I’ve belonged to churches that celebrate the Lord’s Supper once in a blue moon, and I’ve belonged to churches that celebrate it every week. Now that I’m back at a church that celebrates it every week, I’m struck again by how good it is:
- it means that you get to take in the gospel, regardless of what else happens in the service
- it means that you are confronted with the need for repentance
- it means that you are blessed with the assurance of forgiveness and a reminder that you belong to the body.
Now why wouldn’t you want that as often as possible?! 
I’m with you on this. Our church only does communion once a month and on Sunday nights only. We don’t go on Sunday night so I couldn’t even tell you the last time I took communion…
In our synagogue, we have it once a month at our monthly Sabbath dinner. It preserves the Lord’s SUPPER aspect, since we’re enjoying it with an actual fellowship meal.
Of course, the big Communion event is our Passover seder, which is once a year.
Shalom
Amen!
That’s what sucks about being a Bappie- once a month
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Amen, amen. We do it weekly though I wish it were more like a meal (as I take 1 Cor. 11 to indicate…but you know much more about that!)
Yeah, the church I was at previously seemed to do it just four times a year, but it would be either at the morning service or the evening service – and given that we attended the morning but not the evening, it was a rare occurrence!
I think it’s great to have it incorporated into a meal, although I’ve never been part of a church that had that practice.
I’ve had this conversation with the leadership at my church a couple of times. There’s a sense that if you do it more often, it will become mere “ritual” and people won’t experience it the same way. For some reason, though, they don’t have any problem with all of the other rituals that we do every week (singing, sermon, prayer, etc.).
I’m with you on this one. And I sometimes wonder whether not including communion in a service is – very mundanely – often considered in terms of time and the practical difficulties. The question of how communion is done in free churches (what is used for bread and wine; how it is distributed) can raise some difficult issues. But that shouldn’t stop it happening!
I’m all for weekly and I like your reasons too, Matt.
I’ve also heard the “ritual” argument – that people will become jaded by it if it happens too often. But that has certainly not been my own experience – I find that it continues to be a meaningful highlight. And that’s a great point, Marc, that the other parts of the service could be labelled “ritual” just as easily!
It’s true that logistics can become a controlling issue – I was chatting to an Anglican bishop the other day, who said that he got so fed up with all of the communion variables in his churches – common cup/little cups/wine/grape juice etc – that he made a ruling that if you couldn’t take wine from the common cup, then you would have to settle for bread only! “No wine for you!” <- said in "soup nazi" voice
Glad to hear other voices in praise of every-week