5 Reasons To Celebrate The Lord’s Supper Every Week
For some reason, in all of my musings and processing about church, culture, and theology, I can’t get away from this one point. Celebrating the sacrament we call the Eucharist/Lord’s Supper/Communion weekly has become something very close to my heart, and I’d love to tell you why I feel so strongly about it:
- Everything we do in weekly worship is preaching something.
I think it’s fascinating, the things that do and do not take priority in most modern-day evangelical churches. When you look at the order of worship (liturgy) of your congregation, what does it tell you about your theology? Even more to the point, what does your weekly liturgy communicate to guests and congregation members alike? What we do in church matters; it’s why some churches emphasize spontaneity in worship, or some give focused attention to taking the offering, while some have unapologetically long sermons, or some might have an altar call every week after the message. Our worship elements betray our theology, what we value, and what we think is important in corporate worship gatherings.
There are a handful of events that happen every single week at the vast majority of American Protestant churches. And I think we need to ask ourselves as pastors and leaders, why these things particularly and not others? Why do these specific items have to be on the docket, while others seem optional? I believe our worship elements betray our ecclesiology- how we think of church, and what we believe the purpose of church is.
The “constants” are pretty obvious to anyone who’s been a churchgoer for more than a couple weeks. Prayer, worship (i.e., singing), preaching, and an offering of some kind are so common that it’s virtually impossible to find a weekend church service in America today lacking these four elements.
2. The Lord’s Supper (Eucharist) is one of two “sacraments” agreed upon by all Christians, everywhere, at all times.
Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox traditions disagree on exactly how the Eucharist (Greek word for thanksgiving) is a means of grace to believers, but all agree that the Eucharist is a sacrament — a moment in our gatherings that is uniquely sacred in some way, uniquely holy — that in some mysterious way, Christ meets us in the bread and wine in a way that is special and unique from the way He meets us in song, prayer, or the preaching of the Word. Each of the above elements — prayer, worship, preaching, offering — important as they are, are not properly considered “sacraments.” But in spite of this fact, for the vast majority of Protestant churches the Eucharist has become at best an afterthought, an “occasional” sacrament, something to be celebrated monthly or quarterly — or worse, whenever the pastor decides to make time for it, when there isn’t a more pressing building campaign video or a 55-minute message to preach. I joke… a little. I personally grew up in a denomination where the sermons were painfully long, extended corporate prayer and long, spontaneous times of singing were emphasized, but I don’t remember ever once in 15 years celebrating the Lord’s Supper. I doubt my experience is unique.
3. Celebrating the Lord’s Supper weekly aligns our practices more closely with the early church.
If we are honest, this paradigm of occasional celebration of communion represents a distinctly Protestant, distinctly modern, distinctly not New Testament ecclesiology. The modern liturgy of your average evangelical church is at best 500 years old, finding its root in the Reformation, but more likely draws heavily from the American revivals of the 18th and 19th centuries — not from the practices of the New Testament or the ancient Church. The early church, it appears, didn’t put their liturgical priorities on the same things that we do. In fact, the centrality of the sermon is a distinctly Protestant invention, and was simply not central to the liturgy of the medieval Christian worship service until Martin Luther and John Calvin led their movements to make it so. And rightly so, I should add! The “Word” had been so ignored by medieval Catholicism that by the Late Middle Ages one could attend an entire Mass and never once hear God’s truth proclaimed, at least not in a language they could understand. But the medieval Mass had at least one thing right: every week, “celebrating the Mass” meant partaking in the Lord’s Supper. The Eucharist was the high point, the pinnacle, the climax of worship of the church gathered. Because of the Catholic underemphasis on the Word, Protestantism began to emphasize Scripture and preaching, eventually to the point that the Lord’s Supper/Mass/Communion began to be seen as basically optional, and therefore increasingly rare as the centuries wore on. Lest I seem to overstate my point, even Luther’s emphasis on the sermon was due to the fact that without a clear endorsement of the sacraments by the Word, they lost their “sacramental quality,” so even the Reformation’s shift toward sermon centrality was based in the understanding that the sermon supported the power of the sacraments. Calvin himself in his Institutes held the two inseparably together, not in mutual exclusion, in his definition of a church: “Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, there, it is not to be doubted, a Church of God exists” (Stott, pp. 24-25)
4. It helps us keep the Gospel and the glory of Jesus central to the weekly gathering, no matter the sermon topic.
Why do we gather as the people of God? Why do we gather regularly? Is it for fellowship? Is it to hear the Word of God proclaimed? Is it to sing together? Is it to invite unsaved friends to come with us? Is it to bring our offerings to God? Yes, we could say that all of these things are included in the purpose and meaning of church.
But all of these things are but ingredients to facilitate what is in fact our ultimate purpose as a church:
To glorify God together as his people. To worship. To celebrate and proclaim the great worth and weight (glory) of the Lord Jesus.
“Church” can happen without an offering, without music, maybe even without a sermon! But we most assuredly may not say that church has happened if Jesus has not been celebrated and proclaimed as Lord and Christ among us.
So how do we do this? In song, certainly. In preaching, absolutely.
I’ve said that all Christians everywhere and always have agreed upon two sacraments handed down to us by Christ and the apostles: Baptism and the Eucharist. Preaching is not a sacrament, nor is worship through song, nor the giving of tithes and offerings. Baptism is obviously a one-time event, but the Eucharist is an ongoing celebration of Jesus, of the core of the Gospel, even a “re-baptism,” if you will, every week as we immerse the bread into the wine and remember his (and our!) death and resurrection. In the Eucharist we “proclaim the Lord’s death”; we declare his faithful, unfailing love for us; we repent of our sin and lack of grace for others; we trust anew in his forgiveness and mercy for us; we remember. In the Eucharist we have a tangible reminder of the Body and Blood of Christ broken and shed for us that exists in no other place but the bread and wine. Nowhere else in a worship service are we so explicitly reminded of the Gospel as we are in the Eucharist. Nowhere else is the invitation to the Table of the Lord made so directly and powerfully as it is here.
I would go so far as to say that the Eucharist is the essence of why we gather. From the apostles to the Reformers, there is clear and united agreement that the sacraments are one of a handful of pieces that define what it means to be a church. Communion is worship at its natural climax; it is the whole goal of all our preaching, the cumulation of the Gospel, the means and end of our salvation, right there in the elements!
The body of Christ, broken for you. The blood of Christ, shed for you.
Have any more powerful or transformative words ever been spoken from one mortal to another? Why would we ever presume to relegate this most holy of moments to the back burner, to a quarterly schedule, or only at the back end of topical sermons when we preach specifically about the atonement? This is everything of the Gospel, something we must be reminded of weekly, even daily: that Christ is our Savior and Mediator, that sin has no control over us any longer, that we are invited to follow Him in His death and resurrection, to live lives of beautiful brokenness and servant-hearted sacrifice as we love those around us.
The truth is, many churches don’t have a “gospel moment” naturally built into every gathering. Sure, the basics are there, at least in many of the songs we sing, but let’s say you’re doing a topical series on money or marriage or politics. Sometimes it’s easy to forget/neglect to bring those kinds of messages back to the centrality of the Gospel. The Eucharist provides us a centering point, a reminder of why we gather, and it’s accountability for us as church leaders to not let our preaching begin and end as glorified TED Talks that have little to do with the Gospel.
5. The Table of the Lord makes us all equals.
This is perhaps the most overlooked point in discussions around The Lord’s Supper. In a way that cannot be matched in any other element of worship, the Eucharist invites us all to the table of Jesus, to dine and commune with him. Not everyone can sing. Not everyone can give money in offerings. Not everyone knows how to pray, and not everyone can easily follow the complexities of sermons, or appreciate the spoken word. Everyone can eat. Everyone can feel welcomed and invited to commune with Jesus. Everyone — rich and poor, young and old— are one at the Table of the Lord, and the elements themselves keep this in perspective. The primal act of eating, the welcome of an invitation to a meal, the fellowship of sharing nutrition and sustenance… these are transformative on levels that we cannot take for granted.
5. Objections
The most common objection I’ve heard to celebrating the Lord’s supper weekly is that it loses its significance when celebrated too often. I have found the exact opposite to be true. I attend a church in Houston that celebrates it every week, and it’s become for me the high point of the gathering. I look forward to it every week. It’s a sacred moment that trumps every other moment in the service, no matter how powerful the worship or how meaningful the sermon. Conversely, when it’s put to the back burner, that is when it loses its value, in my experience.
We collect an offering every week. We have a sermon every week. When was the last time you heard someone suggest cutting these elements because they were “losing their significance”?
This shows what we deem important elements in our gatherings. This liturgy alone is preaching something to the outsiders that walk through our doors, not to mention to us and our children. It says that we think collecting funds to operate our building and pay our staff is central; we think singing songs together is indispensable; we think that without the sermon, church hasn’t really happened… it also communicates strongly that the most powerful moment of “communion” with God (we call it communion!), instituted by Christ himself, is on the same level of importance as a missions slide show or baby dedications.
The second objection is that it’s not sensitive to outsiders. I have to take issue with this as well. If your version of taking communion is for the most solemn elder to do a meditation on how we will all be slain if we don’t take it “worthily,” and then proceed to make it a dark and heavy moment of self-loathing and navel-gazing, than you would be right. To an outsider, that’s weird and creepy, and not good news at all, for anyone! And they would be right! But when we see the Lord’s Supper as the Gospel enfleshed before us, as the grandest of all invitations to partake in the death and therefore the LIFE of Jesus, it becomes something else entirely! What a thing to invite outsiders into. I would argue that the Eucharist is the most evangelical thing we can do in church. Any outsider can turn on Christian radio and hear worship music any time of day or night, turn on the TV for bad preaching, or go searching their podcast app for better. You can even give your tithes and offerings online these days. But nowhere — NOWHERE — but in a congregation of God’s people can we come together and celebrate Jesus in the simple but profoundly meaningful way we do it in Communion. No one else, no other religion, no other physical space on earth but the holy gatherings of God’s people as the church, has the sacrament. This communion with God we are given in the Gospel, this holy moment, this place where heaven meets earth, is the one thing we have that outsiders don’t. If this isn’t the invitation of the Gospel, what is? Every group, clique, and subculture has their own version of “worship” music, charitable giving, and persuasive speeches. No one but Jesus people have the Eucharist — a word transliterated from Greek that means, literally, “thanksgiving.” No one has a God worthy of remembrance and thanks like believers do.
I believe we cheat ourselves when the Lord’s Supper is not at the centre of our gatherings. The early church, and the church throughout most of history until very recently, has celebrated it regularly. By all means, let us preach unapologetically, worship passionately, and give generously and sacrificially to the work of God here and abroad! But if we have to shave 10 minutes off of the sermon or cut the plate passing so that the glory of Christ in the cross is seen every week, so that people may be healed and made new as they look upon His mercy, so that the all-important Cross and Resurrection may not be forgotten amidst the topical sermon of the week, let’s do that.
Let’s show forth the Lord’s death until He come.
