In reply to a piece of email correspondence in which Ethan indicated an eagerness to incorporate “communion” into our weekly church schedule:
I’m not sure I’m game for the “every week” part yet myself, so let’s slow down on that and make sure to subject it to consensus. Part of my concern is procedural—ensure consensus for all such decisions—but part of my concern might also be personal: I maintain a tenuous sense of what His body being given and His blood being poured out “for [me]” even means.
Or maybe it’s not tenuous but feels that way because it’s substantially different from what I think most of us learned growing up, and I haven’t had much chance to share (and thus practice knowing) it. Maybe I’ll make it part of what I share when I tell the story of my life and the life of God in and around me.
“Died for us” and “died for our sins” are obviously crucial Jesus’ whole shebang. But I don’t want to establish a ritual around those concepts if I don’t have a firm grasp on what they mean. I could see us spending a whole meeting teaching each other about this and discussing this…
Anyway, no immediate actions out of the above. Let’s yes set aside time to ritualistically break bread and drink sparkling grape juice this Friday (provided there’s no objection from anybody else at the time) and then take it from there. I bet doing it this once will make the topic of doing it more often come up naturally. But let’s not be pre-married to the idea of doing it every week yet. Please.