Simple Church Minute 86--Simson's Thesis #12

86—WS #12

My name is Tom; this is Simple Church Minute

            We have been examining Wolfgang Simson’s 15 Theses towards a Re-Incarnation of Church.  Thesis #12 is “Rediscovering the Lord’s Supper as a real supper with real food.”  About this, Simson has written, “Church tradition has managed to celebrate the Lord’s Supper in a homeopathic and deeply religious form, characteristically with a few drops of wine, a tasteless cookie and a sad face.  However, the Lord’s Supper was actually more of a substantial supper with a symbolic meaning than a symbolic supper with a substantial meaning.  God is restoring eating back into our meeting.”  Unquote.

            Another word some flavors of church use for the Lord’s Supper is communion, which is a synonym for fellowship.  Communion as it is done in every institutional church I am aware of is done, as was said above, with tiny amounts of food, everyone being somber.  The Calvinist tradition, for instance, immediately proceeds this by asking everyone to examine oneself for sin.  It was a somber thing.  Conversely, I think back to when I was in college and a group of us from a Christian group went down the street and had soda and pizza.  I can look back and say that doing that together better represented what fellowship is and what true communion should be.  It wasn’t just food, the conversation brought us together as people who were catching what caring for each other is all about.  The Christian life is first about enjoying true fellowship with our fellow believers, the joy of which radiates to the world around us, as opposed to ritual, being somber, and parsing the fine points of theology.  The older I get, the more I see true church in a dorm room, parking lot or tenement versus an expensive building devoted to only the rituals and well meaning man made traditions.

            You can read back and ahead about Mr. Simson’s work at www.simsonwolfgang.de. You can email me at simplechurchminute@gmail.com. For more info about simple worship, visit http://www.simplechurch.com/ or locally at (local website).