I have been spending a bit of time cogitating on whether or not my preference is to observe the Eucharist each week in worship. After some time I think I am ready to say “yes.”
My reasons for not doing so are easily answered. As in, ‘it’s too Roman Catholic.” Or “it will devalue its value.” Or “it will replace preaching.” None of these are of the “necessarily follows” quality.
But there is a reason for a weekly observance of the Supper. It will tame the worship of the church, or at least my branch of the church, the evangelical, nondenominational church. This branch of the church is the “anything goes as long as enough people show up to see it” branch of the church. And it does get crazy. It’s a bit harder to pull some of this stuff off with a communion table right in the middle of everything. Of course, some church’s way around this taming influence is to move communion to a mid-week service where less than 1/2 of the people will show up, including 1/2 of the praise team and 1/2 of the drama team.
I am thinking that the Eucharist has a centripetal force that pulls us back to the center, and the center is a check in our natural inclination to “improve” worship. It puts death in the center of our worship, self-denial, humiliation and deep suffering. Sin and its devastating consequences becomes very dark, the cross stands very large and our complicity in this death deepens. It’s a bit harder to make jokes and hand the service over to what AW Tozer calls “the jingle bell crowd.”
No, the service whose landscape is dominated by Jesus’ death on the cross does not have to be morose and forbidding. It gives rise to joy and gratitude. But it is joy of another kind – not as the world gives but as Jesus gives.
