How Often Does Your Church Take Communion?

We celebrate communion weekly, just before the closing song and benediction.

It's always meaningful, never merely a tradition, and weekly reminder of God's grace.

We’ve always celebrated communion once a month. However, we decided to celebrate it and focus our teaching on it for the entire month of October. Our people seemed to be extremely blessed and there’s a bit of a “buzz” about doing it weekly. Our council will be discussing that possibility during this week’s meeting. 

Your timing with this question is perfect!

We have Communion every Sunday as good Calvinists.

We have been celebrating communion weekly for about the last 18 months.  I have been blessed by this practice and believe we have been drawn more closely together as the body of Christ.  I very much agree with Calvin's notion of communion being "a bond of love" that ultimately produces mutual love among believers. Indeed, Calvin argued that Communion should be observed whenever the Word is preached, or "at least once a week."  

We celebrate monthly.

A couple years ago we went from approximately every other month (6-7 times a year) to once every 6 weeks or so (8-9 times a year). I was hoping that would be a step towards monthly celebration, but that step hasn't happened yet.

Then there is the bigger question. Simply gathering as believers is, in itself, communion. Communion with the Lord and with one another. So what is obviously being referred to is something else, but what is it?

The response would be to offer up one of the other names or terms: The Lord’s Supper or The Eucharist. Both generally refer to the last meal Jesus had with the 12, but what we do bears no resemblance. If that meal were a Passover, then Jesus’ words “Whenever. . . “ would obviously mean whenever you ate the Passover bread and drank of the Passover cup, which would make it an annual event. If it were not the Passover (It is debatable.) then it would seem that the words would be taken to mean whenever you shared a meal together. Which brings us naturally to the observation that it was an actual meal, not a wee bit of bread with barely enough juice/wine to wash it down. But let’s not stop there. Whether Passover or another meal, it was not an event held in the temple or synagogue (today, the church building) but in homes. And last, the individual presiding or “celebrating” was not required to be a priest or to have been, in any fashion, ordained. It was the one who was the head of the household or gathered group.

So what’s the point? Simply this. While we certainly have the freedom to “sing a new song” and create liturgies that enhance our spiritual lives and our walk with the Lord, we ought not to fool ourselves into thinking that Communion aka The Lord’s Supper aka The Eucharist in any way reflects what Jesus was urging or what the first believers practiced. We have so modified it and stripped it down that it would be barely recognizable. Oh, and a last question. We know that Jesus blessed the elements before distributing them. How many church actually bless the bread and the cup today, rather than simply reciting what Jesus did? I expect very few, if any.

It was hard to tell, certainly during the "Big Events" but then now and then.

I raised in our Group Worship sessions (smaller groups held a someone's home), that we should break bread together, and we had one of our younger members lead us with the readings. We decided to do this monthly in our groups at the start of the home sessions - to set our hearts and minds into the right place. 

Sadly our Church has dissolved or is in the process of dissolving this week. Sad because only a few years ago it was thriving and growing.