Mennonite Weekly Review

Growing up in an ecumenical community with most members from mainline Protestant and Catholic traditions, I saw the Eucharist held up as a weekly ritual in which wine and bread were more than symbols. Officiants had theological training or had prepared for that role.

When I became a member of a Mennonite congregation two years ago, I began to ponder my beliefs about the practice as I adapted to monthly communion served by any members of the congregation who were leading worship.

In that context recently, the Anabaptist understanding of communion became more clear and powerful for me. I had planned a worship service with a member of our church living with late-stage cancer. She gave a meditation about letting go of earthly things as she prepared to die.

Later in the service, she and I served the cup and loaves to our brothers and sisters in the congregation. I felt Christ’s presence in the gathered community, broken and poured out for each other.

Six days later, that church member died at home. As I sat in prayer after hearing the news, a line from “What Is This Place” came into my mind: “Here in this world, dying and living, we are each other’s bread and wine.”

While practice varies widely, many Mennonite congregations serve communion only a few times a year. What is the place of communion in our worship lives? Does having communion less often make it more special, or less?

Sara Wenger Shenk, professor of Christian practices at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Harrisonburg, Va., is one of several people who formed The Table, a Mennonite congregation that celebrates communion weekly. She has found receiving the elements each Sunday fills a spiritual hunger.

“The bread and juice become very tangible connections, very real connections to Jesus,” Wenger Shenk said.

She believes there is promise for renewal if churches carefully and imaginatively consider their practice of communion and claim it as a gift of Jesus’ presence made real among us.

“Jesus gave us this as an orienting practice,” she said. “So we in gladness come together around the table, at the table, to meet Jesus, and to be sent out renewed in our joy to serve.”

Communion can transform us when we see it as an encounter with Christ, who shared the gift of himself as he prepared for his death. Communion reminds us that we are each broken and in need of wholeness, which comes from God.

Yet we come to the Lord’s Table not as solitary believers but as the church, asking God to join us there. Congregations will find patterns of holding communion that fit their needs. The key is to consider whether it could serve different or larger purposes in a church’s life together.

Communion affirms the role of community in finding renewal and strength for the daily struggle of discipleship. Surrounded by our brothers and sisters, we receive Christ’s presence more fully in bread and wine, in us and around us.