Colbert S. Cartwright

The minister had pronounced the benediction.  Church members lingered in the sanctuary to greet one another.  A little sprite of a seven-year-old boy slipped unnoticed into a side room called the annex, where deacons placed the communion trays on a table each Sunday after serving the people.  There the lad, glancing about, broke off a bit of the unleavened bread and ate it.  With a glance toward the door he lifted one of the cups to his lips and swallowed the grape juice.
    
Quickly he was back out in the sanctuary to wait for his family to lock up the church.  Each Sunday he followed this same weekly ritual – until his next birthday.  That year it fell on a Sunday.  This seemed to him a most fitting day to join the church.  On this special day marking his birth he stepped forward to make his confession of faith and to rise from the baptismal waters a new person.
    
I was that boy and my father was pastor of that Chattanooga Disciples congregation.  This was my earliest experience of the Lord’s Supper.  I had heard my father say many times that the Lord’s Supper is central to our worship – the reason we gather together on the Lord’s Day.  I wanted to be a part of that worship.
    
Should I have done this?  No.  Would I recommend it to others?  No.  But at times I wish I still had that simple faith of a seven-year-old who quietly remembered Jesus as he stealthily partook of the bread and cup.  It was a meaningful experience then – the beginning of a life increasingly centering in devotion around the Lord’s Table.

Made Christ’s Church
    
We members of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) believe that the Lord’s Supper is central to our common worship.  It is the reason we come together on a Sunday for worship.  We cannot imagine one of our Sunday morning worship services omitting the partaking from Christ’s table.
    
For Disciples this weekly observance is not a quaint custom or a legalistic requirement but the heart of what we understand to be the nature of the church.  In some profound way the Lord’s Supper constitutes us as a people.  It is action by which we know ourselves to be a church.
    
While still in seminary I learned firsthand how the Lord’s Supper is the glue that holds a church together.  One Summer I served a one-room Disciples congregation in a small Illinois town.  On my first Sunday I arrived in time for Sunday school.  Having grown up in a larger, somewhat more formal congregation, I had expected upon arrival to be handed an order of worship to follow.  There was none.  No problem.  I would ask someone after Sunday school to brief me as to how they usually conducted their service.  To my dismay the Sunday school teacher concluded his lesson by noting my presence and calling me to the platform to begin the service.

Grabbing a hymnal, I chose a hymn and announced it, getting the service underway.  While they sang I did my best to think through an order of worship.  Unfortunately the hymn finished before I had my thoughts together.  In an inspired moment of desperation I said, “I can tell this is a singing congregation, so let’s all sing another hymn!”  Fortunately it was a long one and I finally was able to proceed with the service.
    
I discovered later that since this small congregation did not regularly have a minister, it was their custom together, sing some hymns, have a Sunday School lesson from the Bible, and proceed directly with the elders leading them in the partaking of the Lord’s Supper.

I quickly came to realize these people knew they were a church through their sharing in the Lord’s Supper.  At times they may not have a pastor. Never mind.  It is living Christ meeting them at his table who makes them his people.
    
In my later years as an area minister I am so longer surprised upon visiting a small congregation to find sometimes no break between Sunday school and morning worship.  I have learned, like a good Boy Scout, to be prepared.
    
We Disciples see the Lord’s Supper as something more than a personal communion with our Lord.  This meal is what holds us together as a people.  It is what makes us into a church.
    
This understanding holds true for us beyond the local congregation.  Whenever we come together as several congregations for worship – in an area or district meeting – we do not feel quite right unless we have shared together in the Lord’s Supper.  It does not matter that most of us have already participated in this sacred meal earlier in the day.  We want the Lord’s Supper to express our being a part of the larger church.
    
The Lord’s Supper serves much the same purpose in our regional assemblies.  Something within our collective Disciples psyche calls us to cement our wider relationships through sharing together about Christ’s table.
    
Whenever we gather in general assembly we Disciples feel deeply that we have not really expressed our unity with one another until we have participated together in the Lord’s Supper.  Increasingly we have wanted both to open and close our assemblies with this great sacramental act.
    
For Disciples the Lord’s Supper is a powerful action in which Christ unites his people in fellowship with him and with one another.  For a people who came out of the rugged individualism of the western frontier we have a remarkable sense of the social effectiveness of the Lord’s Supper in establishing Christ’s people.
    
This binding power of the Lord’s Supper became particularly apparent as we Disciples restructured our church in the 1960s.  When the work was completed and the last vote taken, preparations were begun for a great celebrative event at which the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) would be “constituted.”
    
Our astute and beloved Disciples historian Ronald E. Osborn has observed that at the last minute the church leaders had second thoughts about what they were about to do.  Dale Fiers said, In effect, “We aren’t constituting the church.  It’s been here all the time.”
    
So the liturgical celebration took another shape.  Following the final vote, the assembly gathered for the Lord’s Supper.  The recently adopted Provisional Design was presented to God as a part of the preparatory offering.  Says Osborn:

We met at the table as those who had belonged to this church all along. 
We had known in our bones that it was truly church, but had learned only at this late hour, after much agony, how we could call it what it truly is and had been ever since we had known it.  With the bread and cup we received as gift a reality which had long transcended the limitations of our structures and our doctrines. (1)

It was at Christ’s table that, recognizing who we already were, we covenanted afresh with one another to continue our life together within the whole people of God.

In reality we Disciples understand the Lord’s Supper to be the covenant which Christ makes to hold Christians together and to constitute them his church.  In our early days this outlook was more a kind feeling than a reasoned expression.  But from those first days to the present Disciples have increasingly experienced the Lord’s Supper as that divine means by which Christ works to form and re-form his church.

The Power to Make Us One

The centrality of the Lord’s Supper for Disciples has influenced our whole stance in ecumenical relations.  We believe that the Lord’s Supper has the power to make us one.  We have wanted in dialogue with other communions to move the sharing in the Lord’s Supper to the center of consideration.  We believe that the Lord’s Supper has the power to make us one.

It is not surprising that a Disciple, Jesse M. Bader, was the one who initiated the effort to encourage churches of all faiths to observe World Communion Sunday each year on the first Sunday in October.  He tried to find a time in the year when all church bodies would be celebrating Holy Communion and use that day as an occasion to recognize our oneness about Christ’s table.  In reality it reminds us of our brokenness.  Our very differences in understanding the nature of the Lord’s Supper make it impossible for us to be at one with each other.

Yet we know deep inside that if we could gather at the same earthly table, Christ, indeed, would make us one church.  So we Disciples keep pushing to the center of ecumenical discussion the centrality of the Lord’s Supper in the life of the church.

I recall the way we Disciples pressed for a great celebration of the Lord’s Supper in our union talks with the Northern (American) Baptists.  Both church bodies agreed to hold simultaneous assemblies in Chicago in May, 1952, and to join together in a common service of worship to express our oneness in fellowship.

Typically, the Disciples suggested the service be one of celebrating together the Lord’s Supper.  What better way to cement our relationship?  The Baptists, taken aback, could not imagine combined conventions celebrating the Lord’s Supper.  For them only congregations had this privilege.  The Baptists, seeking to find a way to satisfy the Disciples’ wishes, suggested that the combined worship could include the Lord’s Supper if we all could be guests of one of their local congregations.

Recognizing that the Baptists had no sense of the Lord’s Supper constituting the church beyond the local congregation, we Disciples bumped up against a fundamental difference between ourselves and that church body.  It was apparent why we could not come together into one church.  That experience did not, however, damper our Disciples spirits in continuing to press for Christians and church bodies to gather about the same Lord’s Table in the search for a united church.

As we Disciples have worked for church union through the Consultation on Church Union we have sought to foster a sense of oneness through participation across denominational lines in what is termed Interim Eucharistic Fellowships.  By Christians gathering from various denominations at the same Lord’s Table, Christ shall through his effective power unite us into one body.  To this point few Christians have joined in this particular ecumenical effort.

Something of the profound mystique of the Lord’s Supper for Disciples can be seen in an incident related to the Consultation on Church Union.  One of that body’s crucial meetings was held in Louisville.  As a part of that plenary session the Disciples delegation invited the participants to go with them out to the Cane Ridge Meeting House, where the Disciples movement in Kentucky began.  There they would have Holy Communion together.

I vividly recall how the irrepressible Disciples ecumenist George Beazley later described the occasion.  He emphasized the way union deliberations that day had seemingly come to an impasse.  The future looked dark for this noble attempt to gather the churches into a more perfect union.  “But then we gathered in that old meeting-house,” Beazley said.  “Two Disciples elders prayed at the table their simply prayers of thanksgiving, and everyone was deeply moved as they shared together about that table.”

Then with an impish smile Beazley declared:  “When we came back to the plenary session the next morning, somehow the clouds were rolled away and we found our way to move forward.  That, my friends, is the power of the Lord’s Supper.

Hands Bound Together by Christ’s Love

I, too, have felt something of that same mystical power at the Lord’s Table.  In 1978 I led a small delegation from the board of directors of the Division of Overseas Ministries in an attempt to understand more clearly the Disciples community we had begun in Zaire some 100 years earlier.  Those African Disciples were feeling estranged from their American counterparts who had begun that marvelous gospel mission but who seemed now to be waning in interest.  They needed a sympathetic ear.

We came to listen, to learn and to fellowship with one another.  That all happened.  But it was when I joined in worship on a Sunday morning at Bolenge, where our whole mission effort there had begun, that I knew without question my oneness with these persons of a radically different culture.  There at a simple table with the familiar words of remembrance carved on it I recognized the reality of our common kinship.  At points we had difficulty in communicating because our cultures were different.  But at this table we experienced an unbreakable unity.

With that visit we invited representatives of these African Disciples to come to North America. Following their visit to our churches we all gathered at Christmount assembly grounds in North Carolina.  There we renewed our covenant with one another – “bound our hands together in love,” as they expressed it, around a communion table.  A representative from each church body offered a communion prayer.  Together we partook of the Lord’s Supper. Although we could not agree at all points as to the specifics of what should be done, our strained relations were mended, our sense of oneness renewed.  Christ at is table had bound our hands with bonds of unbreakable love.

The Lord’s Supper, of course, has many meanings for Disciples beyond what I have been describing. It is always a deeply personal event as well.  But underlying all the varied and rich meanings is the acute awareness that the Lord’s Supper, at the center of our lives, is communal.  It is the source of our common nourishment.  Eating at the same table, we are one.  Here at this table we experience Christ’s binding power so vividly that we know we belong to one another in a deeply abiding way.

We Disciples understand the Lord’s Supper to be what constitutes us as church.  In ecumenical dialogue our understanding of the church in this way would be identified by some as our seeing ourselves to be a eucharistic fellowship.  Many church bodies speak of the meal about the Lord’s Table as being the eucharist – the meal of thanksgiving. Not all church bodies which think of themselves as a eucharistic fellowship agree with our Disciples articulation of its meaning, but they deeply understand how we feel.

In the Preamble to our Disciples Design we confess that we rejoice “in the covenant of love which binds us to God and one another.”  Disciples, centering in the Lord’s Supper, recall the words of Jesus in the Upper Room as he lifted his cup before his followers and said:

            This cup is the new covenant in my blood.  Do this, as often as you drink it,
            In remembrance of me” (Corinthians 11:25).

Christ’s drinking the cup of death on the cross is an astounding act of love.  As Christ’s disciples throughout the centuries and in all places have shared in the drinking of that cup about the Lord’s Table they have felt bound together within Christ’s covenant of love.

The Lord’s Supper is the means by which Christ binds us to one another in his fellowship of love.  This meal, in our Disciples experience, is what holds us together with all Christians – both within a single congregation, within a denomination, and yes, within Christ’s one holy church.

It is not surprising that when Disciples searched for a symbol to identify themselves, they settled upon a red chalice imprinted with a white cross.  They see themselves as a people whose life centers in fellowship with Christ about his table.

The Power to Shape and Re-Shape

We Disciples have not always seen the church clearly in this light.  It is a lesson Christ has taught us as we have gathered about his table.  Before coming to the American frontier, Alexander Campbell lived in Glasgow, Scotland.  There he belonged to a Presbyterian church which required a person to be examined as to orthodoxy before being permitted to share in communion.  If deemed properly aligned in thought with the church the member would then be given a token to be presented at the Lord’s Table before partaking. One Sunday Alexander Campbell held a communion token in his sweaty hand, pondering what sense this all made in the light of the One who would meet him there.  Waiting till all others had partaken, he finally went forward and deposited his token on the table and walked out.  Christ’s church was bigger than that.

His father, Thomas Campbell, who had preceded him to America, had a similar experience at the Lord’s Table.  He was invited to conduct the Lord’s Supper out in a sparsely settled section of Pennsylvania.  There he was struck by the destitute condition of members of differing Presbyterian church bodies who had long been without an opportunity to gather about the Lord’s Table.

In his sermon prior to partaking, Campbell lamented that existing divisions within the church and invited all without respect to party differences to share in the holy meal.  They came.  His presbytery was shocked.  All kinds of reasons were found to bring him to trial.  During those deliberations he decisively exited from the Presbyterian church, just wanting to be a part of Christ’s one church.

For both father and son, the Christ met at his table of remembrance served to broaden their understanding of the nature of the church.  Thomas Campbell out of that experience went on to draft what he called The Declaration and Address.  Its first proposition flatly stated, “The church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one.”

Soon the Disciples questioned if unimmersed persons should be served at the Lord’s Table. Again, experience of Christ at that table, itself, broadened their understanding.  They began to see that the communion table within a congregation does not belong to it.  Christ is the one who meets his disciples there and it is his table, not theirs.  If it is the Lord’s Table, then what disciple has a right to judge who should partake and who should not?  The table was bigger than a denomination.  Indeed, one Disciple declared: “The Lord’s Table is as wide as the gates of heaven!”

Christ comes to us as a people, holding us together in is mighty love.  In our life together about his table he continues to tell us who we are and how he would shape us.

We Disciples know that Christ at his table still has more to tell his church about who we are and what we should be doing.  Through the Lord’s Supper, Christ shall continue to shape and reshape his church.  Within that covenant of love we shall one day find ourselves fully at one with him and with one another.

____________________

From People of the Chalice: Disciples of Christ in Faith and Practice, Colbert S. Cartwright, CPB Press, St. Louis, Missouri, 1987.

1 - Ronald E. Osborn, “Theological Issues in the Restructure of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ),” manuscript. June, 1979.  p.27