By Robin G. Jordan
I am expecting this article to generate disagreement since I am presenting what for some readers may be a controversial view. However, I believe that a case can be made for celebrating the Lord’s Supper online.
What makes us the body of Christ is that we share the same Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that links us to our Lord and to each other. When we gather together bodily, or physically, with each other, we give outward expression to this inward reality. When we gather together digitally, or virtually, we are still the Body of Christ. We still share the same Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit still links us to our Lord and to each other.
When we log into a ZOOM meeting, we are present to each other even though we may be in different rooms, in different buildings, in different locations. We can see and hear each other. We may not be able to feel each other’s body heat, smell each other’s body odors, touch each other, or taste each other but the same can be true in a physical gathering. For example, in some churches the members of congregation sit scattered around the sanctuary. They do not sit in close proximity to each other.
How much space an individual maintains between himself and the other members of the congregation will depend upon the individual. Some individuals can tolerate sitting next to someone else. Others cannot .The study of how much space that people can tolerate between themselves and others is called “
proxemics.”
What transforms a loose aggregate of people into a Christian assembly is not their bodily or physical presence in the same room but their collective doing of what the church does when it meets—singing God’s praise, hear God’s Word, praying for God’s world, and celebrating the Lord’s Supper.
During part of its history the Scottish Episcopal Church was prohibited from gathering in groups of more than four or five people in the same room. It worked around this prohibition by modifying buildings so that small groups of people could meet in different rooms of the building and hear the minister and each other. In this way it held church services while at the same time complying with the letter of the law. Those who attended these services, while they were not assembled in the same room, nonetheless did what the church does when it meets. They were a Christian assembly.
A third consideration is intention. In many denominations an ordained minister—a presbyter or deacon—is the normative minister of baptism. In an emergency, however, a lay person may baptize so long as that person uses the right element—water—and baptizes with the intention to do what the church does when the church baptizes. Such baptisms are regarded as valid. A group of Christians who log into a ZOOM meeting for the purpose of singing God’s praise, hearing God’s Word, praying for God’s world, and celebrating the Lord’s Supper may be regarded as not only doing what the church does when it meets but as doing it with the same intention
Anglican evangelicals have historically viewed the Lord’s Supper as a visual proclamation of gospel. The Lord’s Supper is a means of grace because it stirs up our faith and it is through faith we appropriate the benefits of our Lord’s suffering and death. They have also held that the bread and wine undergo no change at the time of consecration other than a change of use. Faith is also the means by which we spiritually feed upon Christ. This spiritual feeding is not tied to our consumption of the elements of bread and wine. Rather eating the bread and drinking the cup points to it. They are symbolic of it. To feed on Christ, we do not need to eat the bread or drink the cup but to believe that he died for us. These views are in line with the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer (1552, 1559; 1662).
As Thomas Cranmer understood it, the consecration of the elements, their setting apart for sacramental use, was not the petition that those receiving the bread and wine in remembrance of Christ’s suffering and death might be partakers in his body and blood or the Words of Institution which follow this petition but the actions of eating the bread and drinking the cup, done in remembrance of his suffering and death as he commanded.
As long as the elements used for the Lord’s Supper are bread, leaven or unleaven, and wine or unfermented grape juice, and an ordained minister says the prayer that precedes these sacramental actions, as required by the discipline of the Anglican Church, the sacrament would be effectual even though the communicants were in different rooms, in different buildings, in different locations and provided their own bread and wine or unfermented grape juice. It would accomplish what our Lord intended when he instituted the sacrament. In the early church the congregation provided the bread and wine for the Lord’s Supper, bringing it from home. It was ordinary table bread and ordinary table wine. The bread was not made by nuns and pressed into thin wafers. It was bread bought at the local baker’s shop. The wine was not made by monks from grapes that they had grown in their own vineyards. It was bought from the local wine seller.
Such a Lord's Supper celebration is not private communion. Those who have logged into the ZOOM meeting can see and hear each other when they eat the bread and drink the cup. What they are doing is not a private act. Indeed it may be more open and public than kneeling down at a communion rail and taking a wafer from a priest's hand and eating it and taking a sip of wine from a cup held by a communion assistant while ignoring the other communicants kneeling or standing beside you.
