The Lord's Supper: An Actual Meal

Oneness, Fellowship

Every believer has a dinner reservation at the Wedding Banquet of the Lamb. Did you know that Jesus also has dinner plans for you this coming Lord’s Day? The Lord’s Supper was originally celebrated every week, as an actual meal. This fellowship in the breaking of bread is the ideal setting for building the close relationships that form a basis for personalized disciple making. It also creates supernatural unity, fantastic fellowship, and personal holiness in view of His return. Has the Lord’s supper, in your church, become a lost supper?

The bread and cup look back to Jesus’ death on the cross to pay for sin. The meal adds a forward look. When celebrated as a meal in a joyful, wedding atmosphere, the Lord’s Supper typifies the wedding supper of the Lamb. It is a regular reminder of Jesus’ promise to return and eat it with us, and everyone who hopes in His appearing purifies himself, just as He is pure.

Another major benefit is the fellowship and encouragement that is experienced by each member of Christ’s body. The leadership gets to enjoy the fellowship along with everyone else. This relaxed, unhurried fellowship meal with God’s family is a significant means of edifying the Church, building community, cementing ties of love, and creating supernatural unity. It is the perfect setting to “stir one another up to love and good works … encouraging one another” (Heb 10:24-25). The strong relationships formed through this holy meal also create a firm foundation for effective and personalized disciple making.

Scholarly opinion is clearly weighted toward the conclusion that the Lord’s Supper was originally eaten as a meal. In New Testament Theology, Donald Guthrie stated that the apostle Paul “sets the Lord’s supper in the context of the fellowship meal.”
Editor of the notable Evangelical commentary series New International Commentary on the New Testament, Gordon Fee, noted “the nearly universal phenomenon of cultic meals as a part of worship in antiquity.” He asserted that “in the early church the Lord’s Supper was most likely eaten as, or in conjunction with, such a meal.” Fee further noted: “From the beginning, the Last Supper was for Christians not an annual Christian Passover, but a regularly repeated meal in ‘honor of the Lord,’ hence the Lord’s Supper.”

In the New Bible Dictionary, G.W. Grogan observed: “The administration of the Eucharist shows it set in the context of a fellowship supper…. The separation of the meal or Agape from the Eucharist lies outside the times of the NT.”[3] In his commentary on 1 Corinthians, C.K. Barrett stated: “The Lord’s Supper was still at Corinth an ordinary meal to which acts of symbolical significance were attached, rather than a purely symbolical meal.”

United Methodist Publishing House editor John Gooch wrote: “In the first century, the Lord’s Supper included not only the bread and the cup but an entire meal.”

Yale professor J.J. Pelikan concluded: “Often, if not always, it was celebrated in the setting of a common meal.”