How Often, and Who Presides

Frequency divided the Reformers from their own city councils. Calvin argued that the supper belonged in every Sunday service and the Geneva council refused, settling on four times a year, and the pattern of quarterly or monthly communion spread across the Reformed and free churches and held for four centuries. The Scottish communion season grew directly out of that infrequency: a gathering of several days with preparatory services, a fast day, examination of communicants and a great open air communion at the end, which emigrants carried to North America and which shaped the frontier camp meeting. The Churches of Christ and the Disciples went the opposite way and made a weekly supper a mark of the restored New Testament church. The liturgical movement of the twentieth century then reversed the general trend, and weekly communion is now normal in Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist and many Reformed congregations.

Presidency is treated as a matter of church order rather than of sacramental power, which is the deeper difference from Catholic and Orthodox practice. Where the Catholic tradition holds that only a validly ordained priest can consecrate, Protestant churches generally hold that a rightly called minister presides because the church has appointed one to do so, not because a power has been conferred on him. That leaves room for arguments the other tradition cannot have: several Baptist and Brethren congregations allow any recognised elder or member to give thanks at the table, and the Anglican diocese of Sydney has argued publicly for many years that a deacon or a lay person may preside, against the settled practice of the rest of the Anglican Communion.