Today's piece comes from Alan Kreider's study The Patient Ferment of the Early Church, and it tracks some of the changes to the Eucharist in the early church.
At the heart of early Christian worship was table fellowship. Throughout the first three centuries Christian communities gathered once a week for a meal. Across time these communities moved from an early model, which Tertullian called "small feast," to a later model, which Origen called a "great feast." I call these models the "evening banquet" and the "morning service." Both kinds of meal involved remembering Jesus as the communities ate bread and drank from the cup. Both were private ... Both were accompanied by reading, teaching, and prayers.
Greco-Roman culture valued banquets, which customarily had two parts: an evening meal was followed by a time of entertainment, at which people gave speeches, conversed, and drank ... The earliest description we have of Christian worship is the meal described in 1 Corinthians 11 in which all shared an evening meal. The meal was followed by the symposium in chapter 14, to which "each one" could contribute.
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In the second century some Christian communities began to hold their main weekly meetings on Sunday morning rather than Saturday evening ... The tradition of the Sunday morning service thus originates early, but it does not quickly replace the evening banquet ... Christians in some places continued to meet in the evenings as a minority practice, often denounced by councils and bishops, but the morning service, in which the food was "tokenized," gradually become the norm.
The morning service was in the tradition of the evening banquet, but it expressed itself in a somewhat different form, which has become classical ...
- Order of service: The Word now preceded the sacrament. Whereas in the evening banquet the meal (including the bread and wine) had come before the Word, in the morning service the Word came before the meal.
- Quantity of food: The quantity was now slight. The evening banquet's meal was replaced by a symbolic meal with "normative tokenization" of bread, wine, and water.
- Quantity of words: The words that ordinary worshippers spoke decreased and the words that the leaders - the clergy - spoke increased. The sermon grew longer , and the style of worship became monological rather than communal.
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Like the evening banquet, the morning service is an act of worship, but it has become sparer, more efficient, more formal. The worshippers do not gather around tables; in many places they sit in rows, looking at the backs of other believer's heads ...
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The members entered into an alternative world, a utopian space, where things were different from the outside world. There was a new family, sensitivity to economic needs, and an equalising tendency. There was an encounter with the Bible and teaching by leaders with whom there could be interaction. There were opportunities to stand and pray as well as to greet brothers and sisters in peace and be reconciled. And there was the ritual meal, now with token elements, which enabled a sacramental encounter with the living Lord. Indeed, as congregations grew and connections with believers became less intense, this sense of connection with the divine through the eucharistic elements became more intense.
Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church (Baker, 2016), pp.186-194.
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