When did communion stop being a meal?

Watch the complete sermon here: https://www.bridges.church/messages/the-lord-s-supper-1-corinthians-11-17-34/

Hey, thanks again for sending in questions related to our recent sermons. In our study of 1 Corinthians this last week, we looked at a passage describing what communion looked like in the early church and that it was really more of a meal extending from the Passover tradition. In Jewish festivals, you know, the Passover meal was a meal, you know, shared by family.

Others, you see Jesus celebrating the Passover with his disciples on the night he was betrayed. It was reclining around a table celebrating with the full meal.

And then very specific elements needed to be there in order to celebrate Passover. But Jesus transitioned that into communion. The Lord’s Supper, called the Eucharist in some traditions with the bread and the cup. And that is how early Christians continued to celebrate it. So the question comes in this week, when did that change?

When did we stop celebrating it as a full meal and transition it into something much smaller? And church history is muddied, of course, going back that far. You see some references to separating out the fellowship meal from the bread and the cup starting in the second centuries. But people, other groups still had them together until the 4th, 5th, 6th centuries.

But it seems at least by the 6th century, it had detached that the bread and the cup had detached from being any kind of meal.

And originally they brought the meal into the church instead of it being in homes. And then that became the altar table.

And then they kind of ended the meal part around the altar and just had the altar as the altar where you come and get just the small cup and bread. Now, for why it changed, that’s also muddied. Some people speculate that as Christianity grows or grew, that it just kind of became unwieldy to be serving these large groups of people with a full meal.

You can imag in our church, I mean, we do. We actually pull it off a few times a year.

You know, our kind of all church fellowship lunch after service, everybody brings something. We eat out on the back parking lot. We have the tables and tents set up. But if you’re trying to celebrate that with any frequency, that becomes very cumbersome. And so, you know, and just for efficiency, we’re going to make it smaller.

It’s probably why it started to fade away also, you know, as people started to view communion as more transactional, you know, just a symbol of forgiveness or in some tracks of Christianity, this is what would actually forgive you. Right? It’s just, okay, how can I. How can I get what I need, the forgiveness as quickly as possible?

Again, efficiency.

But it’s efficiency towards a transaction instead of the focus of this is for us to be together and for us to celebrate together. And so that was, I would say both of those are unfortunate that we, even though logistically, I get it, we moved away from just sitting with each other and celebrating what Jesus had done.

And so I do believe we need to recapture that somehow. I said in our service that I’d love for life groups to really think through how to plan fellowship meals with each other to celebrate Christ. And I know all of our life groups actually already do that.

They all always, at least occasionally have gatherings where they have food come together. Just add to that the, hey, we’re actually here together. What binds us together? The reason that we would ever all be in the same place at the same time is because of Jesus. And so let’s celebrate him as part of our gathering together.

We should recapture it somehow. And of course, we try to point to that in our services. Even when it is a small cup and small bread, we still point our hearts toward Jesus binds us together. And Jesus has provided a future for us through his death and resurrection. So thanks for the question, and we will see you next time.