Lord's Supper as the central act of Christian worship?

[IAGladfelter]

Perhaps the main reason Communion seems to have less importance than the Sermon in most Protestant Churches / Ecclesial Communities is that they consider it to be only a memorial, the only benefir of which is receiving some sort of unspecified blessing or in the Reformed/Presbyterian Family of Churches, consider that since in their theology “Christ is in heaven, not here, and with his humanity “trumping” his divinity, he cannot be in more places than one at the same time so his presence is either “spiritual only” or that " the soul of the worthy (elect) communicant is in some unknown manner, briefly elevated to heaven to commune with Christ there.” This low view of the Eucharist is at the heart of the problem, working against the centrality of the Eucharist in those Ecclesial Communities.

Only among most (not all) Lutherans and the Anglo-Catholic (high church) party of the Episcopal / Anglican Churches is there a belief in the real, phsycal presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the consecrated elements. Even among those Churches, the Sacrament of the Altar is, at best, only considered to be “generally” necessary for salvation with the emphasis on the word, “general.”

During my som3e 37 years as an organist for Lutheran and Episcopal Churches, I found that the Eucharist is now central in the worship of those Church Traditions, a depressing majority of the parishioners to be, in effect, Zwinglians, who did not believe in the Real Presence - that the bread remained bread and the wine remained wine. T

Blessings,
Irl

P.S. For the record, I and my Church are firm believers in Transubstantiation as explained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Blessings,
Irl

 

[Nominefili]

P.S. For the record, I and my Church are firm believers in Transubstantiation as explained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Interesting. Which parts of the Book of Concord does the ALCC subscribe to?

 

[IAGladfelter]

Interesting. Which parts of the Book of Concord does the ALCC subscribe to?

This is a fair question. The Anglo-Lutheran Catholic Church (ALCC) does not subscribe to the “Formula of Concord” (the last document in the Book of Concord) at all, though it respects it as a historic Document (only.).

As for the rest of the Book of Concord, and ALCC accepts those portions of the individual documents which are in full agreement with the Sacred Magisterium and the Ordinary Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church and completely rejects unequivocally those portions of the individual documents which are not in full agreement with the Sacred Magisterium and the Ordinary Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church.