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In an earlier lecture, we observed that it would be a misunderstanding to speak of baptism as a ritual needing to be administered properly. It is quite possible and desirable, in the right place, to deal with baptism in this way. At the same time, it is also an issue of profound importance for understanding the much larger question of the place of the church as a missionary minority in a hostile world.

In a similar way, we must carefully ask whether it is to be assumed that the sacramental observance of the Lord’s Supper is simply a ritual practice to be observed according to the ordinance of the Lord because he commanded it and only because of the symbolic meaning which he gave it. In the early church, might it be that this practice was also the expression of the character of the Christian community with deeper significance than the symbolic? Again, we can only ask this question if we are willing to come to the New Testament divested not only of Catholic but also of anti-Catholic assumptions and reflexes.

Only one of the New Testament reports of the Last Supper—that recorded by Paul in 1 Corinthians 11—includes the instruction to repeat the meal: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”1 Centuries of debate have swirled around the meaning of the words “Do this . . . in remembrance of me”2 and “This is my body . . .”3 But the logically prior question would rather be what Jesus meant by “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup . . .”4

Since we read these words through the filter of centuries of church practice and debate, we obviously assume that he meant “whenever you observe the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper.” But, this is the one thing that he could not have meant. At the time he spoke, the Christian Lord’s Supper did not exist and, therefore, was not a meaningful concept. Rather, the phrases “this bread” and “this cup” must have had one of two possible very specific meanings. It could have referred specifically to the Passover meal celebrated annually by the Jews, with the tacit assumption that the disciples of Jesus would continue to practice the prescribed ceremonies of Judaism faithfully. This would mean that there should be a Christian Passover service in memory of the suffering of Jesus once a year. The other possible meaning of “this bread” and “this cup” would be a reference to the ordinary daily practice of Jesus and his disciples, the common meal of the body of believers. Although this Last Supper was taken in a Passover context, it was, at the same time, but one more example of the common meal that must have been the usual practice of Jesus and his disciples ever since they left their other occupations to follow him and to share his life, his purse, and his table. The words of Jesus must have had one or the other of these meanings, or they may have combined them. The one thing that is clear is that they cannot be understood, first of all, as pointing ahead to the institution of an unprecedented ceremonial practice in the church.

As we move beyond the crucifixion into the early days of the life of the church, it becomes clear that the disciples’ circle carried on the practice of the common meal. In fact, the risen Lord most often appeared to the disciples assembled to eat together—in the same upper room in Jerusalem, in the hotel at Emmaus, and on the beach at Galilee. The common meal had been the center of their life with him; it became the place where his presence with them was renewed. Therefore, the daily table fellowship of the believers’ circle rather than the annual Passover celebration seems to have been continued as the center of the common life in those early days.

As this pattern of life was propagated by the missionary vitality of the young church in pagan society, Christians found themselves in dangerous juxtaposition with pagan practices that included religious banquets. Thus, it came about that new Christians in Corinth, bringing their habits of table fellowship into the church with them, threatened to change the nature of this communal experience by forgetting that it is a fellowship of the entire group and by concentrating inordinately on an exaggerated convivial joy. It was this distortion that the apostle Paul needed to right when he wrote to Corinth: when they met together it was not to celebrate the supper of the Lord but each was eating his own meal instead.5

What is important for our present search is that this Corinthian deformation could not have taken place if the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper had been anything like what we make it today, whether in Protestant or Catholic circles, whether in evangelical or liturgical circles. If it had been a specifically ecclesiastical celebration, carried on according to the instituted forms for the specific reason that Christ had commanded that it be done with its meaning residing in what the bread and wine symbolically point to, then the disorders in Corinth would never have come to pass. (The abnormal is a comment on the norm.) Therefore, the presence of this distorted practice is the abundant demonstration that the normal observance was an ordinary meal taken together at every normal gathering of the young Christian fellowship.

Therefore, it is part of the definition of the Christian church that Christians are people who eat together. We profoundly misunderstand the development of what is referred to as Christian communism in the early days in Jerusalem when we try to see it as the outworking of a moral condemnation of private property or of a vision of an ideal social order. In the early days, the common purse at Jerusalem was not the outworking of the deliberation about whether it is good for disciples to have possessions of their own, and certainly it involved no speculation as to whether it is wholesome for society to be governed by a regime of private property. Sharing together was much more immediate and unpremeditated; they shared their wealth because they ate together and because food for the morrow is about all the wealth a common person can ever hope to possess in any simple society.

It is quite correct that, in order to avoid the Corinthian misunderstanding of the common meal as an overly joyful banquet, the apostle reminded them that the most dramatic Lord’s Supper had been a Passover meal and that according to the instructions of Jesus it should be a time to remember not only his resurrection and promised return but also his death. Thus, it is appropriate that we should take the meaning of the annual Passover celebration in its Christian transformation into our understanding of the supper. Yet, for the early church, this did not necessitate any weakening of concentration upon the primary character of this celebration as a fellowship meal.

It is an irony of history that this reminder of the Passover sacrifice—when the apostle Paul sought to warn his readers against distortion of the simplicity of the supper by pagan admixtures drawn from the ceremony of the temple—could have had the effect, over the years, of permitting just what he wished to prevent. The idea of sacrifice contributed to the development of a quasi-magical understanding of the mass as an assuredly efficacious transaction whenever the proper words are spoken by a properly qualified officiant. Thus, what was initially a community experience by its very nature became a ceremony for its own sake in Catholicism, a ceremony that could be and often was carried out by the priest alone.

The Reformation was not sufficiently radical to restore the character of the fellowship meal despite some efforts in that direction, especially in the early thought of Zwingli. Preoccupied with the rejection of certain aspects of the Catholic practice, the Reformers were willing to agree with the assumption that the mass was a ritual distinct from the rest of life and debated only what it means and what it achieves, only what its substance is and of what it is a sign. They warded off the dangers of superstition but did not restore the reality of communion. The Protestant practice of the Lord’s Supper remained a ceremony within the church with no direct connection to what bread and drink commonly mean. Upon unfolding the meaning of that common meal as explained in Protestant practice, it would occur to no one to sell a piece of land and contribute it to the church so that everyone would have enough.

The New Community

The point of this historical review cannot be to argue that it is possible or necessary to reconstitute the simple sharing of the band of wandering disciples or of that first Jerusalem congregation as a formal rule for all times and places. We do not need to argue that it is obligatory to modify in some prescribed way the practice of the Lord’s Supper in gatherings for worship—although that would be an appropriate topic for study in its own right. But, between these two extreme applications, what we do need (and what evangelical churches in the modern world especially need) is a restored sense of the imperative that the church of Jesus Christ must be, as in the first congregational experience at Jerusalem, a community in which “there was not a needy person among them.”6

When Jesus warned his disciples of the sacrifice they would need to expect, that warning was linked with a promise:

Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers, sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.7

Such a promise is a most striking occurrence in the midst of a text that (some scholars would tell us) should have eyes only for the end of the age. Jesus promises, to those who forsake all to follow him, a community in which the necessities of life are shared already in this age, in the midst of persecution. The apostolic writers could not have preserved this record in this form if it had not already been fulfilled in their experience; this was a promise regarding their present and not their future.

In recent decades, preachers and prophets have begun to see the Magnificat of the Virgin Mary as a charter for social revolution: “He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”8 But what some are tempted to forget is that this promise was fulfilled not in the mode of the expectation of John the Baptist—with a violent reversal of the social order from the outside through the tools of catastrophe, but rather after the pattern of Jesus—in the creation of a genuinely new social phenomenon, a brotherhood in which the rich give and the poor receive, not under the compulsion of the sword but under the beckoning of the cross. We need not ask why Christian civilization has failed to humanize the social order and has left the forces of social change to seek their vitality from pagan ideology. It is because the people of faith soon ceased to be—and even to promise to become—a community sharing the needs of the common life at a common table that radical social change in our day is the preserve of the pagan.

One Lord, One Table

All those who desire to break the one bread in remembrance of the broken body of Christ and all those who wish to drink of one drink in remembrance of the shed blood of Christ . . . must beforehand be united in the one body of Christ, that is the congregation of God, whose head is Christ, and that by baptism. For as Paul indicates, we cannot be partakers at the same time of the table of the Lord and the table of devils. Nor can we at the same time partake and drink of the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils. That is: all those who have fellowship with the dead works of darkness have no part in the light. Thus, all who follow the devil and the world have no part with those who have been called out of the world unto God. All those who lie in evil have no part in the good.

So it shall and must be, that whoever does not share the calling of the one God to one faith, to one baptism, to one spirit, to one body together with all the children of God, may not be made one loaf together with them, as must be true if one wishes truly to break bread according to the command of Christ.9

One of the most general topics of ecumenical debate is the question of intercommunion. A review of the several available attitudes on this question may help to clarify the originality of the free church position.

The text just quoted, Article 3 of the “Brotherly Union of Schleitheim” (1527), is probably the earliest confessional statement of a believers church.10 In the statement of the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, its concern is not with the significance of the sacramental emblems nor with the authority of the church organization or the officiant but rather with the right by which each individual may properly be considered as a member of the communion. It is appropriate that communion be thought of, primarily, as the name for the group and not merely the sacrament.

Therefore, unity can only be celebrated when it exists. The unity of the congregation and the proper belonging of each member within it are prerequisites for and not results of the celebration. Thus, not only the conditions of the individual membership are related to the communion celebration but the disciplined life of the congregation has as its goal this genuine unity that can permit the common breaking of bread to be genuine. The same “Brotherly Union” also says that the restoration of estranged brethren and the exclusion of the unrepentant also should take place “according to the ordering of the Spirit of God before the breaking of bread so that we may all in one spirit and in one love break and eat from one bread and drink from one cup.”11

Much of the ecumenical scene is dominated by the Catholicized understanding of the Lord’s Supper according to which the meaning and the validity of the celebration are dependent upon the sacramental authorization of the officiant and the technical correctness of the words that are used. Therefore, the problem of intercommunion is one of determining how different organizations using different forms of words or having different succession of authority can recognize one another. The numeric and emotional prestige of the churches with this kind of understanding, and their insistence upon institutional form, has led even some of the free churches to begin to speak of orders and of necessary episcopal succession.

The whole concept of sacramental validity, either for the priest or for the ceremony, depends upon a certain kind of philosophy. A particular conception of the nature of reality is necessary before one can believe that prescribed verbal formulae or manual gestures could—simply because this was thus prescribed—take on a specific metaphysical meaning. Such conceptions of the nature of reality are foreign to the mind of the individual in this scientific age. The individual will ask of a form of words: to what visible event do they point? The individual will ask of a gesture: how could it ever manipulate invisible spiritual reality?

But, it would be improper to challenge this concept of communion only because of the currency of certain philosophical ideas. The really significant reason for doubting the correctness of such a statement of the nature of communion is that it is very difficult to support it from a biblical perspective. The bearer of the meaning of the communion in the New Testament church was the body and not the bread. The failure to “discern the body,” which the apostle Paul rendered accountable for spiritual sleepiness and death, was not an insufficient conception of transubstantiation but the failure to share the table with all of the brethren in the same church at Corinth. Considerations of episcopal succession and other criteria of sacramental validity, bound as they must be to particular times and places, are major sources of division among the churches. The cure is not to find an ingenious formula of compromise or a liturgy of reunification whereby the descendants of all can somehow enter into each other’s organizational history. Rather, the need is to overcome the separation of the sacrament from the daily life of the body that was at the very root of the development of sacramentalism.

The alternative solution in the West tends to be the protestantization of the sacrament. In the heritage of the Zwinglian Reformation, modern Western Christians have sought to reduce the sacramental practice into what it means. For modern humanity, meaning can be reduced to clear ideas that are most correctly stated in words: the sacraments are parables or pictures which are useful to give dramatic completeness or artistic depth to the ideas they express, but the mature modern individual could best concentrate on the verbal meanings and would even, as in Quakerism, drop the forms completely. Words are, after all, more spiritual than bread and wine.

It is because of this conception of the sacrament as communication of the gospel that Protestantism has strongly moved in the direction of open communion. If the message of God’s love is being proclaimed in these emblems, then it is the sinner, the person aware of one’s unworthiness, who is most in need of this reassurance. The authority of the church to proclaim this message is universally given and needs only a minimum of external order which, in the origins of Protestantism, was provided by the government. Any church can be accepted which “rightly preaches and dispenses the Word and the sacraments.” Mutual recognition between churches is no problem because both the church and its sacraments have been reduced to a message.

Again, we would not do well to argue, against this modern flattening of the concept of the church, that there is a religious or metaphysical dimension that it forgets. For instance, the traditional argument between the Zwinglians and the Lutherans about what kind of reality a symbol does have, after all, is not the point. What is missing in this conception of the Lord’s Supper as a message, as an acted sermon, is the congregation.

Somewhere between these two competing conceptions is a third that many would feel combines the shortcomings of both. The Puritan conception, coming from an age when Protestant churches were a power in society, tended to make access to communion a reward for virtue. One asked the question of worthiness, thereby differing from the tolerant and modern Protestant pattern. But, this was tested morally or perhaps by agreement with a correct doctrinal statement. Like the New Testament church and unlike modern Protestantism, the Puritan communion is only for members; the members are measured by the characteristics of their own mind or morality and not by their participation in the life of the body.

We in the Anglo-Saxon world are experiencing yet another transformation of the thought of the Eucharist. In much of Protestantism, boredom with a word-centered service has given way to the thought that worship can find more meaning by turning not to the ideas but to their artistic clothing. More music, more careful choice of words, more repetition to accustom the mind to the world of religious concepts, deeper respect for the history of ritual and its solidity may restore the dimension of depth which modern scientific humanity has so nearly lost. Yet, the capacity to sense such a cultural lack and the capacity to try to fill it with artistic means already marks the class and culture, the needs and the capacities of a leisure class society for whom bread is no longer the normal food. In this society, one must give symbolic meanings to table fellowship because it does not occur to one to share at table with the congregation or with the poor.

Thus, we have every reason to return—from the preoccupation with succession or communion, with artistic depth or moral worthiness—to seek the restoration of that reality of which the breaking of bread in the early church was the integral expression and not an artificially chosen object lesson. Let a cell of that body be recreated in every place, composed of believers whose life together proclaims the Lord’s death until he comes. Let this death be proclaimed, and let the universality of that communion be visible in every place in the reality of persons whose lives are wholly shared with one another and not by a definition in words or in ordination. Let us be freed from our capacity to separate the action and its meaning until our eating together truly means that our life is real communion.

Then forces of social renewal, like those unleashed in the first Christian centuries, may well go out from this table. Like the New Testament, the “Brotherly Union” (from which we quoted before) clarifies the unity of the church by speaking of its separation from the hostile world. Other theologies can define the sacraments without reference to the world, for the emblems and the ritual have their meaning in themselves. That meaning was defined in the age of Christendom. But, if the “one bread” we break truly points to “one body,” that meaning demands an awareness of the church’s mission in the world. The church is not an institution dispensing sacramental benefits to the population at large but a people called together for a mission in and to the world. Its separate identity is not a proud or fearful retreat but the presupposition of mission.

We already observed that it is the free church that alone stands toward the world in a genuinely missionary posture when renouncing a proprietary control even over children of believers in baptism. Only if one recognizes the line between belief and unbelief, between community and alienation, can the message of reconciliation be known. Here we touch on one of the genuinely live issues in contemporary ecumenical thought on the mission of the church in the modern world. Now that the alliance of church and state is ending, those theologies that were molded by the alliance would like to reestablish it by understanding mission only in the sense of a pedagogical service to society as a whole. Reconciliation then means a call to all people to live together in mutual respect and to reorder their society in a more human way.

If anyone questions the needfulness of this message to society, it would be a misunderstanding of what we need to debate. In the past, it has been the believers churches that have had this kind of impact on society and not those official churches to which one belonged by virtue of birth. But we doubt that such a pedagogical proclamation is either possible or desirable if it is not being made by a visible, committed community in which at least something of that reconciliation and social reordering—which the gospel commands and promises—is in process. Missions and nonconformity to the world are not alternatives but are mutually prerequisite. It is the city set on a hill that cannot be hid. It is where Christians will love one another—as Jesus himself asked it of his Father—that the world will believe.

In order to be understood by humanity, or in order to deal with their own common concerns, it may well be that Christians in our day will be led to change the times, or places, or forms of their meeting together. There is much to learn in the current ecumenical studies of the missionary structure of the congregation. But the deeper need, and one with which the disciples’ church must help, is to rediscover the congregational structure of the mission. Let there be, first of all, a loving community of whom it can be said, “you have received Grace, you are God’s people,”12 and the world’s capacity to understand will not be a problem.

1. 1 Cor 11:26.

2. 1 Cor 11:25.

3. 1 Cor 11:24.

4. 1 Cor 11:26.

5. See 1 Cor 11:17–22.

6. Acts 4:34.

7. Mark 10:29–30, emphasis added by author.

8. Luke 1:53.

9. The Schleitheim Confession, trans. and ed. John Howard Yoder (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1973) 11.

10. This is commonly referred to as The Schleitheim Confession, although it is important to note the particular emphasis intended by the author here.

11. The Schleitheim Confession, 10–11.

12. See 1 Pet 2:10.