Once A Year Isn't Enough: The Case For Recovering The Lord's Supper

Picture the scene. It's the first Sunday of October, or maybe December, if your church tends to wait until it feels more holy. The pastor announces that today is communion Sunday. A quiet murmur moves through the congregation. The deacons fan out with trays of tiny plastic cups and broken crackers. Someone reads 1 Corinthians 11 with a suitably grave tone. You're told to examine yourself, maybe. You eat the cracker. You drink the juice. And then it's over, until next year.

For millions of Christians in Baptist, Pentecostal, and non-denominational churches, this is often the full extent of their experience with the Lord's Supper. Once a year, maybe twice. Communion is often treated as a solemn interruption to the normal order of worship rather than as the beating heart of it.

The question I want to raise in this post is not a small one: Is that what Jesus had in mind?

The short answer, grounded in Scripture and confirmed by history, is no. What follows is a case, not for a particular brand of theology, but for recovering something the church has largely lost: the regular, joyful, nourishing celebration of the Lord's Supper as a genuine means of grace.

The Passover Foundation: Repetition Is Covenantal

We cannot understand the Lord's Supper without first understanding the Passover. The Supper wasn't invented in an upper room on a Thursday night. It was the fulfillment of a meal Israel had been eating for over a thousand years.

When God instituted the Passover in Exodus 12, He was explicit: this was not a one-time event. It was to be observed annually, generation after generation, as a perpetual ordinance.

"This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD; throughout your generations, as a statute forever, you shall keep it as a feast."  ~Exodus 12:14

The purpose of the repetition was profound. When children asked their parents what the ceremony meant, the answer was meant to be spoken in the first person, not "our ancestors were slaves in Egypt," but we were slaves. We were redeemed. Deuteronomy 16:3 calls the unleavened bread "the bread of affliction" so that "you may remember the day when you came out of the land of Egypt all the days of your life."

Repetition was not a sign of cheap memory; it was the covenant mechanism by which each generation entered into the reality of redemption. The Passover meal was a recurring covenant renewal, not an annual footnote.

Jesus, at the Last Supper, deliberately recast this meal. He took the Passover cup, almost certainly the third cup, called the "cup of redemption," and said, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood" (Luke 22:20). He was not abolishing the Passover. He was fulfilling it and establishing its successor.

The new covenant Passover carries the same covenantal logic as the old: it is meant to be repeated, because repetition is how covenant communities remember, renew, and are nourished.

"Do This": The Weight of the Command

Luke 22:19 records Jesus saying, "Do this in remembrance of me." Paul, in 1 Corinthians 11:25, records the same command over the cup.

It's easy to read "do this" as a casual suggestion. But the Greek word for remembrance, anamnesis, is doing heavy covenantal work.

In the ancient world, and especially in the Jewish liturgical tradition, anamnesis did not mean mere mental recollection. It meant making present, calling into active reality, the saving event being commemorated. When Israel ate the Passover, they weren't just thinking fondly about the Exodus. They were, in a covenantal sense, participating in it. The meal removed the distance between past event and present community.

When Jesus says, "Do this in remembrance of me," He is using that same covenantal language. This is not "think about me occasionally." It is "enact this covenant meal, and in enacting it, you will participate in what it proclaims."

The Lord's Supper is not a statue in a park. It is a living, repeated, covenant-renewing act.

So, the question then isn't whether we should do it. The question is how often, and whether the church has any warrant from Scripture to reduce it to a rare occasion.

What the Early Church Actually Did

Here is where the historical record becomes impossible to ignore.

Acts 2:42 describes the marks of the early Jerusalem church: "And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers."

The breaking of bread, a clear reference to the Lord's Supper in the early church's vocabulary, is listed as one of the four pillars of Christian community. Not four annual practices. But four ongoing, regular rhythms of church life.

Acts 20:7 is even more specific: "On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them..."

The early church gathered on Sunday to break bread. The Lord's Supper was not an interruption of Sunday worship. It was, in significant measure, the point of gathering.

Move outside the New Testament to the early church fathers, and the picture only deepens. Around 150 AD, Justin Martyr wrote what is widely considered the earliest detailed description of a Christian worship service. He describes the weekly Sunday gathering: after the reading of Scripture and a sermon, bread and wine are brought forward, blessed, and distributed to all present, with portions even carried to those who were absent.

This was not the "exception"; it was the norm in Christianity for the first several centuries of the church. The Didache, a church manual likely dating to the late first or early second century, instructs believers to gather on the Lord's Day and break bread.

Weekly communion was not a medieval Catholic innovation. It was the unbroken practice of the earliest Christians, rooted in the New Testament pattern and sustained by the church fathers.

The question is not "why should we do it weekly?" The question is: when did we stop, and why?

What the Table Actually Is: A Means of Grace

Here is the theological crux of the matter. The reason infrequency feels acceptable in many churches is that the Lord's Supper is not understood as a means of grace.

It is understood as only a memorial, a ritual of mental recollection, a spiritual photograph of the crucifixion. If it's just a photograph, then perhaps once a year is enough. You don't need to look at a photograph every week.

But that is precisely the question Scripture will not let us answer so easily.

"The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?"  ~1 Corinthians 10:16

The word translated "participation" is koinonia, fellowship, communion, genuine sharing. Paul is not describing a symbol that points backward to an event. He is describing a present reality in which something actually happens when the covenant community gathers around the Table.

John Calvin, the great 16th-century Reformer, was careful to distinguish the Reformed understanding from both Rome and the memorial-only view. Against Rome, he insisted that Christ is not physically present in the elements. But against a simple memorialism, he insisted that the Spirit truly lifts the believer up to feed on Christ spiritually. "The flesh and blood of Christ are not less truly given to us," Calvin wrote, "than bread and wine are set before our eyes and put into our hands."

This matters enormously for the question of frequency. If the Table is a place where God genuinely nourishes His people, where the Spirit feeds believers on Christ, then infrequency is not reverence. It is starvation.

We don't skip preaching for eleven months to make the Christmas sermon more special. We don't refrain from prayer for most of the year to make it feel more weighty when we finally pray. So why would we withhold from our congregations a genuine means of grace because familiarity might breed contempt?

Why We Drifted: A Charitable Reading

I think it's worth pausing here to be fair to the traditions that practice infrequent communion. The intention, in most cases, is reverence. The fear is that too much communion becomes rote, that people will mindlessly eat the cracker and drink the cup without engaging their hearts or examining themselves. I do think this is a genuine pastoral concern, and it is not without some basis in Paul's corrective in 1 Corinthians 11.

But we should also notice what Paul is actually troubled about in that passage. He says the Corinthians are coming together, and it is "not the Lord's Supper that you eat" (v. 20), not because they are eating it too often, but because some are gorging themselves while others go hungry, and the unity of the body is being shattered. The problem is irrelevance and division. Paul's prescription is not to eat less frequently, but to eat rightly.

~1 Corinthians 11:28 "Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup." The solution to unworthy eating is worthy eating, not abstaining.

The roots of Protestant infrequency actually run deeper than 1 Corinthians. Much of it traces to the revivalist tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries, where the emotional drama of conversion became the center of gravity in worship.

The altar call removed the Table.

The individual decision event replaced the covenant meal.

Baptism became the primary ordinance because it was a visible sign of conversion.

The Lord's Supper, with its quieter, ongoing, covenantal logic, got crowded out.

This is a historical development, not a biblical one. And recognizing it as such is the first step toward recovering what was lost.

The Correction: Frequent, Intentional, Joyful

What does recovery look like? Not merely adding the Lord's Supper to the calendar more often, but recovering a theological understanding of what the Table is and who it was given to.

John Calvin himself provides a useful and humbling footnote here. He wanted weekly communion in Geneva. He believed it was the clear biblical and historical norm. The city council overruled him and mandated quarterly observance.

Calvin lived with that disappointment his entire ministry, calling it a "defect" and expressing his wish that it be corrected. The icon of Reformed worship died without achieving what he believed Scripture required. If Calvin couldn't win this argument in a theocratic city-state, we should be humble about the difficulty of recovering it, but not about the necessity.

The Westminster Larger Catechism (Q. 177) describes the Lord's Supper as to be administered "frequently," a word chosen deliberately, not accidentally. The Reformed confessional tradition has always pointed toward regularity, even when practice has lagged behind.

But I want to be very clear, frequency alone is not the goal. The goal is a right understanding that produces the right practice. When the church understands the Table as a genuine means of grace, a place where the risen Christ nourishes His people through the Spirit, then coming to it weekly is not routine. It is, as Calvin said, the weekly feast of the covenant people.

There is also a profoundly pastoral dimension here that is easy to miss. The Lord's Supper is tangible. It engages the body: sight, taste, touch.

In a world of abstractions and anxieties, God gives His people something physical to hold. "The body of Christ, broken for you."

"The blood of Christ, shed for you."

Week after week, in bread and cup, the gospel is enacted and not merely declared. For the doubting, the grieving, the weary, the Table is not a burden. It is a mercy.

The Baptism Scoreboard and the People Left in the Pews

I think there is something that needs to be said plainly, even if it is uncomfortable to hear.

Within the same traditions that have largely abandoned the regular Lord's Supper, baptism has been elevated to extraordinary prominence. And on the surface, that may seem right. Baptism is a sacrament, though in some of the aforementioned traditions, it is referred to as an ordinance. Baptism is a sign of the covenant, and it should absolutely and joyfully be celebrated. But something has gone wrong, and the distortion is worth naming.

In many Baptist, Pentecostal, and non-denominational churches, baptism has become a metric. A scoreboard. A proof of ministry success.

"We baptized 75 people last week." The announcement comes with a glow of triumph, and not without reason; conversions, if they are sincere, are a genuine cause for joy. But look carefully at what is being celebrated, and what is being neglected, and a troubling picture emerges.

The 75 who were baptized are celebrated. But the 300 who have been sitting in the pews for years: the struggling, the doubting, the grieving, the faithful, are handed a cracker and some juice once a year and told to examine themselves.

This is not an accident. It is the fruit of a theology that has organized itself around the conversion event as the apex of Christian experience.

If getting people to the altar is the goal, then baptism, the visible, photographable, announcement-worthy sign of that event, becomes the trophy. The Lord's Supper, with its quiet, ongoing, covenantal logic, offers no such trophy. It nourishes people who are already in the fold. It feeds the sheep who are already in the pen. And in a ministry culture obsessed with numerical growth, feeding the sheep you already have is easy to neglect.

But what does this neglect actually communicate to those sitting in the pews?

It communicates that their ongoing journey of faith, their daily dying and rising with Christ, their struggle against sin, and their need for nourishment are less interesting, less important, and less celebrated than the moment of conversion. It communicates that once you are in, the church's primary energy moves on to the next person they're trying to get to the altar.

This is not just a liturgical preference problem; it is an absolute pastoral failure.

And Scripture speaks to it directly.

"Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood." 

~Acts 20:28

The charge to elders and pastors is to care for the flock, the whole flock, not just the new arrivals. The Lord's Supper is one of God's appointed means for that care. It is the covenant meal at which the Shepherd feeds His sheep. If it's withheld or reduced to an afterthought, it neglects the very instrument God ordained for the ongoing nourishment of His people.

There is also a self-righteousness at work here that I believe deserves honest examination.

A church culture that quantifies baptisms and broadcasts them as ministry achievement has, consciously or not, made the leader's fruitfulness the point of the service rather than Christ's provision.

The Lord's Supper will not cooperate with that agenda. You cannot put a number on it. You cannot photograph it for the announcement reel. It simply is, week after week, bread and cup, the body broken, the blood shed, the covenant renewed. It humbles the pastor just as much as it humbles the newest convert.

Perhaps that is part of why it has been pushed aside.

Jesus did not say, "By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you baptize large numbers." He said, "By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:35).

The Lord's Supper is, among other things, a communal act of love, the covenant family gathering to be fed together, to proclaim together, to wait together for the coming of the Lord (1 Corinthians 11:26).

A church that neglects that gathering in favor of counting conversions has confused the front door with the dining room.

To be direct: if your church can tell you exactly how many people were baptized last year but cannot tell you the last time the congregation was fed at the Lord's Table with appropriate weight and regularity, something is out of order. It is not a small thing. It is a shepherd feeding the visitors while the flock goes hungry.

A Word to the Reader

If you are in a tradition that celebrates the Lord's Supper once or twice a year, this is not written to condemn you or your church. It is written to invite you to a question.

Why this infrequency? Is it rooted in Scripture? Is it rooted in history? Or is it rooted in tradition, a tradition that inherited its shape from revivalist priorities that were themselves a departure from something older and better?

If you are a church member, ask your elders. Bring the passages. Ask about Acts 2:42. Ask about Justin Martyr. Ask about Calvin's lament. Ask with a spirit of genuine inquiry rather than accusation, and see where the conversation goes.

If you are a pastor or elder, consider what it would mean to recover the weekly Table for your congregation, not as a liturgical novelty, but as a return to the ancient practice of the church of Jesus Christ. Consider what it would mean for your people to come to the Table every Lord's Day, to be fed there, to have the gospel in pictures before them in bread and wine alongside the preached Word.

The Table is not a quarterly interruption. It is not an annual ceremony.

It is a covenant meal, instituted by the Lord of the covenant, for the nourishment of His covenant people. It has been waiting at the center of Christian worship since the first Sunday after the resurrection.

Come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.

Primary Texts Referenced: Exodus 12:14; Deuteronomy 16:3; Luke 22:14–20; Acts 2:42; Acts 20:7; 1 Corinthians 10:16; 1 Corinthians 11:17–34 // Justin Martyr, First Apology, Ch. 67 // The Didache, Ch. 14 // Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 177 // John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.17