How Often Should a Church Celebrate Communion?

The answer to the question of how often a Church should celebrate communion is immediately a matter of what authority or authorities a group of Christians believes should govern belief and practice. 

I’m an Eastern Orthodox Christian. My church celebrates communion every Sunday out of a belief that this practice was handed down as the correct practice all the way from the apostles, who received the instruction to celebrate communion every Sunday from Jesus himself. 

Other churches, which do not accept the tradition of the church itself as an authority base their beliefs and practices only on what they find in the bible. 

I’ll present what we know about the earliest Christian practice and then what evidence is available in the New Testament itself. 

Earliest Christian Practice 

The oldest record we have concerning christian practice of the Eucharist outside the new testament is the Didache, the Teaching of the Holy Apostles. It is believed to have been written near the end of the 1st century AD, so it was composed while the very last of the apostolic generation may have still been alive, but many Christians still had active memory and experience of that first generation. The Didache teaches the following regarding how often and when to celebrate the Eucharist: 

14:1 And on the Lord's own day gather yourselves together and break bread and give thanks, first confessing your transgressions, that your sacrifice may be pure. 
14:2 And let no man, having his dispute with his fellow, join your assembly until they have been reconciled, that your sacrifice may not be defiled; 


But it is also very clear that the Didache describes a church that celebrates the communion service every Sunday. Indeed, it seems to be the primary reason for the christian assembly on the Lord’s Day, Sunday. If you study the practice of the Christian church as found in authors dating after the Didache, you discover that the Didache was not unique in this belief. Celebration of the Communion every Sunday was a universal belief and practice in the christian church. It remained so until the period of the reformation, when some christian communities began to celebrate the communion with less frequency. 

Even if the Didache describes a late first century church that celebrates communion every Sunday, for Christians who only follow the authority of the bible, neither the Didache, nor the practice of the universal church after that point matters.  So let’s look at what the new testament might preserve on this point. 

New Testament Teaching 

Saint Paul, in his first epistle to the Corinthians discusses a number of matters that he feels need to be corrected within the church there. In chapter 11, he addresses some irregularities in their practice of communion, such as people not sharing with others and even getting drunk. He even calls into question whether what they are doing can be called the Lord’s Supper or not. Here’s what he writes: 

When you meet together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat.  (1 Cor 11:20) 

One certainly would interpret from this verse that the Lord’s Supper is something that invariably happens whenever they meet. If that were not the case, he would have had to say something along the lines of “when you celebrate the lord’s supper, it is not the lord’s supper at all. Instead, it’s “when you meet together." And apparently every time you meet together. 

St. Luke also gives us a window into new testament practice on the matter of the the Sunday service. And quite by accident.  We read the following about Paul’s visit at the city of Troas: 

On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them, intending to depart in the morning (Acts 20:7) 

Luke goes on to describe an incident in which a young man falls out a window and seemed to have died of his injuries, but St. Paul healed him. But you’ll notice St. Luke tells his readers the context of this story as happening “On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread.  St. Luke is undeniably saying here that the reason the Christian community gathers is to break bread. And they gather on the first day of the week. 

Universal christian practice after the New Testament was to celebrate communion every sunday. and now it’s clear why that was the case. Because the New Testament itself also clearly describes that as the practice of the Christian Church during the time of the apostles. 

The protestant denomination which calls itself The Disciples of Christ celebrate communion every Sunday. They were formed in the 1800s out of a movement of protestant Christians who wanted to achieve unity between different denominations by basically starting over and studying the Bible to create what they believed was the original christian practice. And they concluded that the verses I’ve mentioned here teach weekly communion. 

If you are in a Christian church that does not practice communion every Sunday and yet otherwise claims to base its beliefs and practices on the Bible, I would urge you to advocate for the practice of weekly communion. You should advocate for it because that’s what the Bible teaches. It is a source of blessings, intended for our spiritual benefit on a weekly basis.

Review of Garry Wills: Why Priests?

In his latest book, Garry Wills is playing the tired role of what I call a "Catholic but." You've heard these people. "I'm Catholic, but I don't agree with my Church on [Abortion, Contraception, Homosexuality, All-Male Priesthood, ad nauseum]." They claim their authority to bash the Roman Catholic Church, curiously, from the very fact that they are organically members of that body.

In his book Why Priests?, Wills challenges the development of the concept of priests at all in the Church. Now, while I'm not Roman Catholic, what Wills says is equally an attack on the position of the Orthodox Church. I'll be addressing it from a perspective that defends the Historical Church which was united for a millennium and which, sadly, has now spent a millennium not sharing Communion.

The basic points of Wills' argument could be summarized as follows. He wants to assert that Jesus was not a priest and that what we currently call and consider priests should not have developed into that concept. Now, the word priest is derived from the Greek word presbyter (elder), but it is certainly true that the English word means what the Latin sacerdos meant (and in Canon Law, the term sacerdos commonly describes priests). 

Wills is immediately confronted with a problem. The Letter to the Hebrew explicitly discusses the priesthood of Jesus (e.g., see Hebrews 4:14). Wills deals with this potential fatal error to his argument by suggesting that the Letter to the Hebrews is itself "idiosyncratic" on the topic. And he further calls the canonical status of the letter into question. In other words, if a book of the Bible destroys your argument that Jesus wasn't a priest, remove that book and then proceed with your argument that the Bible doesn't call Jesus a priest!

From there Wills essentially argues that the concept of the presbyter as "priest" is a late and unfortunate evolution, not really found in any meaningful way until that villain St. Thomas of Aquinas. 

I'm going to explain now why Wills could not be more wrong.

What he has missed is that the concept of the presbyter as "priest" follows naturally from the teaching of the Eucharist as Sacrifice. If the Eucharist is a Sacrifice, then the man who offers that sacrifice is, of course, a priest.

The Primitive Church viewed the Eucharist as a Sacrifice certainly as early as the composition of the Didache (a late 1st century Church manual). 

The Didache describes the Eucharist in clear sacrificial terms and even quotes Malachi 1:11 as a text which predicted the Eucharist:

14:1 On the Lord's day, gather yourselves together and break bread, give thanks, but first confess your sins so that your sacrifice may be pure.

14:2 Let no one, however, who has a quarrel with his brother come together with you, until he has reconciled, so that your sacrifice may not be profaned.

14:3 For this is what the Lord has said (Malachi 1:11): "For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name is great among the nations, and in every place incense is offered to my name, and a pure offering; for my name is great among the nations, says the of hosts."

Now, you may here admit that while the Didache clearly views the Eucharist as a Sacrifice, that doesn't really matter, since it isn't in the Bible. What we really need is something in the New Testament which indicates that the Eucharist was a Sacrifice.

St. Paul discusses the Eucharist extensively in his First Letter to the Corinthians.

He explains to his flock in 1 Corinthians 10:16-21 that there is an inherent inconsistency between receiving the Eucharist and participation in two other things:

 Is not the cup of blessing which we bless a communion in the blood of Christ? Is not the bread which we break a communion in the body of Christ?
 Since there is one bread, we who are many are one body; for we all partake of the one bread.
 Look at the nation Israel; are not those who eat the sacrifices sharers in the altar?...The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God; and I do not want you to become sharers in demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.

So, St. Paul tells us you cannot partake in the Eucharist and also the sacrifices of the nation Israel or the things the Gentiles sacrifice. Are just two of these three things sacrifices in his mind? Obviously not. Paul is clearly here stating that all three of these things are sacrifices. And Christians need to pick just one.

St. Paul also gave one more indication that he believes that the Eucharist is a Sacrifice. When he called the Eucharist the "Table of the Lord, (τραπεζης κυριου)" he was using a term that occurs in only one other place in the Old and New Testaments. The Altar of the the Lord is called the "Table of the Lord" in Malachi 1:12, immediately after the verse quoted by the Didache as a proof text of the Eucharist as Sacrifice:

But you are profaning it, in that you say the Table of the Lord (שלחן אדני) is defiled.

This is no coincidence. The Didache quotes Malachi 1:11 as proof the Eucharist is a Sacrifice. St. Paul quotes Malachi 1:12 to call the Eucharist the Table of the Lord. The phrase "Table of the Lord" means sacrificial altar in Malachi 1:12. Obviously St. Paul means to call the Eucharist a Sacrifice. And, in so doing,  St. Paul  is also aware that the Early Christian Church viewed that whole passage of Malachi as predictive of the Eucharist. 

The Christian Church, from the time of St. Paul onward, viewed the Eucharist as a bloodless Sacrifice which mystically makes present the timeless Sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. The men who offered this Sacrifice on behalf of the Church are naturally priests of that altar. 

Wills has constructed an impassioned argument against a key tenet of the Historical Church. But he did so by intentionally not engaging key information that would have stopped his argument in its tracks.

Where to Start?

At my local supermarket, which is stocking products for the upcoming celebration of Easter, I spotted, next to the wide variety of Chocolate Bunnies, a Chocolate Cross:


(I cropped off the name of the company that produced this confection.) Maybe this style of candy has been on the market for years and I just never noticed it. But when I saw the item, I had a visceral reaction against this development. Now, thank God this company had the sensibility to not issue a Chocolate Crucifix, though that must certainly be next.

People to whom I have described this product have normally at first expressed the view that there is nothing at all wrong with such a thing. That is, until I ask them one important question. "What's your strategy for eating it?"

I remember as a child invariably thinking, as I ate my annual Chocolate Bunny, things along the line of, "Hmm, I guess I'll start with your ears this year. Next I'll eat your tail."

And there's just no escaping the fact that, if you eat a Chocolate Cross, you'll have to immediately make that crucial decision of where to start.

Shall I just start at the top, eat the branch that would have hosted the sign INRI (Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum/Jesus the Nazarean, King of the Jews)? Next perhaps I will eat the base, the Milk Chocolate plank symbolizing that prototype onto which the feet of my Savior were nailed. As for the top branches, where the hands of my Lord were pierced, I'll maybe save those and enjoy their sweetness later.

When I ask people how they would eat a Chocolate Cross, they are suddenly more circumspect and express the view that, after all, there's just something not right with consuming this thing.

To eat and to drink are ultimately at the root of our very being. And in the Orthodox/Catholic Tradition, we experience, through the gift of the Sacrament, union with the Divine by means of this basic and vital process. Sadly, our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ sojourning in the more radical Protestant communities do not experience this. However much they talk of "feasting on the Word (meaning, read the Bible)," their spiritual hunger remains. And eating a Chocolate Cross is a tragic substitution for that which Christ instituted.

I avoid foods with processed sugar. But if I splurge, it will be with a Chocolate Bunny or a Cadbury Egg. And before the Cross of Christ I bow down in worship and his Holy Resurrection I glorify.