By Donald Schell
We began making explicit invitation to everyone present to receive communion at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, San Francisco in 1981. After the Eucharistic Prayer and breaking of the bread and immediately before communion, we began saying something like this – ‘Jesus welcomes everyone to his Table, so we offer the bread and wine which are his body and blood to everyone, and to everyone by name. If we need help with your name, please help us out.’ We knew we’d chosen to step across a line, going beyond the canons of the Episcopal Church and the rubrics of the Prayer Book, and beyond that, remaking longstanding Christian tradition.
My colleague Rick Fabian and I have both offered theological and scriptural defense of the practice elsewhere and we’ll continue to engage the ongoing conversation in our church now, when many others have also written to raise theological questions and argue for or against the practice. I’m writing this today as a practice narrative, to tell the mix of circumstances, discoveries, accident, and theory that moved us to make a change we didn’t expect to be making.
When Rick and I first worked together at Episcopal Church at Yale (Rick 1970-1976 and me as his associate in 1972-1976), our church was in the early stages of Trial Use. For the generation who’ve known no other Prayer Book, Trial Use was the church’s official process for exploring how the new liturgy would go beyond the 1928 Prayer Book we all knew.
Six nights a week for six years at Yale’s Dwight Chapel 25-45 students completed our liturgy surrounding the altar table for the Eucharistic prayer, and then offering communion student-to-student around the circle. One of our regulars was a Jewish undergraduate who had converted to Christianity in his religious studies major. He received communion for well over a year before deciding to seek baptism. There were other unbatpized students we knew were receiving. Generally we had a sense of who and why, so perhaps pastorally we were practicing open communion, but we made no liturgical invitation or announcement of it.
After the Yale chaplaincy, my work as mission vicar at St. David’s, Caldwell, Idaho gave me the opportunity to introduce that congregation to now familiar Episcopal church practices like communion every Sunday at the main liturgy and offering communion to baptized but not confirmed children. In fact the latter practice was new to our church in 1970 and was unknown (and almost unthinkable) to the people of St. David’s when I arrived.
Rick, meanwhile, was working for Bishop Kilmer Myers of California. His title of ‘chaplain to the bishop’ included driving the night-blind bishop long distances for parish visits, helping the bishop prepare for highly conflicted meetings with parishes poised to withdraw over the ordination of women, discussing theological issues on the road, and drafting responses to the bishop’s correspondence.
So after our work together at Yale, Rick and I in quite different settings both saw a lot of parish conflict and theological pain. And both found ourselves asking questions about evangelism and parish structure and how practice might empower or limit evangelism.
The year after he completed his assignment as bishop’s chaplain, with then diocesan executive George Hunt’s strong encouragement Rick wrote a proposal to the diocese to found an experimental mission dedicated to Gregory of Nyssa. The mission church would try innovative liturgical practices to further evangelism, Christian formation, and service, and it would draw on organizational and group research to order governance and common life in ways that would bring conflict to the surface more quickly and work with it creatively.
For the mission’s founding liturgy on St. Gregory’s day, March 9th, 1978, I flew down to preside, and Rick served as deacon and preacher. In October that year the new congregation was admitted as a specialized mission and given seat and vote in California’s diocesan convention.
After his consecration in September of 1979, California’s new bishop, Bill Swing generously accepted oversight of St. Gregory’s, the tiny specialized mission he inherited from Bishop Kilmer Myers.
In July of 1980 my wife Ellen and I moved from Idaho to join the project of founding St. Gregory’s. As planned Rick and I worked as founding vicars from that point. Ellen and my arrival increased St. Gregory’s membership from 10 to 12 people, and our two children doubled the size of the Sunday School.
Shortly after I arrived, Rick and I went to talk with Bishop Swing about St. Gregory’s purposes, about innovation, and our declared commitment to testing innovation beyond the limits of canons and rubrics (all this had been in the mission proposal and was begun with the blessing of his predecessor and diocesan convention).
Bishop Swing told us what he would expect of us as we continued to experiment beyond the new 1979 Book of Common Prayer and canons of the Episcopal Church. His one firm rule was that we were not to invite lay people preside at the Eucharist. For all other innovation or experiment he asked us to keep him well informed of what we were doing and the reasons we were doing it so he could always say, “Yes, I know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.” We were careful and deliberate to keep him informed.
Meanwhile, in clergy gatherings around the diocese our new bishop repeatedly said, “If you don’t have a valid missionary reason, you must obey the rubrics. If you have a valid missionary reason, you must disobey the rubrics.”
From 1978 through 1980, though we were not making an explicit to all to receive communion, nor had we planned to. But we had no printed or spoken announcement like ‘all baptized Christians are welcome to receive.’ People simply received if they put their hands out or passed the bread and wine on to the next person, and we quickly realized that our efforts to attract unchurched people to our Eucharist-every-Sunday community were paying off well enough that our regulars were frequently giving communion to an unbaptized visitor, the stranger standing next in the circle. Some of those visitors would return regularly and began to ask about membership. We’d seen that pattern before in the Yale chaplaincy.
Concurrently, as part of our teaching work, we began offering an eight week course called “Jesus and Paul, the Christian Source.” It was our introduction to Jesus’ teaching and practice concluding with some Paul’s more intriguing and caring interpretation of Jesus’ work. The course was based on our distillation of the best New Testament scholarship we could find. Norman Perrin’s Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (1967) significantly shaped “Jesus and Paul,” particularly his critical method, and argument and conclusions about realized eschatology and the prophetic/messianic sign of Jesus’ meals.
Perrin argued that it was Jesus’ enactment of Isaiah’s feast for all people’s, the divine banquet where God welcomed all, including the unworthy, the unprepared, the unfit, in sum all the ‘wrong’ people prompted some Jewish religious leaders and local Roman authority (for different reasons and different understanding of the threat Jesus posed) to work together in a conspiracy to stop and eventually kill him. “This guy welcomes sinners and eats with them,” Perrin concluded from language and other evidence was likely an accusation Jesus’ adversaries had hurled against him. Perrin’s conclusion has become a central consensus among Gospel scholars.
In our teaching of Jesus class we began to notice that our communion practice of getting all the lay people present to administer consecrated bread and wine to one another kept prompting all of us, clergy and lay participants to wonder what we should do with Perrin’s conclusion that the meal was Jesus’ crucial practice, literally what he did that took him to the cross. By 1981, what we were seeing in practice and hearing ourselves say in teaching finally provoked a conscious decision to make our communion invitation consistent with what we were reading in the Gospels and teaching in ‘Jesus and Paul.’
We were quite aware of the rubrical and canonical boundary we were crossing. We were open about what we were doing. And to steady ourselves we looked to others in the tradition who crossed official, received sacramental boundaries like John Wesley instituting presbyteral ordination when he couldn’t get his bishop to give him the clergy he needed for his mission to England’s industrial poor, and like John Mason Neale brought up on court charges for rubrical and civil law violations introducing ritual richness, hymnody, colors in church, cross and candle on the table, etc., and like Bishop Ronald Hall ordaining Li Tim Oi’s a priest, and finally like Li Tim Oi herself disappearing into communist China where she was needed to function as a priest, simply ignoring Canterbury’s insistence that she stop.
We were acting, as each of these before us had, publicly, offering our rationale for what we were doing, and still taking certain risks for the sake of what appeared (and yes, still does appear) to us to be faithful leadership.
Other early witnesses to the practice may have more stories to tell. So far as we know, the explicit invitation we began to make in 1981 at St. Gregory’s, San Francisco was the first time in our Episcopal church that we made a deliberate, explicit invitation to all to communion. But others may have begun independently and perhaps before us. I’d welcome hearing those stories and expect the ‘how’ of those decisions will be significant too.
We’re all still forging the theology of communion and baptism (not to mention the confusing separate work on confirmation). Much of the theology must rest on interpretation or reinterpretation of scripture and tradition. But practice and the stories of practice belong too. Sara Miles’ telling the story of her first communion, conversion, beginning the St. Gregory’s food pantry and subsequent baptism has meant touched many and inspired other story telling.
As we continue to work, and talk and sometimes argue theology, I hope this account of a beginning – almost twenty years before Sara came to St. Gregory’s as an unbaptized stranger, received communion, and was converted – may inspire others to tell stories of when and how their practice of communion changed.
The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is
President of All Saints Company.