Christ.
We come again and again with our lives to offer; we bring and ‘sacrifice’ – that is, give to God – what He has given us; and each time we come to the End of all sacrifices, of all offerings, of all eucharist, because each time it is revealed to us that Christ has offered all that exists, and the He and all that exists has been offered in His offering of Himself.
We are included in the Eucharist of Christ and Christ is our Eucharist. (p34-36)
For The Life Of The World, Chapter 2, “The Eucharist”, pages 34-36, Alexander Schmemann
