What We Believe About Communion

Communion (or Eucharist, or the Lord’s Table) is one of only two things Jesus explicitly commanded His church to keep doing (baptism being the other), and it is the one moment in our whole service where He attached a promise of His presence to something real.

So this is our position, written out plainly, along with the reasoning underneath it. You do not have to agree with every line of it to belong. But you should know what your church actually teaches, and you should be able to see why.

Communion is remembrance

This is the part most of us already know. Jesus said “do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). The bread is broken as His body was broken, and the cup is poured out as His blood was poured out.

What most of us have never been told is that the word Jesus used is far bigger than the word we hear. In English, remembering is something that happens inside your head: you call a fact to mind and hold it there for a moment. The word in the text is anamnesis, and it’s from the Passover table, where remembering never meant thinking about an old event from a safe distance. It meant ‘standing inside it’. God says to a generation born long after the Exodus, “your eyes saw what I did in Egypt” (Josh 24:7). The Passover liturgy Jewish families still use says it outright: each person is to see himself as though he personally came out of Egypt.

So when Jesus puts bread in your hands and says remember, He is not asking you to picture Calvary from a distance. He is telling you that what happened to Him happened for you, and that in eating this you are standing inside it. What your Saviour did is what you did, because you are in Him, and it was those in Him He came to rescue.

So, remembrance isn’t a small part. Everything else on this page is what this word “remembrance” actually contains.

Communion is not only a symbol

The common assumption across many Protestant churches is that Communion is purely symbolic, or simply a visual aid to help us concentrate on something that happened a long way away and a long time ago. That is a small view of Communion, and Scripture rules it out.

Paul’s word for participation is koinōnia, which means sharing, fellowship, having something genuinely in common. It is the word you would use for two people who actually share a life together, rather than the word you would use for looking at a photograph of someone who is not in the room.

Notice what Paul is doing with it, too. He is arguing the Corinthians out of eating at pagan temples, and the line he lands on is that “you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons” (1 Cor 10:21). That argument only works if something real is on offer at both tables. A memory creates no conflict of allegiance. Nobody has ever had to choose between two photographs.

Two other things back this up.

The first is that Jesus said “this is my body” (Matt 26:26) and did not say “this represents my body.” Christians have argued for five hundred years about how far to take that sentence, but the one thing you cannot get out of it is “it’s only a symbol.”

The second is that Paul says some of the Corinthians were weak, ill, and had died as a result of taking Communion in an unworthy manner (1 Cor 11:27-30). Whatever is going on in that passage, it is not describing the consequences of mishandling a metaphor. Something real is being handled at this table.

How is Christ present?

This is the question that split the Reformation, and we hold it relatively loosely. There are four historic answers, and they differ over the mode of Christ’s presence rather than over whether the meal matters.

We rule out the first and the last.

Transubstantiation fails because Scripture never describes a change of substance in the elements, and because Christ ascended bodily and remains bodily at the Father’s right hand. A human body is located in one place, and being locatable is part of what makes it a human body at all. The Catholic explanation also runs on Aristotle’s distinction between substance and accidents, which is a philosophical framework imported into the text rather than drawn out of it, and our faith does not need that scaffolding to stand up.

Bare memorialism fails for the reasons in the two sections above. It cannot account for koinōnia, it cannot account for 1 Corinthians 11, and most tellingly of all it cannot account for the word remembrance it takes as its own proof text. It is also the youngest of the four views by a long way: the argument has a traceable origin in the 1520s, Zwingli published it in 1525, and it was a minority position through the Reformation, taken up by none of the leading Reformed confessions.

Between the middle two we hold the difference loosely, and we do so deliberately. Both of them affirm the thing we actually care about, which is that Christ is really here, really giving Himself, and really feeding His church.

Note from Josh: exactly how Christ’s glorified body relates to a piece of supermarket cracker in Port Stephens on a Sunday morning is a mystery we leave as one from the stage.

The ancient story of the Table

Most of us learned about Communion starting in the upper room, which is understandable, but the meal is much older than that.

Eating in God’s presence is one of the oldest patterns in Scripture. Adam and Eve ate in the garden in unbroken fellowship with God, so every meal they had was a meal in His presence. Sin ended that, and much of the rest of the Bible is God working to get His people back to the table.

Just watch the story. In Exodus 24 the elders of Israel go up the mountain, and Moses records that they saw God, and they ate and drank. Israel is later commanded to bring a tithe of grain and wine and oil to the place where God causes His name to dwell, and to eat it there before Him and rejoice (Deut 14:23, 26). These are meals eaten in the presence of God, and they are a partial restoration of what was lost in Eden, though they still carry the reminder that sin has not yet been dealt with.

Then Jesus sits down with His disciples, takes the bread, and tells them the debt is about to be settled in His own body. And at that same meal He says this:

So the table we gather around on a Sunday sits in the middle of a very long story. It reaches back to a garden where people ate with God without shame, and it reaches forward to the marriage supper of the Lamb where they will do it again. Every Communion is a meal eaten between those two points, which is why it is both a memorial and an appetiser.

What Communion does in us

Three things follow from all of that, and they are the ones most often missed.

1. It makes us one: Paul’s conclusion in 1 Corinthians 10:17 is that the one loaf makes us one body. Communion is the sacrament of union, joining us to Christ and, in the same movement, to each other. That matters in a church where a person can attend for two years without anyone learning their name.
2. It preaches: “As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26). Every time we take it we are announcing the gospel both to ourselves and to anyone in the room who has not yet believed it. Communion is a moment where somebody might genuinely be saved, not by eating, but by finally hearing what the eating announces.
3. It points forward: The meal looks ahead as well as back, for the reasons in the section above. We are eating in the gap between the garden and the wedding.

Who the table is for

Communion is for those who belong to Christ. It is the sacrament of union, and someone who is not united to Christ has nothing yet to participate in, so this is a description of what the meal is rather than an act of gatekeeping.

We’re not going to interrogate anybody or police the room. We let people answer it for themselves, which is why you will hear something close to this on a Sunday morning:

If you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord, we invite you to receive Communion with us this morning.

Two questions come up often enough to answer here.

Baptism. The New Testament order is belief, then baptism, then the breaking of bread, and the church has followed it almost everywhere since. We hold that as the normal and expected order but we aren’t going to police it.

Children. Anyone who trusts Christ is welcome, and nobody has to be able to explain how Communion works before receiving it, because none of us can. Self-examination is not a test of intelligence. If you are a parent weighing this up for your child, come and talk to us. That decision sits with you, your child and God, and we would rather help you think it through than hand you a rule.

How we are to approach the table

1 Corinthians 11:27-30, the passage where some of the Corinthians become ill and a few of them die after taking Communion, is the most misused text in the whole doctrine. It frightens people, so it is worth being clear.

Paul’s warning is real, but notice what the “unworthy manner” actually was in Corinth. If you read the whole chapter, the church was dividing along class lines, with wealthier believers eating and drinking their fill while poorer ones went hungry and some got drunk (11:17-22). They were excluding their own brothers and sisters from the meal that was supposed to make them one. That is the sin Paul is addressing, and “failing to discern the body” in verse 29 means failing to recognise the church as Christ’s body while claiming to receive Christ’s body.

So when Paul tells us to examine ourselves, he is not asking whether we have been good enough this week. He is asking whether we are coming in faith, in repentance, and at peace with the people around us.

The tone Paul himself lands on is this: “if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged” (11:31). Self-examination is how we avoid the warning rather than being the trap hidden inside it.

For those serving Communion

If you have been asked to lead us in Communion, the single most useful thing you can do is work from the above content rather than from memory of how you’ve seen it done. Drift happens when we’re all improvising from half-remembered lines.

What to make sure you say

You will not fit all of the above into five minutes, and you shouldn’t try. Pick one focus and let it carry the message.

What should be present every single time is that Christ is really present here. That is the thing most easily lost to “here we go again” type familiarisation. Make it a moment of worship.

Beyond that, pick a primary passage of Scripture that is relevant, or even simply take an idea from the above content or from Pastor Josh’s further research on communion.

For the invitation, use the wording under the above ‘Who the table is for’ section more or less as it stands. It does three jobs at once: it tells believers they are welcome, it tells anyone who is not yet a Christian that this particular thing is not for them without shaming them publicly, and it preaches Romans 10:9 in saying it. Don’t focus too much on exclusions.

One practical thing, if you can manage it: break a single visible loaf in front of the room before the trays go out. Paul’s whole argument in 1 Corinthians 10:17 is that the one loaf is what makes many people one body, and a tray of sealed individual portions works quietly against that. Breaking one loaf where everybody can see it costs nothing and recovers most of the symbol.

What not to say

Ok, none of these will get you in trouble, but they do undercut what we are trying to teach, and they accumulate over a year of Sundays.

• “This is just a symbol” or “it’s only a cracker and some juice”: We say close to the opposite. You can acknowledge the obvious physical reality, but the emphasis should be on how “Christ meets us in them.”
• “This represents the body of Christ”: Prefer Scripture’s own words, which are “this is my body.” If you want something softer, “this bread signifies the body of Christ, and His real presence meets us here” covers both.
• “If there’s unconfessed sin in your life, don’t take it”: See the warning under ‘How we are to approach the table’ above. This is the one that does actual damage.
• “Close your eyes, it’s just you and Jesus”: This is the standard line and it points people in exactly the wrong direction. Remembrance means stepping into a story alongside a people, not going inward to audit your week, and this is the meal that makes us one body. Eyes open is fine. Let them see the room they are being joined to.
• Treating it as a break in the service: Phrases like “before we get into the message” or “just quickly” tell the congregation this is the ad break. Try not to devalue this moment.
• Rushing the elements: don’t be scared of silence. Let people examine themselves. Silence from the front is never as long as it feels, I promise.

Sample Communion message

As we gather for Communion, let’s pause to reflect on its meaning.

1 Corinthians 11:23-25 (ESV)
23. …The Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread,
24. and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
25. In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

This is not an empty ritual. Instead, Christ says “this IS my body”. It’s not that what we hold in our hands stops being bread and becomes the literal body of Christ. That’s not what’s happening here. The bread stays bread. The cup stays juice.

On the other hand, this is not just a memory exercise either. When Scripture says remember, it never means thinking about something from a safe distance. It means standing inside it. Paul explains it like this:

1 Corinthians 10:16-17 (ESV)
16. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?
17. Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.

Paul calls this a participation. As in, a real sharing in Christ. By His Spirit, the risen Christ meets us here and unites us to Himself afresh. As we eat and drink in faith, we are truly fed. Not by the physical bread, but by Christ Himself.

He is truly present when we take the bread & cup by faith.

So this is not just a symbol we perform out of duty. Rather, it’s a means of grace. It’s a place where, by His Spirit, Christ draws us near and sustains us afresh.

Take a moment to examine your heart. We come before Him in this moment with reverence, repentance, and gratitude. Lay your sin and weakness before Him, trusting His grace is sufficient.

Let’s pray:

Lord, we thank You for Your body, broken for us. We thank You for Your blood, poured out for the new covenant. As we eat this bread and drink this cup, by Your Spirit, unite us to You and to one another. Remind us of the reality to which this bread and cup point: your finished work on the cross. Renew Your presence among us now.

As we eat and drink, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes. Not because He is absent, but because by His Spirit, He is truly present with His people even now. Amen.