Church as a Family Gathering
When I think about the early Church, there is a very specific image that comes to mind: a family gathering. The first churches were house churches so I see them sitting in the living room talking about Jesus and Scripture and how they will witness to their fellow Jews (and later Gentiles). Led by the apostles, different people would stand up to contribute a hymn, a sermon, a reading, etc. Perhaps they would read aloud the latest epistle from Peter or Paul or John. Perhaps they would encourage those among them who were suffering persecution. They then would gather around the table to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, breaking bread together and talking about the death and resurrection of their Savior.
When I think about the contemporary Church, a very different image appears. We sit in pews or rows of chairs, staring at the back of the head of the person in front of us. We sing while staring ahead at the words on the screen or staring down at the words in the hymnal. We listen to the sermon while staring ahead at the PowerPoint slides or down at our Bibles. We take communion while staring at the head of the person in front of us. Our worship experience has become very individualized. If I want to, I can go to church, worship, and leave without every making a meaningful connection with another person. I cannot imagine someone in the early Church being able to do that no matter how hard he tried. Granted, a large part of this image is based on my American Protestant experience, but my extended experience in Russian churches and in Catholic churches tells me that this problem (at least in part) extends beyond American Protestantism.
I attended a meeting yesterday to help plan my church’s next communion service. The sermon that morning will be on loving fellow believers as part of a 3-week series on the Great Commandment so we were trying to think of ways to make communion be more corporate and less individual. The biggest problems we have are logistical. We simply do not have enough tables or room to sit a few hundred people around a big U-shaped table to create a family meal.
We often refer to our fellow believers as our church family so how do we reconstruct that family gathering experience? How can we make the Lord’s Supper more like a family meal? How can we make our corporate worship experience actually corporate and not just individuals worshipping in the same location?
