The Lord's Supper in our tradition

How we practise the Lord’s Supper ‘reveals more of what we believe about grace, the church and mission than any other aspect of congregational life; it is our theology incarnate,’ says John Rempel. This article traces its practice through Mennonite history.


In the New Testament, we have only hints of how the Lord’s Supper or Eucharist was practised. I have
concluded that this sparse record is a blessing, lest we imitate the form rather than the spirit of the event.

The same is true of Anabaptism.

Anabaptism came into existence by means of its renegade celebration of the Holy Supper in 1525. It did not become a church through a political or theological declaration but through a liturgical act. Its most trenchant criticism of the existing order was not a document but the ceremony of baptism.

Anabaptism retained a positive role for ceremonies but changed the actor. It was not the priest but the congregation that “consecrated” the bread and wine. At the same time, the Anabaptists never got over their fear that outward signs easily become a substitute for inward faith.

The only complete service is that of Balthasar Hubmaier, a Catholic liturgical scholar before he became an Anabaptist. He compiled a “reformed mass,” a purified version of the medieval liturgy, with a preparatory service, preaching on the sacrifice of Christ, simple prayers of thanks for the bread and cup. The outcome is that believers are set free to lay down their lives for their neighbours, as Christ laid down his life for them.

Ulrich Zwingli, the great reformer of Zurich, and Conrad Grebel, his rebellious disciple, had an interesting debate on distributing the elements. Zwingli saw nothing wrong with communicants coming forward to receive from the minister, as of old. But Grebel insisted that the supper must be served in the rows with the members passing the elements to one another, to symbolize the communal nature of the event.

Other Anabaptist writers note only that believers met for the breaking of bread as often as they could. For them, the supper was a participatory meal, the bond of their unity—and the event from which they excommunicated one another. Some Anabaptists tried to overcome the medieval dread of unworthy partaking. In the end, the Anabaptist tendency toward perfectionism led to a different dread of unworthy communion, and Anabaptists reverted to communion only once or twice a year.

Anabaptists carried over medieval traditions such as the preparatory service in which congregants went before the priest and declared whether or not they were at peace with God and their neighbour. They had to seek reconciliation before they could come to the Lord’s Table.

In the Prussian-Russian stream, it was customary to bring along a fine cloth in which to hold the bread. In the Amish tradition, there is the practice of bending one knee when receiving the cup. There is no theological warrant for such practices, but these ancient acts of reverence remained meaningful.

There was no uniform theology of the Eucharist in Anabaptism. The most anticlerical pronouncements come from court hearings of Anabaptists who refused to bow before the elements or to confess that Christ is physically present in them. Menno Simons denounced idolatry, seeking salvation in outward things, but he also said that the Lord’s Supper is “a communion of the body and blood of Christ.”

The term “body of Christ” in Anabaptism signifies the historical person of Jesus, the bread of the sacred meal, and the church. The body of Christ is those who have covenanted with Christ and fellow believers in baptism. In the breaking of bread, this community is recreated. The transformation that happens is of people, not things.

Further, the supper is a “communion of the body and blood of Christ.” It is a relational event. Christ is present not in the bread and wine, but in the act of their being shared. In a gathering of believers who break bread in faith and love in the power of the Holy Spirit, there is an assured union with Christ (Pilgram Marpeck).

While Anabaptist writers argue that the bread remains bread, the emphasis on the Spirit as the agent of Christ’s presence leads to an understanding of the supper as the mystical communion of the body and blood of Christ, as in John 6 (Dirk Phillips).

There is tension in Anabaptism concerning liturgical ceremonies. Do they signify only the faith of the believers or also the grace of God? Protestants, especially Anabaptists, agreed that grace is the cause but faith is the condition. But even in Hubmaier’s and Menno’s theology, something transformative happens in the supper; grace is at work. In Pilgram Marpeck’s thought, a sacrament is the point of intersection between grace and faith.

How did the Anabaptists’ practice of communion incarnate their theology? Their practice suggests that they had an unbounded vision of mission. They created simple, inviting forms for new converts.

But after believers were baptized, the community was closed. Only fellow believers in the narrow sense were welcome at the Lord’s Table—and in the kingdom of God. Grace was not unconditional; it had to be manifested in holiness of life.


Establishing practices
By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Anabaptism had changed from a protest movement into a settled denomination. Everywhere but in Switzerland ministers were writing prayer books and sermon collections.

Leonard Clock published a collection with a number of communion prayers (one abbreviated in Hymnal: A Worship Book, #787). Hans de Ries’s book of communion sermons included an order of service for communion (Form 2 in Minister’s Manual, 1998).

Christ on the cross is the heartbeat of these prayers. There is “real presence” but it is not clearly related to the breaking of bread itself.

The Dordrecht Confession of 1632, adopted by the Dutch, South Germans and Amish, emphasizes remembrance and fellowship in its article on the supper. The High German Confession of 1660, the mother creed of Prussian and Russian Mennonite strands, adds union with Christ as a mark of the sacred meal. Both confessions emphasize footwashing.

Handwritten manuscripts reveal a normative pattern but with much variation in wording. Common to most is an emphasis on preparation and on reverence. Most of them talk of a counsel meeting or preparatory service. Baptism and holiness of life are the door to communion.

Preaching texts are usually from the Passion accounts of the Gospels, Isaiah 53, and 1 Corinthians 11. Prussian and Russian sources contain references to a thanksgiving service for the work of Christ on the Sunday after communion, and to the fact that the supper is held apart from worship, often Sunday afternoon.

In these circles, Good Friday and Pentecost (with baptism) are common communion days. In the Swiss-South German realm there was a practice of spring and fall communion.

All references I have seen speak of the bread being served by the bishop to each communicant in the rows. In the Swiss tradition, he also served the cup. In the Russian tradition, the deacons passed a cup through the rows, with each partaker nodding assent to the next person before passing the cup along.

How did the practice of communion in this era incarnate the theology of the time? The only mission the community was permitted to pursue was to its own offspring. Thus, forms of worship became routine and were understood only by insiders. The gateway to the Lord’s Table was conformity more than sanctity.


Nineteenth century
In 1807, Valentine Dahlem, a South German minister, published the first Mennonite minister’s manual of which copies remain. In more than 300 pages, Dahlem included instructions and prayers for every Sunday and for all occasions. He created two sections on the Lord’s Supper.

The first included elaborate prayers of thanksgiving and consecration, clearly adapted from Lutheran formularies. The second section preserves the old practices referred to above.

Dahlem explained that he had created these liturgical resources to bring new life to worship. My sense is that he turned to Lutheran forms because these were richer than Mennonite ones and because Mennonites were assimilating into a Lutheran culture.

In Canada, three decades later, Benjamin Eby published another manual. His goal was not to innovate but to preserve. Eby included no prayers—only instructions on how to pray. This suggests the Swiss Mennonite aversion to written prayers. Eby’s work was translated into English in 1890 and remained the norm into the 1960s.

In 1860, a revolution in communion practice took place in Russia with the formation of the Mennonite Brethren. They protested the tradition-bound practice of the supper, its gracelessness and its admission of all baptized members whether or not they exhibited holiness of life.

Because of their missionary vision, the Brethren simplified the order of service, emphasizing grace and the assurance of salvation. Ministers as well as bishops could officiate. Members passed the bread and the cup through the rows. They celebrated the supper monthly.

In North America, Mennonites were reinvigorated (and assimilated) by revivalism. It kindled the missionary impulse and, with it, the transition from German to English. In revivalism, the emphasis was on inward conversion, and theology had a rationalist bent.

“Outward” religion, including sacraments, was suspect. Two developments added fuel to the fires of suspicion. One was a wave of anti-Catholicism; the other was a scientific worldview that attacked religion—especially ritual—as magical. Both conservative and liberal Protestantism shared these suspicions. Both left an enduring mark on the Mennonite theology of the Lord’s Supper.

How did communion practice incarnate the theology of this era? There was more diversity and the wall around the Mennonite church was less firm, although open communion was inconceivable. A sense of missionary responsibility was rising and the language God spoke was changing. Believers were becoming conscious of the fact that their rituals had to be accessible to newcomers.


Communion today
The mid-twentieth century was a time of liturgical assimilation and contraction. Conservatives tended to gravitate toward Baptist practices and liberals toward Presbyterian ones. The outcome was communion as a simple memorial service appended to Sunday morning worship, shorn of a preparatory service and footwashing. Gone was much of the theology of the body of Christ and the real presence.

I think that reasons for this shift were more pastoral than theological. The passion for a church “without spot or wrinkle” had led to a legalistic nonconformity. The preparatory meeting had become a day of judgment. The breaking of the bread had become burdened with a fear of unworthiness.

An evangelical confidence in grace and forgiveness rightly challenged the old forms but had few liturgical resources consistent with a Mennonite understanding of the church to offer in return.

The process accelerated with the upheaval of the 1960s. Three trends affected the shape of the Lord’s Supper: the charismatic movement, the liturgical movement, and the “Anabaptist vision” movement. For all of them the big issue was what to make of diversity (different cultural expressions and gifts of the Spirit) and inclusivity (welcoming unbaptized Christians, opening the table to divorced and gay people).

Particularly in the Mennonite Church and General Conference, the congregation’s voice was restored—through spontaneous prayer and singing, and through liturgical responses. Ordinary members took up roles as worship leaders and communion servers.

The revolutionary biblical insight that changed ecumenical and Mennonite eucharistic theology was that the meaning of communion is not exhausted by the Last Supper. The meals Jesus held during his ministry became an essential part of the church’s understanding of the breaking of bread.

Jesus’ meals were wildly inclusive: he ate and drank with sinners. They were also acts of justice: he fed the hungry. These insights established a direct link between Eucharist and mission. The church gathers to eat “the bread from heaven” and scatters to offer that bread to the world. Not only that, outsiders are invited in. This rereading of Scripture inspired both evangelistic and social mission.

Yet both approaches have had to come to terms with a tension in the meal accounts. In the Last Supper and the resurrection meals, Jesus’ companions were only those who had accepted his call to mission (Judas is the startling exception). The tension between these meal accounts mirrors that of the church’s ministry: unconditional grace and holiness of life.

How does our practice of communion incarnate the theology of our time? First, baptism is seen less and less as the door to the table. In the mid-nineties the Mennonite Brethren, influenced by the church growth movement, officially decided that all believers are welcome to the bread and cup.

Mennonite Church Canada and USA still link baptism and communion in their confession of faith and minister’s manual, but encourage a completely open Lord’s Table. The decisive weight is on unconditional grace, but we differ in our understanding of how grace and obedience fit together.

On the one hand, grace alone saves us. On the other hand, the encounter with grace always wants to make relationships right. The decisive factor is not being an insider or outsider, but being willing to be changed.

As I understand the sources, baptism initiates us into the covenant with Christ and the church, and therefore to the Lord’s Supper, which is the renewal of that covenant. I would make the case for a pastoral exception to this norm. Someone seeking faith might be drawn to the company of Jesus and his friends as they gather at the table.

But accepting the offer of grace implies a decision—not agreement on the contentious theological and sexual questions of the day—but a decision for Christ. Thus, the participation of an unbaptized believer in communion is an exception on the way to baptism.

Our practice of the Lord’s Supper enacts the competing claims at work in our midst—between grace and sanctity, boundary and inclusion. How we celebrate the Lord’s Supper profoundly shapes, and is shaped by, our belief about the work of grace and the nature of the new humanity.—John D. Rempel

Artwork (top) The New Testament: A Pictorial Archive From Nineteenth-Centruy Sources. New York, Dover, Photo (bottom) by Sue Careless.

The writer teaches theology and Anabaptist studies at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS). The above is a shortened version of his article in Vision: A Journal for Church and Theology, Spring 2001. Vision is published by AMBS and Canadian Mennonite University.

Do this in remembrance of me...

The communion services that I’ve found most memorable,” my husband told me recently, “were both outdoors: a United Church of Zambia annual meeting I attended in 1970, and the Mennonite World Conference (MWC) service at the Winnipeg Stadium two decades later.

“What really moved me at the Zambian service was the diversity and breadth of the church universal. There was such a feeling of being part of something very large, very important…. Suddenly I was more fully aware of being part of a community of faith circling the globe which had been around for 2000 years.”

He also noted the incredible sense of acceptance—no feeling of being an outsider.

“We stood together among thorn bushes and acacia trees on a hot afternoon, surrounded by red dust and children and dogs running all over while people were singing in such incredible harmony! It was my first real experience of that African sound.”

Everything was wide open: blue sky, no walls, no benches. The Zambian pastors walked around offering bread and wine—“well, coke and ordinary bread, actually, the same kind of bread the students would share with me in the boarding school dormitories when I did my nighttime checks. There too, I had a sense of being welcomed into their circle.”

So that communion service wasn’t just one experience on a special Sunday. It was an entry point into how a Mennonite man from Manitoba, where solemnity and separateness characterized communion at that time, began to experience the openness and welcome of Africa over the next few decades.

A similar thing happened at the MWC service. “The inter-cultural singing was spectacular and the bread and wine, offered in tiny disposable cups and bits of bread, reinforced that feeling of belonging, this time in a worldwide Mennonite communion. That was very satisfying.”

For me, too, the experience of worshipping and working in cross-cultural settings has widened my understanding of what communion “means.” Any restrictions about who could or could not participate flew out the window as we fellowshipped with Salvation Army workers in Zambia and Quakers in South Africa, neither of whom celebrate communion (or baptism) in a traditional way.

Instead, they sought to embody the essence of the Eucharist in their daily lives. The Zambian Salvationists frequently shared bread with each other in their tightly knit mission community and with the poor around them. They healed broken bodies in their leprosy and HIV/AIDs work, some of the best in Africa.

Although the South African Quakers shared regular “bring and share” meals after worship, they also gave their bodies to be broken quite literally as they were imprisoned and harassed because they opposed apartheid or refused to do military service.

Though there were times when my husband and I missed the traditional communion service during those years, we also realized that by focusing our “remembering” too much on a formal rite, we might be in danger of mistaking the the ritual for the thing itself.

Even though I deeply cherish many Mennonite traditions, some of the most memorable communions I have experienced were not formal or even “religious.” They were times when we shared “bread and wine” with people in ways that changed us.

For example, I remember a farewell supper given by the Christian Council of Mozambique. In the midst of war and famine, they prepared a lavish feast for us. It was a humbling experience for us, the “rich givers,” to receive food from the poor.

Another experience was a sumptuous lunch we shared with Chipewayan friends on an island on Reindeer Lake, near the 60th parallel. The lives of our northern hosts had been disrupted by flooding because of the ever-increasing hydro needs of their southern Manitoba neighbours.

They served us fresh fish (from the flooded land), deep-fried bannock and strong tea, prepared over an open fire and served on “platters” of spruce boughs. It was a delicious and deeply significant meal reminiscent of Jesus cooking breakfast over a fire for errant disciples long ago.

And finally, an experience of foot-washing in Zimbabwe:
That day,
having walked together
in the greening rain-
wet hills of the eastern highlands,
my Zimbabwean host
(who became a friend in
the space of one brief hour)
knelt before me with a bowl of warm water
and a bar of aloe-
scented soap in her hands
lovingly (in spite of my red-
faced protests),
she lathered
and rinsed
and dried,
first
one mud-spattered foot,
then the other,
until tear-stained, I rose
from that fragrant cleansing,
and continued on my journey.
—Leona Dueck Penner

Coloured pencil drawing by Karmen Krahn.

Communion meals in British Columbia

On Maundy Thursday evening, First Mennonite Church in Kelowna met for a fellowship meal and communion. The service was begun a few years ago by John and Grace Kroeker. The simple meal was followed by a service of readings and song, and the evening ended with communion around the tables.

Led by the pastor, the bread was symbolically broken and then each person at the table shared the bread and cup with those around them. People left the service in silence when they were ready.

Usually communion is held on Sunday mornings, about four times a year, and is led by the pastor and deacons, says pastor Clare Neufeld. They always serve juice. A loaf is symbolically broken and then pre-cut pieces of bread are passed around. Sometimes music accompanies the distribution of the elements; other times it is done in silence.

As for who can take communion, Neufeld says that the constitution says nothing about that matter.

“It is generally understood, and expected, that persons should be baptized, and fully participatory in the life and work of the Christian faith, at peace with God and neighbour,” he says.

At First United Mennonite Church (FUMC) in Vancouver, the same expectation holds true, but they include children and those who are not baptized by using grapes. It is a way of acknowledging that everyone is on a journey of learning to know Jesus more.

“We say…that just as the grapes become the juice or wine, so it is our hope that as people hear the Good News of Jesus and experience his love in the congregation they will come to a decision to follow Christ and be baptized,” says pastor Ingrid Schultz. “Each time we have communion it is an invitation to that commitment…. People have said they appreciate the grapes as a way of saying that they are important to us and a part of us.”

At FUMC, the form of the communion service varies. Sometimes people remain seated as the elements are passed around; at other times they come to tables at the front of the sanctuary to receive the elements.

“Communion is given out by leaders in the church. We do try to mix it up with married and singles and people from different cultures,” Schultz says. “The grapes are given out by a mix of youth leaders, people who have been newly baptized, and Sunday school teachers.”

A highlight for Schultz is bringing the communion elements to those who cannot come to church. This is done twice annually, during Lent and Advent, and usually involves 8-10 homes.

“We go with a group of people from the church and meet around the person’s table in their home or a care home,” she says. “We do prayers of healing for the person and share in table fellowship (tea and coffee and baking). This brings people into the circle of prayer and leading who might not do it from the front on Sunday mornings…. We have had some very deep and meaningful times of sharing.”—Angelika Dawson


Photo by Lynette Wiebe