Good point.
As a former JW myself, I can assure you that the wine doesn’t go to waste. Typically, an elder takes it home and possibly shares it with the other elders in an after-the-meeting gathering. The bread is usually just matzos, so those might get tossed.
At least you didn’t ask how often you have to attend to get your own whore…
I would go back to church if I could find one that featured whores riding tigers. I am pretty sure I am not the only one.
There are some Christian groups that explicitly don’t do communion (Salvation Army as mentioned above, Quakers)
As a life long Southern Baptist, I find this interesting.
Our church typically refers to is it the Lord’s Supper or Communion.
We have it planned in the by laws of the church to do it once a quarter (we can do it more often if desired). We do it at Easter and Christmas, but those fit into two of the 4 times a year.
Typically we have a regular service and the Lord’s Supper is done at the end of the service.
Our pastor does tell everyone to make sure they have confessed their sins to God so they are prepared to partake in Communion.
We do not believe that the grape juice or the unleavened bread become anything special, it is done in remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice.
And our pastor typically closes with something like “As oft as you do this, remember Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection until He comes.”
Jeffery
JWs actually do use real wine in their Memorial service. It has to be a plain red wine, unspiced, like Kosher wine. But still real wine, not grape juice. It hardly matters though, since in most congregations, nobody drinks any (except, as I mentioned in a previous post, the elders at home after the meeting).
Well I went to a Episcopal service today that didn’t have communion. (I went to an “evening prayer” service, the Sunday morning services do have weekly communion.) The thing that instantly struck me was it lasted only a half hour; not only did they have no eucharist, but they had a two sentence bible passage and no sermon either. Almost all the time was taken up with songs or chanted prayers. I talked with the rector after the service and he noted a lot of Episcopal churches don’t do the evening service anymore, and he also mentioned they sometimes have a longer evening service that includes a sermon.
I am born and raised United Church of Canada, which is a 90+ year old denomination created with the amalgamation of Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational churches. My understanding is it is similar to the United Church of Christ in the USA.
When I was growing up our church did communion on the first Sunday of every month, with a few changes for special chuch occasions like Pentacost and other days. This wasn’t a hard and fast rule, I know because our youth group had a trivia contest and I answered that correctly. We had a new minister at the time and his kids took exception to getting that question wrong. Their previous church had a different system.
We do Welch’s grape juice and bread. It’s symbolic. It’s been done by intinction for maybe 25 years now but we used to do little tiny glasses being passed to each person in the congregation.
My grandmother was horrified when intonation started. She didn’t like us parading around the church “like a bunch of Catholics”(!). Ha. Meanwhile my lapsed Catholic boyfriend had horrors everytime he sees communion in our church. His inner “Good Catholic Alterboy” doesn’t like the casual handling of the bread and everyone drinking the wine/grape juice disturbs him to no end. (He doesn’t take Mass if we are at a Catholic church either. Except at his Dad’s funeral. )
A friend of mine told me that the reason he became an altar boy when he was a kid was because the one priest let all the altar boys finish the left over communion wine.
And my mother said back in the day when you used to have to do the long fast, she’d often faint in church.
I think Benny put in a few changes. Because I noticed that the last time I went to church and having been a Catholic since birth, it was very disconcerting not to be able to follow along automatically anymore.
And even then, it falls under “wherever two of you meet in My name…”
It sounds like you participated in a [Daily Evening Prayer](http://www.bookofcommonprayer.net/evening_prayerII.php?do_yearNo=2&do_id=5&do_dow=1&today=Sunday, June 05, 2016) service. Note that link specifically gives you the readings and collects for yesterday (June 5 2016) in Rite II, the modern language version. I’m not a liturgical expert but I don’t believe the order of service for Evening Prayer includes a sermon. The service may or may not be followed by a celebration of Eucharist; but by itself it is fairly short. What you normally get on Sunday morning is the service of Holy Eucharist.
For anyone interested in what you will hear in any random Episcopal church on any given Sunday (or at an Episcopal wedding, funeral, ordination, etc.), this is a great (but unofficial) online version of the Book of Common Prayer (1972) with the Revised Common Lectionary:
http://www.bookofcommonprayer.net/contents.php
Is this same as Evensong?
Yeah, even the Catholics have such a thing as services without the Eucharist. They’re not very common, but they are an option (most often, at a baptism, wedding, or other big event where it’s expected that the majority attending will not be Catholic).