Churches should win awards for their innovation during COVID, as they created new ways to be church together while apart. Pastors responded to the needs of the community in a time when caring for community meant being separated from one another.
Technology helped facilitate the transition, moving much of weekly services and activities online. However, technology could not help with the more tangible portions of worship.
“Online can do a lot that approximates worship. Online, we can hear sermons and music, we can see liturgical colors and sacred signs. But we can’t taste Communion through a screen. We can’t give and receive with one another,” says Eric Howell, senior pastor of Dayspring Baptist Church in Waco, Texas.
Laura Ellis
Rituals like Communion required more thought during the pandemic. I remember the first time I was given one of those perfectly packaged plastic Communion sets in the shape of a chalice. Peel back the bottom for a pellet of bread. Flip over and peel back the top for a sip of juice.
These sets became wildly popular in the early days of the pandemic. They were politely passed down the pews in churches that still met in person. They were mailed to the homes of congregants for churches meeting virtually.
Sometimes these kits were even handed through car windows in a parking lot for a “drive-thru” Communion. I could imagine the advertisement: “It’s fast. It’s easy. It’s Communion on the go!”
To me, this had the same level of veneration as the satirical marketing for a “God in a box” product.
And yet, I understand churches had to adapt in order to protect the physical safety of their congregants. This is a good thing. We all did the best we could to retain the reverence and rituals of Sunday morning.
However, I no longer understood the popularity of Communion kits as time went by and we learned more about the science of this disease, namely, that it wasn’t spread through physical contact. For many churches and gatherings, these kits became a one and done solution to COVID. Science be damned.
“The COVID health precautions that lingered the longest in congregations seem to be the ones that made worship not safer, but more convenient.”
Some churches have long since abandoned pesky things like masks and social distancing but are still using the kits today. Interestingly, the COVID health precautions that lingered the longest in congregations seem to be the ones that made worship not safer, but more convenient — dare I say, quicker.
I went to an event last summer where we spent all day inside and hardly anyone wore a mask, but for some reason these plastic-wrapped kits were passed around during Communion time. It felt as though we were trying to get through the Communion portion of the service as quickly and efficiently as possible — as if the sign of a successful Communion was a short one. Although we were congregated in person, it felt about as sacred as a drive-thru. I was sure the pastor was about to say, “It’s fast. It’s easy. It’s Communion on the go!”
These kits that once were a creative solution to a serious concern for congregants’ health now feel like a further atomization of the community of Christ. Instead of one loaf and one cup taken as one community, we take individual portions of the meal in our own individual seats.
Baptists tend to understand faith on personal terms rather than communal ones, and I fear in the wake of the isolation of the pandemic, we are stuck in an individualized and convenient perspective on faith. One of the best ways to emphasize a more collective and authentic faith is through a recentering of Communion in Baptist services.
Dayspring Baptist Church made the decision to celebrate weekly Communion during Lent in 2020. Three Sundays later, COVID forced the congregation to meet online. When restrictions lifted, Pastor Howell worried about congregants’ responses to returning to weekly Communion.
“When we came back in person from COVID, Communion embodied the grace of being together in worship.”
“I’ve heard people worry that if you celebrate it too often it won’t be ‘special.’ What I discovered is that the congregation hungered for Communion in our worship,” he said. “When we came back in person from COVID, Communion embodied the grace of being together in worship. The incarnation took on added meaning.”
Many people are concerned with how the pandemic stripped us of embodied gathering in community with one another for corporate worship. It’s a complicated topic that must include a nuanced view outside of ableism, recognizing that virtual services opened up worship for people with disabilities in ways the church never has done before.
And yet, we all can agree something is lost when we cannot be physically present with one another. What is the incarnation but a radical statement that our physicality matters? That there is significance being in bodily presence with one another? That there is power and salvation in the physical body of Christ? That being around the body of Christ and being in physical proximity to others is in itself sacred?
Communion, as a representation of the physical body of Christ, is at its heart about embodiment — the embodiment of Christ and the embodiment of the church as the “body of Christ” in the world as we take the elements in community with one another.
Eric Howell
“Importantly, for Baptists, Communion helps reconnect our worship with the physicality of our bodies and the world, as we pray that God would make bread the sign of Christ’s body for and in us and be known to us in its ritual sharing,” Howell said.
Reflecting on Jesus’ commandment to “do this in remembrance of me,” theologian William Cavanaugh writes, “If we understand this command properly, the Eucharist is much more than a ritual repetition of the past. It is rather a literal re-membering of Christ’s body, a knitting together of the body of Christ.”
After months of being disembodied and separated, Communion has the power to reunite us to the physical community of one another and to the embodiment of incarnation.
Beyond our remembering and re-membering, Communion also can contribute to the healing of our collective trauma over the past three years.
In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk writes that trauma is not just an event of the past, but an experience we continue to live through in our minds and carry with us in our bodies. As a result, our bodies often pay the toll of traumatic experiences.
There is a powerful metaphor in the way Communion represents the body and blood of Jesus that was broken and is now being broken again. There also is power in the idea that through Communion, the body of Christ is contributing to healing the trauma in our bodies — that by being in the presence of the body of Christ and by being in the physical presence of a community, we are healing from our collective trauma.
The meaning of Communion contains a multitude of opportunities to rediscover evolving interpretations in every season. But like other aspects of worship in the wake of the pandemic, I fear we’ve become complacent with viewing Communion as an afterthought. Rituals can quickly lose meaning when they are not practiced habitually.
Now is the perfect time to renew our reverence of the holy meal.
It is easiest to “do this in remembrance of me” with Good Friday lingering so closely in the rearview mirror. With the memory of Easter fresh in our minds, this is the season to abandon our convenient and individualized plastic kit kind of faith and dig into the recentering of Communion and the reimagining of the way it could affect the life of our communities.
“I would encourage the recentering of the sacred ritual of celebrating Communion regularly, even weekly, as Christians gather for worship,” Howell said. “Restore the pattern of word and table. Communion is the Christ-given sign of embodied community with one another, an encounter of divine mystery through sharing bread and cup.”
Laura Ellis serves as project manager for Baptist Women in Ministry. She is a former Clemons Fellow with BNG and earned a master of divinity degree from Boston University School of Theology. She lives in Waco, Texas.