Being a Christian is all about Communion

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In another thread I brought up this fact that being a Christian is all about Communion. We are a Church because we are gathered in communion with one another and our bishop and collectively are in communion with Christ.

Of course there are some push-back by non-Ancient Christians who do not have the Eucharist as part of their Christian life (let us leave aside discussions about validity for now and assume for the sake of discussion that all churches that claim to have the Eucharist do so validly).

So what do each of us think (anyone is invited to chime in) about this? Why do you think you have a church/community/congregation/etc.? What is the point of gathering about if not for communion with Christ and with one another?
 
ConstantineTG said:
In another thread I brought up this fact that being a Christian is all about Communion. We are a Church because we are gathered in communion with one another and our bishop and collectively are in communion with Christ.

Of course there are some push-back by non-Ancient Christians who do not have the Eucharist as part of their Christian life (let us leave aside discussions about validity for now and assume for the sake of discussion that all churches that claim to have the Eucharist do so validly).

So what do each of us think (anyone is invited to chime in) about this? Why do you think you have a church/community/congregation/etc.? What is the point of gathering about if not for communion with Christ and with one another?
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To get donuts after Services…:dancing:
 
Nicea325 said:
To get donuts after Services…:dancing:
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:rotfl:

I have heard Southern Baptists speak of fried chicken at social gatherings with similar wonderment (as though the gathering would be invalid without it).
 
So what do each of us think (anyone is invited to chime in) about this?
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ConstantineTG,

Yes, Christianity is all about being in a complete communion with God and neighbor. All Christians are called towards a bond of peace and charity with God and with one another.

In fact, all of creation (the material and the spiritual) is called to be in communion with the Creator.

God bless,

Rony
 
ConstantineTG said:
That is not a bad reason ;)😃
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It’s actually a good reason.
One parish I attend does the donuts thing. Friendly people, good coffee; a sense of community with our brothers and sisters in Christ that extends, I feel, a bit beyond and in addition to the service itself. And then there’ll be the rummage sale!!
The other parish, well, they tend to take off either after the service communion or as the last hymn is starting…No getting to know our brothers and sisters there. And departing that way, I think, is a tad rude. And they do not do things like rummage sales…They don’t do much period.
 
cheezey said:
It’s actually a good reason.
One parish I attend does the donuts thing. Friendly people, good coffee; a sense of community with our brothers and sisters in Christ that extends, I feel, a bit beyond and in addition to the service itself. And then there’ll be the rummage sale!!
The other parish, well, they tend to take off either after the service communion or as the last hymn is starting…No getting to know our brothers and sisters there. And departing that way, I think, is a tad rude. And they do not do things like rummage sales…They don’t do much period.
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Oh it is very important. We have lunch every Sunday and everybody just brings whatever. It’s not organized, so some Sundays we have a lot of food, while others there’s not much to eat. But the point is to have everybody just share a meal. Eating is such an important thing in the human experience, which is why Christ used a meal to share His very being with us. It is only today that people have meals alone, whether they drive thru for fast food or just sit in a corner away from everyone else. In the past, meals were gatherings for the entire family. And by family I mean extended family. Meals as gatherings is very important, and it plays a large part in the symbolism of the Eucharist.
 
ConstantineTG said:
What is the point of gathering about if not for communion with Christ and with one another?
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To offer God the worship He is owed. Communion is certainly an important part of it, but I would hesitate to say we gather solely for communion - that could lead to a flattened out sense of the liturgy, an overemphasis of the horizontal over the vertical dimension. I suppose you could make a case for worship being communion with the Trinity (not just Christ), but worship would seem to involve other dimensions than just communion.
 
PietroPaolo said:
To offer God the worship He is owed. Communion is certainly an important part of it, but I would hesitate to say we gather solely for communion - that could lead to a flattened out sense of the liturgy, an overemphasis of the horizontal over the vertical dimension. I suppose you could make a case for worship being communion with the Trinity (not just Christ), but worship would seem to involve other dimensions than just communion.
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What else? Worship is supposed to bring us into communion. Why do you think God wants us to act a certain way for worship? Is it because it pleases Him that we do as we are told? Or that He is amused by our actions? I find it hard to believe that a perfect, infinite being would even want anything from us. But God is love, and so our act of worship should be something that brings us into the love of God.

This is not something we owe to God. For what? What is there for us to give to God given that God is infinite and all powerful? God doesn’t need anything from us, but worship simply brings us into communion with God because God is love. God does not need us, we need Him.
 
The understanding of the OP works for me, too. We gather together, commune from the same cup, and after liturgy, we have the agape meal, which is symbolic of the communion of Christ as well. It’s a good way to be.
 
Is it not a matter of fellowship as we are instructed?

The logic of the meetings was evident for Old testament time…place for the ‘sacred’ fire in the inner sanctum, when many currencies- the ‘universal’ fines of food (offered to God first to check the entrails for infestations and to make sure the ‘grill’ was sterilized), with enemies often about and predatory creatures, a way to ensure if neighbors, friends, allies, those sharing like beliefs were safe, and to keep the scuttlebutt going about the region and a venue to keep them safe economically as well.

It is also a celebration stemming from Old Testament time…a victory…we have the word of God for all to hear…a sharing of that joy.

The addition of the Eucharist, the sharing of the Body and Blood of Christ from his being human, hence the blood, sweat, and tears of all the generations, yet promulgated into the spiritual with God was an additional necessity of this sociological/anthropological necessity… Hey what do you do on your day off? Beats rape, pillage, and plunder…

But those Baptists…if the meal has grace said over it in Jesus’ name which they most certainly would do, is this not a type of Eucharistic celebration?

But you have a cream puff or chocolate iced bavarian cream in the donuts? Suisse mocha with sweetener? LOL
 
ConstantineTG said:
What else? Worship is supposed to bring us into communion. Why do you think God wants us to act a certain way for worship? Is it because it pleases Him that we do as we are told? Or that He is amused by our actions? I find it hard to believe that a perfect, infinite being would even want anything from us. But God is love, and so our act of worship should be something that brings us into the love of God.

This is not something we owe to God. For what? What is there for us to give to God given that God is infinite and all powerful? God doesn’t need anything from us, but worship simply brings us into communion with God because God is love. God does not need us, we need Him.
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I was thinking along the lines of CCC 2185: (emphasis added)

On Sundays and other holy days of obligation, the faithful are to refrain from engaging in work or activities that hinder the worship owed to God, the joy proper to the Lord’s Day, the performance of the works of mercy, and the appropriate relaxation of mind and body.Family needs or important social service can legitimately excuse from the obligation of Sunday rest. The faithful should see to it that legitimate excuses do not lead to habits prejudicial to religion, family life, and health.

Focusing exclusively on communion would seem to make worship all about ‘us’ while it should be all about Him. I believe St. Thomas speaks about the worship owed to God in the Summa, but the exact place escapes me at the moment.
 
I guess the paradigm shifting moment for me was Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s book, For the Life of the World, where he did a short discourse on the importance of a meal to man that transcends culture and time. And this is why God gave himself to us in the form of food, so that without changing our basic understanding of and our behavior around meals, we understand through its symbolism of how God shares with us.

Here’s some excerpts:
Man is a hungry being. But he is hungry for God. Behind all the hunger of our life is God. All desire is finally a desire for Him. To be sure, man is not the only hungry being. All that exists lives by “eating.” The whole creation depends on food. But the unique position of man in the universe is that he alone is to bless God for the food and the life he receives from Him. He alone is to respond to God’s blessing with his blessing.
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He does not realize that to eat can be to receive life from God in more than its physical sense. He forgets that the world, its air or its food cannot by themselves bring life, but only as they are received and accepted for God’s sake, in God and as bearers of the divine gift of life.
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in this eucharistic offering in Christ of all things to the One to whom they belong and in whom alone they really exist, this movement of ascension has reached its end. We are at the paschal table of the Kingdom. What we have offered—our food, our life, ourselves, and the whole world—we offered in Christ and as Christ because He Himself has assumed our life and is our life. And now all this is given back to us as the gift of new life, and therefore—necessarily—as food.
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since God has created the world as food for us and has given us food as means of communion with Him, of life in Him, the new food of the new life which we receive from God in His Kingdom is Christ Himself. He is our bread—because from the very beginning all our hunger was a hunger for Him and all our bread was but a symbol of Him, a symbol that had to become reality.
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Abbigaelann said:
Is it not a matter of fellowship as we are instructed?
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Nothing God does is accidental, everything is deliberate and symbolic. So our gathering isn’t just merely an instruction because God arbitrarily decided is would be cool if people come together. But being together with one mind and one heart focused on God is the foretaste of the Kingdom where we all hope to enter.
 
Communion with Christ (and therefore God himself) is the sole purpose of church. Ultimately we hope to see this Communion turn into Theosis.

Services where the Eucharist is not served, and other similar gatherings (bible studies, etc) serve the subsidiary purpose of preparing us for communion.

Other activities which the church carries out, such as community building, and charity similarly helps us, not necessarily preparing for communion, but helping us to follow the teachings of the church (which of course do help us prepare ourselves for communion).

Let us say we have a large parish, active in the community, basically the ideal Christian parish. Let us set our perfect parish into decline. As it loses membership it is forced to cut back its activities. Charitable giving starts to go down, it drops off bible studies, community outreach. Eventually it is just a parish which meets on Sunday for communion, nothing more. But it is still a church. It declines some more. Eventually it is only three people and a priest every three weeks, but it is still a church. It does nothing else, just communion. It serves its base purpose. Only when it ceases to have communion does it cease to be a church. It has abandoned its primary purpose.

Everything single thing the church does should in some way lead back to Communion.

Of course, the donuts are a close second.
 
ConstantineTG said:
In another thread I brought up this fact that being a Christian is all about Communion. We are a Church because we are gathered in communion with one another and our bishop and collectively are in communion with Christ.

Of course there are some push-back by non-Ancient Christians who do not have the Eucharist as part of their Christian life (let us leave aside discussions about validity for now and assume for the sake of discussion that all churches that claim to have the Eucharist do so validly).

So what do each of us think (anyone is invited to chime in) about this? Why do you think you have a church/community/congregation/etc.? What is the point of gathering about if not for communion with Christ and with one another?
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In the Lutheran tradition, we speak of the Church as the congregation of saints (believers), where the word is preached and the sacraments administered. This speaks strongly to the point that Christianity is a communion. We are in communion not only with those around us, but with all Christians in all places and all times, in the past and in the future, in the Church Militant, and the Church Triumphant. And we are most closely linked together in that way by the sacrament He Himself instituted on the nightt of His betrayal. We kneel, genuflect, stand and receive His body and His blood for the remission of sins, and we do it together, even if in different parishes, with different names on the front sign.

Jon
 
dzheremi said:
The understanding of the OP works for me, too. We gather together, commune from the same cup, and after liturgy, we have the agape meal, which is symbolic of the communion of Christ as well. It’s a good way to be.
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My church is small enough that we do things the same way. 🙂 Unfortunately I’m not yet able to partake in communion, but I still feel a sense of belonging there far more so than at any other parish I’ve attended.
 
Trebor135 said:
My church is small enough that we do things the same way. 🙂 Unfortunately I’m not yet able to partake in communion, but I still feel a sense of belonging there far more so than at any other parish I’ve attended.
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When are you going to be chrismated? Mine will be on All Saints Sunday.
 
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