When I was a kid, it was almost impossible to find a church that didn’t practice communion in some way, shape, or form. Different churches practiced communion in different ways; in some you dipped the bread, in some you broke the bread off a big loaf, some had wafers, some did communion every Sunday, some did it once a month, etc. But, in every church you did communion.
Then the “Great Decline” of the American Church hit in the 80’s and 90’s and the church growth movement started. In order to bring people back to church, church leaders did some interesting things. Seeker sensitive churches were birthed, started by Rick Warren in Orange County, California and Willow Creek in Chicago. Churches started to remove denominational names from their titles so as not to detract people who didn’t feel a connection to that denomination, or who were averse to it (a great example of this is Granger United Methodist Church in Indiana. Granger saw the success of its neighbor, Willow Creek, and in short order removed any denotational affiliation from its name. It has been Granger Community Church since the early 2000’s).
This also led to further rebranding. Not everybody who walks through a church door every Sunday morning is Christian or even feels affable toward Christianity (people go to church for a lot of reasons, sometimes Grandma makes us). For this reason, symbols of Christianity such as crosses, paraments, baptismal fonts, etc., were removed from many of these attractional church sanctuaries. The goal was to make the church building and its sanctuary look like a place for everybody, not just for people who knew the secret handshakes or connected deeply with its symbols.
And I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with this movement. More people experiencing the Gospel is a holy thing & thank God for leaders who’ve challenged the Church to do things differently to meet the kaleidoscope of spiritualities that come through our doors (I’ve done a few weird things too in my day). At the same time, really important church practices were jettisoned for the sake of attraction. Namely, communion. Very few churches formed by this attractional model practice communion. Why? Communion is chock full of secret handshakes and uncomfortable movements. Communion requires understanding something of the story of Christ before you touch the bread and wine (insider knowledge). Communion requires standing up and bumping into neighbors you might not want to bump into. Communion requires being vulnerable in front of a stranger and standing there open handed, as he or she feeds you. Communion requires standing out a bit, knowing that people are watching you eat, and going back to your seat to watch other people eat. Communion requires the ability to hold mystery; we know Jesus meets us in bread & wine, but we’re not good at explaining how. Out of every experience at church, communion is the hardest to curate and control. It’s messy people sharing a messy meal. If you’re trying to curate an experience where everybody feels comfortable, communion might not be your best friend. And so communion was cut out of the attractional church model.
Why all this talk about communion and its messy nature in a community newspaper? On some level, I think church is supposed to be a mess, and communion is WHERE we experience God meeting us in that mess. We might enjoy curated, controlled spaces, but the bodies & minds we bring to the table are anything but curated or in-control. We bring the mess of our lives and ourselves, and we bump into the mess that is our neighbors. We hold out our hands still dirty from the fields and receive bread from somebody that definitely needs to cut their nails more.
And somehow, THERE is where we meet Jesus. Not in our curated lives, but in the mess we and our neighbors bring to the Table.
Yes, there’s something uncomfortable about that. But, there’s also something really holy there too. A well-manicured sermon might take 1,000 words to tell you Jesus loves you. But bread and wine from one dirty hand given into another preaches the whole Gospel in an instant. Thank God for the sacraments, lest we ever forget God shows up in our messes.
