The Case for Weekly Communion

The Lord’s Supper is not a religious add-on to the regular worship service but an integral meal for those called to minister to the world. The meal is a preparation for our tasks during the week.

Evangelicals like myself, rooted in the Reformation, came very late to the beauty of weekly communion. I was a sophomore in college before I realized that the vast stream of the Protestant tradition celebrated communion weekly. For most of my life, I assumed the table was reserved for special occasions like Easter or Christmas. I attended a Brethren congregation that did communion once a year. Even the late Jay Adam, whom I had the privilege of interviewing twice, argued for once-a-year communion. He pointed to a few Puritan practices as evidence.

However, as I broadened my theological interests, I understood the Supper’s function in the liturgy and the theology of the church, and it became unbearable to contemplate its absence during a worship service. Once you fully display the architecture of worship, the idea of an absent table becomes unthinkable.

Historically, our Reformed forefathers—including Luther and Calvin—desired communion to be weekly. In fact, in the early centuries of the Church and the majority of Protestant Churches in the 16th century practiced weekly communion. Only in the 19th century, particularly during the Prohibitionist movement, weekly communion became obsolete. We may be able to trace this transition to two concerns:

First, the change from wine to grape juice. The practice seems to have caused churches to reconsider the weekly practice. Grape juice removed any sense of mystery, often attributed to weekly practice with wine. Wine gave the sense of sacerdotalism, with its priestly consecrations and Roman Catholic associations. Grape juice gave the practice a mundane feel not associated with ecclesiastical hierarchy. This practice may be attributed to a Methodist dentist:

…the possibility of the practice goes back to the late 19th century and a Methodist dentist named Thomas Bramwell Welch. (See www.welchs.com/company/company_history.html.) Welch had scruples about the use of wine and had heard of Louis Pasteur's process of pasteurization of milk. Welch successfully applied the process to grape juice, and he began to use it in his church, where he was a Communion steward.

The second reason for the move away from weekly communion comes from Baptistic theology, which believes that infrequent communion preserves the sacredness of the Supper. This sentiment is articulated by a Baptist minister:

Carefully considering our religious landscape and a possible inclination toward meaningless repetition, we have chosen to find a cadence of practice that calls for our regular remembrance, repentance, and reminder of his coming return without a frequency that inclines us toward ritualism.

Therefore, the combination of the use of grape juice and the concern for repetition led to a dramatic decline in weekly communion practices in the evangelical landscape. The infrequent practice of communion is relatively new in the church but is undoubtedly the majority position within the evangelical church. The newness and the majority status of infrequent communion does not mean it’s wrong, but it should raise questions and challenge our assumptions about what the Bible says concerning the frequency of such practices.

Historical Data

The Didache, one of the earliest records of the church after the Bible, says the following:

“On the Lord’s own day gather together and break bread and give thanks, having first confessed your sins so that your sacrifice may be pure.”

The Church believed that we become purer by celebrating the sacraments weekly. This is not because there is something magical in the bread and wine but because God uses these means to communicate his presence and strength to us (WCF XXIX.1).

Additionally, the Early Church believed that the Lord’s Supper made us a more thankful people. We don’t often associate communion with thankfulness, but the word “Eucharist” is not some invention of men. It is the word Paul uses to refer to the Lord’s Supper. The word means “thanksgiving.” The Lord’s Supper is a Thanksgiving meal, a Eucharistic meal.

The Bible makes a clear case that every time the people of God gathered for worship, the Lord’s Supper was a regular part of that gathering. Acts 2:42 says:

“And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

There is a definite article before bread, making the text read “the breaking of the bread” (τοῦ ἄρτου). This is not a generic reference to a household meal but about a particular kind of bread, the eucharistic bread used at the Lord’s Table.

Acts 20:7 says: “Now on the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread…”

Again, when the Early Church met, they always had the Lord’s Supper. In a time when persecution was rampant, the people needed to be comforted and thank God as they ate together with the people in worship. We should also assert that the only way in which Paul could castigate the Corinthians over eucharistic disputes is if the practice was ordinary and frequent. If it were an irregular practice, the Corinthian letter would make little sense. There would be no reason for Paul to make the case for the Supper as a unifying meal to bring the rich and poor together if these occurrences occurred infrequently. The Supper demanded a weekly nature to demand such pastoral rebukes.

The Restoration of Weekly Communion

I had mentioned earlier that the Early Church, up to the first thousand years and during the Reformation era, firmly believed in weekly communion. But there came a time when the Church abandoned this practice. As Keith Mathison observes in his book “Given For You,” the practice of infrequent communion became the practice of the Roman Catholic Church in the 13th century and continued until the Reformation period.

In those days, members could only partake of the sacraments once a year. Against this background, such men as John Calvin and Martin Bucer called for a return to the Apostolic Christian practice of weekly communion. We might say that part of the motive of the Reformation was to undo the Church’s infrequent communion and return to the Early Church practice of weekly communion. Calvin writes in response to the common practices of the day:

“The Lord’s Table should have been spread at least once a week for the assembly of Christians, and the promises declared in it should feed us spiritually.”¹

Note Calvin’s use of the phrase “at least,” implying that there were other special occasions when the Supper was crucial in forming Church life besides the ordinariness of its practice on Sundays.

Professor Michael Horton once observed, “Your view of the nature of the Lord’s Supper will determine the importance of it in the worship service.” It should come as no surprise then that those who view the Lord’s Supper primarily as a matter of subjective mental recollection would see no need to celebrate it frequently.

But when we begin to view the Lord’s Supper as a meal of joy and a means of grace to sustain and nourish us, we quickly expect each Lord’s Day to conclude with a meal just as our day ends with a meal.

The Lord’s Supper is not a religious add-on to the regular worship service; it is an integral meal for those called to minister to the world. The meal is a preparation for our tasks during the week. It is bread from heaven to needy men. We need it weekly to feed our souls.

1. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.17.44, 46.