I’ve been in the ministry for more than 21 years, which means my children (ages 18 and 14) have only known life as PKs, pastor’s/preacher’s kids. Their experience is fairly atypical from most PKs, I think, especially since their main memories have come from being a part of an urban church plant. But despite that unique perspective, one thing has remained pretty consistent over the years: They often have opinions about the quality of the communion bread.
Urban Village is a bit of an anomaly among United Methodist Churches in that we offer communion every week. We’re dependent on faithful volunteers to provide bread each Sunday so one never knows what *kind* of bread will show up on the plate. As noted above, my kids are the resident critics about the quality of bread, but I’m just grateful that someone is kind enough to bring bread each week.
Before worship a few weeks ago, the person who brought the bread came up to me with some instructions. That’s somewhat unusual, but I was moved by her gesture. First, she noted that she brought gluten-free bread. Several years ago, we started offering gluten-free wafers for folks who can’t digest gluten since the bread almost always has gluten in it. While this was a step toward an inclusive communion table, the people eating the wafers still were not eating from the same loaf. Our volunteer, though, wanted to rectify that. But she had a second bit of instruction: “The bread is pretty fragile so…just be careful when you break it.” We occasionally have the opposite problem, that a loaf is so dense that it takes a little extra muscle to break it, but, sure enough, the loaf started to break apart as soon as I lifted it up. Since we offer communion by “intinction,” which means that we offer a bit of the bread to the person and then invite them to dip it into the cup, you can imagine what happened next. Crumbs. Lots of crumbs.
Everyone seemed pretty good-natured about it and when I sat down after communion was finished, I saw an explosion of crumbs on the floor. I quickly had the exact same thought as our worship leader when he noted that sometimes inclusion (in this case using one loaf for all) is messy.
Indeed it is. It’s not too hard for us to *say* we’re inclusive, but if one is serious about true hospitality and welcome, it will not always be pretty or convenient. But that’s what brooms are for, to sweep up the mess and try again.