The Lord's Supper

The physical changes the Reformers made were arguments in wood and cloth. A stone altar fixed against the east wall, with the priest standing before it and the people behind him, states that something is being offered on their behalf. A wooden table standing in the body of the church, with the minister behind it facing the congregation, states that a meal is being shared. Zurich made the change in 1525 and the rest of Protestant Europe followed at different speeds; in England the order to replace altars with tables came in 1550 and was reversed and restored more than once before it settled.

Several other features follow from the same decision. The cup is given to every communicant, reversing the medieval Western restriction of the wine to the clergy. The elements are received in the language of the people, from a minister the congregation can hear, and the account of the institution is read out from scripture rather than said quietly as a formula, because it functions as the warrant for the action rather than as the mechanism of it. Nothing is elevated for the people to adore, and nothing is kept afterwards; the bread and wine left over are ordinary bread and wine again, which is why these churches have no tabernacle, no monstrance and no rite of benediction.

What none of this settles is what the communicant receives, and the churches that share the furniture divide completely on that question. A Reformed congregation and a Baptist congregation may use the same table, the same words and the same trays, and hold quite different accounts of what happens at them.

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.