ON 24 JANUARY 1958, a Church Times leader was in celebratory mode. “The Parish Communion has come to stay,” it announced. “There is no doubt about it.” From small beginnings in the 1920s, it had “caught on in every quarter of the Church”, with holy communion put “into its own proper position as the Lord’s own Service on the Lord’s own Day. . . [It] has brought countless people, high and low, rich and poor, face to face with the duty they owe to God, and with the love he has bestowed upon them.”
For worshippers today, a parish church holding a celebration of the eucharist as its main Sunday service may seem entirely typical. But, in the latter half of the 20th century, its ascent was remarkable. The scheduling of such a service at 9 a.m. on a Sunday would have “startled the Churchmen of a generation of two ago”, Archbishop Michael Ramsey observed (Church Times, 4 July 1958).
But, while it may no longer startle us, the primacy of the parish communion is by no means a foregone conclusion in the Church of England. Much has changed since the decades in which warnings could be heard that the Parish Communion Movement (PCM) had “virtually swept all before it” (Comment, 22 January 1988). In part, this is a question of capacity. A combination of falling attendance, with increasingly sparse congregations spread across thousands of buildings, financial deficits, and a thinly spread clergy have prompted many dioceses to engage in large-scale restructuring. Increasingly, fewer clergy are responsible for the oversight of large areas, and lay people are taking on increased responsibility for the leadership of churches.
In a Church in which sacramental ministry is reserved for the ordained, this has far-reaching consequences. This is not, in fact, a new concern. Just a year before the Church Times ran its triumphant leader, it was expressing concern that the success of the PCM might be jeopardised by insufficient numbers of clergy. In 1962, it reported on the case of a priest who had had to administer communion “single-handed” to 120 communicants, including 50 teenagers.
Erik Starkie The Revd Arwen Folkes presides in St Mary’s, Eastbourne
Perhaps what has changed is the universality of regard for the eucharist. The PCM was striking in its reach, successful “in parishes labelled Evangelical quite as much as in those which are definitely Catholic, in circles called radical quite as much as in those content to be in the middle of the Via Media” (another CT leader, 3 February 1978).
Today, the language emerging from some of the people leading dioceses through change evinces a different degree of attachment. Among the “Frequently Asked Questions” answered in one diocesan document — designed to accompany extensive reorganisation — was “What will happen if we want Eucharistic services every week?” The bishops had agreed to communion by extension, the document explained. “So for those people who benefit from this spiritual food, it will be more freely available than at present in most parishes.”
The Bishop of Sheffield, Dr Pete Wilcox, acknowledges that a fall in the number of stipendiary incumbents has affected the diocese’s capacity to offer a celebration of the eucharist in the “golden window” between 9.30 and 11.30 a.m. on a Sunday. “If the time is vital, we have had to encourage worshippers to be flexible about the place,” he says. “If the place is vital, we have had to encourage worshippers to be flexible about the time. But this is not led by our ecclesiology. It is a reluctant response to capacity. If more clergy were available . . . we would not intentionally reduce the availability of holy communion.”
A recent report, New Things, produced by the Centre for Church Planting Theology and Research, at Cranmer Hall, suggested that dioceses had jettisoned the use of the word “church” to describe gatherings established in their parishes (News, 16 August 2024). Among its findings was that it would be “very hard” for those of a more Catholic tradition to engage with this movement. “Put simply, if a church is the gathering of those around the word, and sacraments as administered by a priest and according to the authorised forms, then ‘new worshipping community’ or ‘new Christian community’ will always be inherently weak as a descriptor.”
For Dr Wilcox, clarity is vital. A “new thing” may be a “missional activity, designed to create a bridge” (a toddler group, for example) or a “new primary place of belonging as church”. In the latter, he says, “we would expect the activity to be moving very intentionally towards the celebration of the sacraments, as the people of God are gathered by baptism and communion, with the preaching of the word.”
CARE in nomenclature — the importance of not “misnaming” things — is important for the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, the Revd Dr Andrew Davison, whose books include Why Sacraments? (Books, 3 January 2014). “The Thirty-Nine Articles talk about the Church in terms of where the word of God is preached and where the sacraments are administered and both of those things are very important,” Professor Davison says. “If what you are doing is gathering people in your house and praying together and reading the Bible together and evangelising, that’s great; let’s just not call it a local church; let’s call that a house group.”
He has concerns, too, about ensuring that an increased emphasis on lay leadership coheres with Anglican ecclesiology. Traditionally, he says, the various strands of leadership — teaching, sacramental presidency, administration, and pastoral care — were regarded as threads to be held together. “I’m all for finding lay people who have the right gift and calling, and equipping them to teach, pastor, administer; but why not also have the authority to administer the sacraments? Why are we not ordaining them?”
When it comes to questions about the eucharist, he draws on history and canon law to draw distinctions between the expectations that adhere to attending, receiving, and holding: “No Christian is under obligation to receive communion every week. Historically, people didn’t receive communion often. . . Infrequent communion doesn’t necessarily mean taking it lightly — in fact, quite often, say, in the Presbyterian churches, it is taken very seriously indeed, and for that reason you have to prepare yourself.”
But, while nobody is under an obligation, “any given person might have a good reason to want to receive,” he says. “They might be sick. They may want to attend because it’s very important for them as a matter of prayer and uniting their prayers to the sacrifice of Christ.” This doesn’t mean that the eucharist must be the “main service” on a Sunday, he says, but the Canons — which state that it shall be celebrated in at least one church in each benefice on all Sundays — must be obeyed. Frequency of attending and receiving holy communion is a “matter of piety”, he concludes, “as long as we bear in mind the guidance in the Canons”.
WHILE the frequency of receiving holy communion has varied across the centuries, the centrality of the eucharist to the life of the Church was evident from the very beginning. In his Penguin book on the Early Church, Professor Owen Chadwick observed that, for the first Christians, the eucharist was “so deeply felt to be the essential expression of membership of the society that fragments of the broken bread were taken round to any who were absent through illness or imprisonment”. Although attending the service meant risking one’s life or liberty, “all Christians regarded it as an absolute obligation to be present each Sunday if it was in their power.” Only the baptised were admitted, and a “serious moral fault” entailed exclusion, either permanently or for a time.
JASMINEGIVNANDr Wilcox presides at the chrism mass this year, at Sheffield Cathedral
In Going to Church in Medieval England (Books, 1 October 2021), Professor Nicholas Orme records that the mass was “the service of greatest importance and with the strongest appeal to lay people”. A parish priest was expected to celebrate mass on Sundays and festivals, but “popular opinion ran strongly in favour of daily masses.” Lay people were expected to attend mass on Sundays and festival days, and its value was “constantly urged” by church authorities and devotional writers.
Normally, only the celebrant received communion, except on Easter morning, when everyone was required to do so. But, reflecting the doctrine of transubstantiation, great emphasis was placed on the importance of viewing and venerating the elements. After the Reformation, one writer scorned the way in which lay people had “run from altar to altar . . . peeing here and touting there”. Those who had heard the bell, rung at the elevation of the Host, in their fields or homes, had been expected to genuflect.
Such devotion had the effect of instilling in the laity a belief that receiving the sacrament required “significant preparation” by confession and fasting, Professor Orme writes. This persisted after the Reformation, when Archbishop Cranmer’s invitation to receive “failed to evoke a response”. The 1549 Prayer Book provided that, if the laity would not take part, no celebration should take place. Its 1552 successor required every adult parishioner to communicate at least three times a year.
To read the history of the Church of England is also to be reminded that its teaching on the eucharist has been the occasion of intense dispute, with the highest of stakes — in some cases a matter of life or death. The Test Act of 1673 required all those holding civil, military, or religious office to take an oath denying transubstantiation. Article XXVIII of the Thirty-Nine Articles states that transubstantiation is “repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions”.
ALL this suggests that our Reformation forebears would have been more than startled to read the agreed statement on eucharistic doctrine, published in 1971 by the Anglican-Roman Catholic Joint Preparatory Commission, and hailed by some as “the most important since the Reformation” (Church Times, 10 September 1971). “The elements are not mere signs,” it reads. “Christ’s body and blood become really present and are really given. But they are really present and given in order that, receiving them, believers may be united in communion with Christ the Lord.”
It was another occasion for an optimistic Church Times leader. “What makes this newly issued document so exciting and so important is that its authors have agreed, beyond all doubt, ambiguity or equivocation, on the Real Presence of Christ in his sacrament,” the last of that year opined (31 December 1971).
The paper’s Tractarian founders would have had cause to celebrate. Decades before the triumph of the Parish Communion Movement, the Tractarians — who emphasised the Real Presence and the eucharistic sacrifice — had worked to reintroduce weekly celebrations, and, in doing so, to return to the expectations that they deduced from Cranmer’s placing of the service in his Book of Common Prayer.
An insistence on the eucharistic fast, however, meant that the laity usually communicated at an early celebration. At sung, often choral, celebrations later in the morning, which tended to oust sung matins, usually only the celebrant and a few elderly people who were considered dispensed from fasting made their communions. These services were gradually abandoned by Catholic Anglicans in favour of the parish communion at which all parishioners, ideally, communicated together: a service usually held at, or soon after, 9 a.m., to facilitate fasting reception. Today’s after-service tea and coffee is sometimes the attenuated relic of what was once, at the height of the movement, a full “parish breakfast” with eggs and bacon.
The Tractarians’ introduction of an early-morning celebration had precedents. It had, for instance, already been introduced by the Evangelical Vicar of Islington, Daniel Wilson, as noted by the Presiding Bishop of the United Episcopal Church, the Most Revd Peter Robinson, in his blog. It is an illustration of the danger of characterisations of church tradition which repeat what Professor Chadwick describes in his book on the Reformation as a “crude antithesis”, in which conservatives regarded the mass as the “supreme and ultimate act of the Christian minister”, and the Reformers the preaching of the word.
“The idea that Protestantism takes the eucharist unseriously, or marginalises it, is a travesty,” Professor Davison says. He believes that, in some quarters, Protestantism needs to “reconnect with its own tradition”. Calvin and Luther would be “horrified” by the idea; Charles Simeon, who led the Low Church Evangelical movement in the 19th century, took holy communion “gloriously seriously”. Michael Ramsey once described the eucharistic sacrifice as “an intensely evangelical doctrine. Having nothing of our own to offer, trusting only in Christ’s one offering of himself, it is that which we represent to the Father as ourselves members of Christ’s body, accepted only in him.”
In Sheffield, Dr Wilcox observes that “Classical Anglicanism seeks an exact balance between the ministry of the sacrament of holy communion, and the ministry of the word. That is why, conventionally, we stand for both the Gospel reading and the eucharistic prayer. It isn’t either or, it is both and, if there is a difference, it is that the sermon requires more hard work by the priest, because in the celebration of the eucharist, so much work is done for us; so I do fear that many clergy do not invest as much in their ministry of preaching as they might. For me, it is a high priority.”
FOR an illustration of the centrality of the eucharist across traditions and Churches, Dr Davison recommends reading The Lord’s Supper (Chosen, 2023) by Dr Jonathan Black, a Pentecostal theologian currently serving as Principal of the Apostolic Church Theology School. “The Lord’s table towers over testimony, praise and miracles in its centrality and importance,” reads the opening chapter, in which the author sets out his desire help all Christians follow those in Acts who approached it “with such expectancy and faith in Christ’s promise of His presence, that nothing . . . could keep us away”.
JASMINE GIVNANDr Wilcox presides at the chrism mass this year, at Sheffield Cathedral
The following chapter tells the story of a stained-glass window at an Elim training centre partially obscured by a loudspeaker. Dr Black records how, once daily eucharists were begun, people began to notice the figure in the window, identified as Tarcisius, a third-century martyr stoned to death after refusing to hand over the sacrament that he was delivering to imprisoned Christians.
Such reverence, born of the belief that Christ was present in the sacrament, did not die with the Reformation, Dr Black writes — contrary to the understanding that some of his students bring with them. Throughout the book, he provides quotations from key Protestant figures from history, affirming their reverence for the sacrament, from Martin Luther, who declared that he would rather drink pure blood with the Pope than “have mere wine with the fanatics”, to Calvin protecting the elements from sword-wielding excommunicate Libertines.
John Wesley urged Christians to “receive the Lord’s supper as often as [we] can”. For centuries, until the present day, Dr Black writes, “virtually all” Protestants have agreed that Christ is present — while disagreeing on exactly how. In the words of Hooker, “what the elements are in themselves, it skilleth not.”
This extends to Pentecostals, for whom the elements are filled “with the presence of the wonder-working Saviour himself”. The Lord’s Supper is full of accounts of revivals catalysed by by the breaking of bread.
IN HIS Grove booklet Discipline and Desire: Embracing Charismatic liturgical worship, the Vicar of St John the Baptist, Hoxton, the Revd Graham Hunter, writes of gaining a reputation among his contemporaries for “banging on about the centrality of holy communion in the worshipping life of our churches”, and of being described as “climbing the candle”. His response is that it is because of his Charismatic tradition that he takes the eucharist seriously: “I believe in the real presence!”
Readers nurtured in the Low Church Charismatic tradition may view holy communion as “one of those slightly outdated traditions of the Church that we have to do because our vicar will get in trouble with the bishop if we do not”, he writes. “It is often seen as an ‘inconvenience, getting in the way of the songs and the prayer ministry.’ Yet holy communion “takes us right back to the heart of the gospel story, and is a way of responding to God and opening up ourselves to the Spirit.”
Professor Davison notes that the availability of holy communion is also a question of lawlessness: “If people are willing to take a Church of England stipend, and live in a Church of England house, and have a Church of England pension, and the Church of England doesn’t put that many requirements on us, and one of them is you will make sure that within your benefice there is a communion service, that seems to me a scandal if that is not undertaken.”
Canon B15 states that: “It is the duty of all who have been confirmed to receive the Holy Communion regularly, and especially at the festivals of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun or Pentecost.” But requirements concerning availability have changed in recent years. Canon B14 states that “The Holy Communion shall be celebrated in at least one church in each benefice or, where benefices are held in plurality, in at least one church in at least one of those benefices at least on all Sundays and principal Feast Days, and on Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday.”
An amending Canon changed the requirement from “in every parish church” — a move recommended by the Simplification Task Group (Synod, 24 February 2017). The Synod was told that this was a matter of the law mirroring practice: in many benefices it was “simply not possible” to meet the existing requirement.
IN THE decades that followed the celebratory leader of 1958, concerns about the effects of the Parish Communion Movement began to surface in the Church Times. Perhaps chief among them was anxiety that it had bred “superficiality”, with inadequate preparation or reverence (Leader, 3 February 1978). Twenty years earlier, addressing the Church Union, Archbishop Ramsey — who famously worried about those “tripping too carelessly to communion” — had identified the need for “more careful teaching on preparation, on penitence, on the use of the scriptures, and on the doctrine of the Presence”.
BODLEIAN LIBRARY, MS DOUCE 112A woman is communicated in a 16th-century Book of Hours
In 1962, one correspondent to the Church Times worried about the “virtual dragooning of the newly-confirmed into a weekly Communion” — something that must be “supported by a prayer-life utterly beyond the majority of the newly-confirmed” (Letters to the Editor, 31 August 1962). By the 1980s, a fear that the movement had been “too successful” was being voiced. One vicar who had initially welcomed the movement, regretted the loss of matins, and warned that the PCM had “unchurched many people who regarded themselves as C of E and attended Mattins occasionally, or even regularly, but who were not confirmed” (Comment, 14 June 1985).
In 1988, the Revd Hugh Pruen put it more strongly, warning that the movement had made the Church “look suspiciously like what is often referred to as a eucharistic sect or a clergy cult”. Its champions had not come to terms with “the uncomfortable fact that not every worshipping member of the Church of England is by nature a sacramentalist, or even wants to be” (22 January 1988).
Today, worries about priests struggling single-handed to meet the demands of dozens of teenagers eager to receive may be regarded with envy. After a rise in the decade to 1960 to a peak of almost 200,000, the annual number of confirmations fell precipitously — to just 10,900 in 2022.
But, in the diocese of Chichester, the Vicar of St Mary’s, Eastbourne, the Revd Arwen Folkes, co-founder of the College of Catholic Anglican Women (News, 2 June 2023), says that she has “no problem” getting confirmation candidates. Two nights before the interview, eight candidates were confirmed, including two teenagers. Young adults are “wanting to belong to something that is Other”, she says.
“The mass springs from the heart of Christ,” she observes. “It’s a commandment . . . but more than that it’s God’s tangible way of feeding his flock. That’s why it’s so clear, not only in the Gospels but in Paul’s writing, that there’s something really fundamental about the binding together of the body of Christ in the eucharist.”
She was first admitted to holy communion at the age of six or seven, in the Roman Catholic Church. Returning to the Church later in life, she felt “like the prodigal son” on receiving the eucharist: “It was in my veins.”
The doubts of the Parish Communion Movement’s critics — the belief that a service of holy communion is exclusive or alienating — have their echoes today. And Professor Davison suggests that it’s “not for nothing” that the most popular services in Oxbridge colleges are evensongs. “The counter-position is that sometimes you want to display to the world the thing that moves your heart, and is at the centre of everything,” he says. “They don’t have to exclude one another.”
At St Mary’s, the family service alternates between a service of the word and a eucharist, but, at every eucharist, Mthr Folkes makes sure to say that “This is part of the Christian life; one day you will be part of this.” She has become alert to the danger of “projecting nervousness” on to those new to the Church. “Now, I just talk about ‘one day’. . . I make it very warm, almost as if it’s a foregone conclusion. . . ‘If you are coming into the Body of Christ, worshipping with us, praying with us, then inevitably you will become part of this’ — being really positive about that, really open and welcoming and inviting and showing what that paths looks like.
She observes: “If you view the altar rail as a gate that you are holding open for people to come, then I think it changes the whole approach. . . People are hungry for it, and want to be invited into it.” This must be the starting point, she suggests. “If we look at whether it’s possible first, then we will find ways of ruling it out.”
