‘Who Presides?’ (Part Two)

(See part one here).

Who presided at celebrations of Holy Communion in the early church?

Truthfully, it’s hard to know. And one of the problems is that we have such a hazy idea of what actually went on.

We tend to assume that the early Christians did things pretty well as we do them – getting together on Sundays, sitting in rows facing the front, taking part in a service led by someone at the front, which included Bible readings, set prayers, a eucharistic prayer and so on. And I think you can make a good case for something like that by at least the mid second century. But is it in the New Testament?

In 1 Corinthians 11, when Paul describes the Lord’s Supper, it actually sounds a lot more like a pot-luck supper than a liturgical celebration.

When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What should I say to you? Should I commend you? In this matter I do not commend you! (11:20-22).

True, he does go on to describe something like what we know today as the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion, in which the bread and wine are eaten and drunk in obedience to Jesus’ command at the last supper:

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. (11:23-26).

Taking the text as a whole, however, it seems most natural to assume that at Corinth, in the mid-50s, the Lord’s Supper was still being observed as the last supper had been – as part of a communal meal, with the bread and wine of the Eucharist being shared as an integral part of the meal, perhaps at the beginning and the end as they had been at the last supper, at least in Luke’s account (see Luke 22:19-20). Worship at Corinth, it seems, was much more like a real supper with prayers, teaching, and the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper attached, whereas today it is more of a liturgical celebration with a tiny bit of food and drink attached to it! And Paul’s directions for who will speak, who will prophesy or speak in tongues and so on (see 1 Corinthians 14) seem to assume that there is not usually just one person ‘up front’; rather, worship seems to be taking place ‘in the round’, as it were, with many different voices contributing.

So it’s not entirely clear from the New Testament that Christian worship looked anything like what we think of when we use the term today. And neither is it clear that Christian leadership looked anything like our concept of ministry, or priesthood, or the pastorate.

For one thing, the term ‘priest’ is never used to describe a Christian liturgical minister – which is striking, as it was one of the most commonly used terms for religious leadership in the Gentile world, and of course had a good Jewish pedigree as well. But the Greek word for ‘priest’ – meaning a mediator, a go-between, one who brings God and people together – is used in the New Testament in only two ways: first, for Jesus himself, our great high priest (see the Letter to the Hebrews), and secondly, for the whole people of God, a royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9-10). The word is never used to describe what we might today call ‘Christian ministers’ or ‘pastors’.

We have a clear indication in the Book of Acts of the sort of leadership that was commonly exercised in the young churches founded by the early Christian missionaries. In Acts 13 and 14 Paul and Barnabas went on a missionary journey through what is now Syria and Turkey, preaching the gospel and gathering the new converts together into Christian congregations. On their way home they retraced their steps and established a leadership structure of sorts in these little churches:

After they had proclaimed the good news to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, then on to Iconium and Antioch.There they strengthened the souls of the disciples and encouraged them to continue in the faith, saying, ‘It is through many persecutions that we must enter the kingdom of God.’ And after they had appointed elders for them in each church, with prayer and fasting they entrusted them to the Lord in whom they had come to believe. (Acts 14:21-23).

In establishing this ‘eldership’ structure, they were consciously imitating the way Jewish synagogues were organised. Each Jewish synagogue in those days was governed by a council of elders (the word used in the Greek New Testament is ‘presbyters’); their functions were not only liturgical and educational but also organisational and administrative. It does not seem to have been their job necessarily to give the teaching every week; rather, it was their job to make sure someone was there to do the teaching (and so it was natural, for instance, in Acts 13:15, for the ‘officials’ (clearly the elders) of the Jewish synagogue to invite Paul and Barnabas, who were obviously travelling preachers, to instruct the congregation that day).

What the early Christians set up was obviously something similar. J.B. Lightfoot, in his influential essay ‘The Christian Ministry’ (1868), pointed out that

The duties of the presbyters were twofold. They were both rulers and instructors of the congregation… Though government was probably the first conception of the office, yet the work of teaching must have fallen to the presbyters from the very first and assumed greater prominence as time went on.

However, not all of the presbyters in each congregation were necessarily preachers or teachers; this is clear in 1 Timothy where we read ‘Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honour, especially those who labour in preaching and teaching’ (5:17). Clearly, then, not all of the elders were teachers, but they were all involved in the ‘ruling’ of the congregation. And clearly, also, they worked as a team; Luke says that Paul and Barnabas ‘appointed elders’ (plural) in each church (Acts 14:23), just as each synagogue had been led by a team of elders.

It seems to me that these elders were something like a combination of our modern Anglican offices of ‘lay reader’ and ‘vestry member’ (U.K. readers: ‘PCC member’). They were obviously not seminary-trained, and although Paul does mention the idea of remuneration in a couple of places, it seems unlikely that they were all full-timers. It seems much more natural to assume that they earned their living in their normal jobs and worked together as a team to guide and rule the congregation committed to their charge.

One thing that is very striking, however, is that at no point does the New Testament ascribe any liturgical function to them. They are not mentioned as leading the congregation in prayer, nor are they mentioned as taking turns to preside at the Lord’s Supper. The only specific functions given to them in the New Testament are teaching and ruling, and the qualifications required of them are mainly that they be people of exemplary character (see 1 Timothy 3:2-7).

This does not necessarily mean that they did not do these things. It may mean quite the opposite; it may mean that their liturgical function was so well-known that no New Testament author felt it necessary to mention it. But it does seem somewhat strange, if presiding at the Eucharist is the primary function of the priesthood (to use later terms), that this is nowhere mentioned in the New Testament.

But even if it could be clearly demonstrated – and I do not think that it can be – that in the New Testament only the presbyters/elders presided at the Lord’s Supper, we need to ask ourselves whether these New Testament elders are in fact the same as what we now call in the Anglican tradition ‘priests’. And the answer to me is clearly that they are not. Some of them, but not all, are preachers and teachers; some are presumably primarily involved in governance and are much more like churchwardens and vestry members. And even the ones who teach don’t usually do it full time or as ‘lone rangers’; they do it as part of a team. So in fact, as I have said, the ‘presbytery’ of the average New Testament church appears to have combined the functions of what Anglicans today would describe as vestry members, lay readers, and priests. Even an argument, then, that in the apostolic and post-apostolic church it was the presbyters who presided at the Lord’s Supper does not necessarily mean that only priests should do so today, because the New Testament and post-New Testament ‘presbyter’ and the modern ‘priest’ are not necessarily the same thing.