Thomas Baldwin considers the place of communion in the Church of Scotland today

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FOR an illustration of the range of approaches to Holy Communion in the Church of Scotland, look no further than Colston Milton Church in Glasgow.

Occasionally, they will hold a very formal, traditional communion using the service familiar to most Church of Scotland members.

But at other times they will do something very different.

“The formal communion is something some of our elder members want to be part of our worship pattern and really appreciate,” says Jo Love, who is a deacon and member of Colston Milton.

“The other way is completely the opposite. We set up round three sides of a square with a space in the middle, and put rugs and cushions down for the children to sit around on.

“When it comes to the communion, the kids will lay the table, lay the cloth, go and get the plates and goblet. There are usually sharp intakes of breath at some point as we wonder who’s going to sit on the edge of the tablecloth and bring the whole lot down, but it hasn’t happened yet!

“It’s all very informal, and when the time comes to serve, we serve each other in whichever way we choose. It’s bordering on anarchy, but it’s a glorious family anarchy which works with a small congregation, and people enjoy it and enjoy that kids are at the centre of it.”

In another contrast to both of those forms, a monthly ecumenical service at Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh approaches Communion in a very quiet, contemplative manner, using as few words as possible. Called ‘Refugio’ (from the stopping places for pilgrims on the Santiago de Compostela route in Spain), the evening consists of a guided ‘stilling’ exercise, a reflection and then a simple celebration of Communion where bread and wine are shared in a circle.

Elizabeth White, who was involved in the establishment of Refugio about eight years ago, says: “What we were hearing from people was they just really liked the fact that they could come and be quiet and not have to faff around with lots of bits of paper that takes them away from their own internal reflective places.

“People were saying ‘I can’t find this anywhere else’. There was something about it being a very restful place, a place that connected our own lived experience with something people were familiar with in another setting.

“It’s a place of rest and of quiet, and of finding God in a different way than we tend to get, particularly in those traditions that are very liturgical and do it in a very set responsorial way some of us find didn’t do it for us all the time.”

With Holy Communion, as with so much of Church of Scotland worship, you used to know what to expect: four times a year, your district elder would deliver your communion card; then on the Sunday, communion would take place after the usual service, the soberly-suited elders dispensing the bread and wine in solemn silence.

In many, perhaps most parish churches, that is still the usual pattern: a bolt-on to the regular hymn sandwich, greeted in at least some quarters with an inward sigh because it makes the service last longer. Compared to most Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, where communion is the centrepiece and climax of the service every Sunday, it can sometimes seem a bit of an afterthought.

As the examples above (and the responses to the Big Question on page 12) show, a growing number of churches are trying to do it differently as they experiment with new styles of worship.

However, there are other places within the Kirk where the place of communion is much less certain: where the increasing shortage of ordained ministers makes it hard to hold a regular communion, and in the growing number of Fresh Expressions of church which don’t directly involve a Minister of Word and Sacrament at all.

Add on the perennial debate about whether elders should be authorised to dispense communion, and the range of opinion and practice on whether children should be allowed to take part, and there are a lot of questions around the significance and place of the celebration of the Last Supper within the denomination. How it deals with these questions will affect the Church’s place in the universal church.

The Rev Jenny Adams, minister of Duffus, Spynie and Hopeman in the Presbytery of Moray, is currently tasked with studying some of these issues, as the convener of a working group on the sacraments (as probably most readers will know, communion and baptism are the only two sacraments recognised by the Church of Scotland).

She says: “The starting point would be that, as in so many things in the Church of Scotland, there is a huge breadth of theology and practice around communion. This is one of those things where there is constrained difference and mixed economy, and a huge variety of understanding.

“There are places where it would be celebrated monthly or weekly, and others where it’s only a couple of times a year. There is such a breadth of ways we can celebrate it.

“And it has got so many meanings: it can be seen as a memorial, a commemoration of the Last Supper, a family meal of the church, a foretaste of the feast to come.

“I think some people still really value that sense of seriousness (from the traditional approach), but others find it oppressive. It doesn’t need to be miserable. I remember one congregation where the elders looked terrified: they were so worried about which way to go, who they were meant to serve. It had become associated with fear of getting it wrong.”

She adds that the questions facing the working group – which was set up by the 2017 General Assembly, with members from the Panel of Review and Reform, Theological Forum, Ecumenical Relations Committee, Legal Questions Committee, Ministries Council and Mission and Discipleship Council – grow from two main strands of concerns raised with the Panel in recent years.

“One is coming out of Fresh Expressions and Pioneer Ministry. Fresh Expressions don’t necessarily involve a minister of Word and Sacrament, so does that mean that if they want to celebrate Communion or have someone baptised they need to bring in someone from outside, who isn’t part of that community?

“The other strand is congregations in long-term vacancy. More and more of them have leaders that may not be ordained ministers. Does their access to the sacraments become limited to when they can find a retired minister or someone else can do a swap?

“But there have been questions and concerns about what it would mean for our place in the universal church if we were allowing the sacraments to be celebrated in ways that might not be recognised by others.”

However, she says that the infrequency of communion in most churches in the Church of Scotland does not mean that it is regarded as unimportant, either historically or in the present day.

“My sense would be that it’s because it’s taken very seriously. For the Reformers it wasn’t about celebrating it less frequently, it was about understanding it.

“Although I would caution that it’s impossible to fully understand what’s happening. If it gets too tied to understanding, firstly it starts excluding people and secondly it’s something that should be beyond words.”

She also says that the Church has sometimes got too hung up on the idea that people have to be ‘worthy’ to take the communion: “There’s a sense of First Corinthians 11, of eating and drink judgement on ourselves (verse 27).

“But we got too tied to worthiness, this sense of ‘I am not good enough’. Jesus shared that first meal with folk he knew were betraying him.”

The Rev Dr Peter Donald, minister of Crown Church Inverness, wrote the last major piece of work on communion for the Church of Scotland 10 years ago, while he was convener of the Panel on Worship and Doctrine Task Group.

He agrees that the infrequency of communion in the Church of Scotland should not be taken as a historical indication that it’s not taken seriously – in fact, he says, it is only in modern times that Anglicans and Roman Catholics have begun taking it weekly.

“The perspective that Catholics love people to get Communion and Protestants don’t is a travesty of Reformation history,” he says. “At the Reformation, what the Reformers wanted was that people would receive sacrament at least twice a year in country parts and at least four times a year in town. That was in contrast to Catholic churches, where they would only ever receive it at Easter.

“It’s arguable historically that Reformed churches have had a much, much higher and stronger estimation of the importance of Holy communion than Anglicans for instance. In the Church of Scotland historically, communion used to be massively significant, even if it was only two times a year.”

However, he admits: “If that’s the case from the 16th to the 19th centuries, it’s certainly not the case nowadays.”

In the middle part of the 20th century, the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches moved to weekly communion (which Peter says has led new generations to think that this is what they have always done), but suggestions that the Church of Scotland should do likewise ‘fell flat’.

Peter says: “The first book of Common Order in modern times, in 1940, has as the main morning service something like what happens in most churches: an order of morning prayer with preaching as the dominant element.

“In 1979, when the second Common Order was produced, the Panel on Doctrine at the time were very keen to bring Communion into being the principal morning service, and for worship within the Church of Scotland to be much more Eucharistically ordered – so the sermon would be in the middle of the service, rather than the high point and climax and last thing.

“But that has not been taken up, except by a very few churches. I think quite a lot will have it once a month, but usually either as a bit of an add-on, or at a different time – so again as an extra, rather than the main thing.”

However, he adds that it’s not true to suggest that nothing has changed. “What has happened since 1979 was huge numbers of congregations gained permission to drop communion cards and communion rolls being kept in the way they used to be, and that has had a fairly major effect on how communion is attended and celebrated.

“There was a time when elders visiting districts and handing out cards was a very big part of it, and now that’s not such a big deal.”

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Peter also laments a poor institutional memory, which he says has coloured the Church’s attitude to communion in recent years. “The knowledge of the General Assembly is remarkably poor. Ministers are often terribly influenced by their own personal backgrounds.

“For instance, it’s not required for elders to be the ones to distribute. It’s not required for there to be silence when communion is received. Many of these things have become myth and legend, grown up through practice in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but they aren’t in the Reformed tradition.”

So, where do we go from here? There seems little prospect that there will be widespread take-up of the weekly communion service in the Church of Scotland, even if there were the ministers (or other authorised persons) available to administer it.

However, that does not mean communion is not valued.

Peter says that when the Worship and Doctrine Task Group held a series of roadshows on the issue, many people told them they liked communion in small close settings, such as in Session meetings or while on retreat.

Jo Love, who works with the Iona Community’s Wild Goose Resource Group, speaks of Community communions or less formal agapé meals at which the setting up of the table and worship space is part of the ritual.

Jo says: “Jesus said ‘do this to remember me’ and it’s a reminder that he had this human life, that he was a flesh and blood person, and this was the last thing he did with his friends altogether in his human life.

“There are places where it (communion) would be celebrated monthly, and others where it’s only a couple of times a year. There is such a breadth of ways we can celebrate it. And it has got so many meanings: it can be seen as a memorial, a commemoration of the Last Supper, a family meal of the church, a foretaste of the feast to come.”

“To me, we should be making it not this tokenistic four times a year thing, but a much more ordinary shared-table experience.”

And Jenny Adams adds: “It’s encountering God and meeting Jesus in the tangible, in what we can taste and touch. I think it’s important to folk, and it’s important to discuss it.

“It’s supposed to be a Ministry of Word and Sacrament, and if we lose the sacramental side of things then I think we don’t let people meet God in as many ways as we should.”