The Earnest Communicant

An example of communion preparation from 19th c. Montreal

I’ve written before on this Substack about the twentieth century transformation in communion preparation across a number of Christian churches including the Roman Catholic Church and my own Anglican church. Before, whether communion was celebrated weekly or indeed daily (as in the Roman Catholic Church) or more infrequently (most Anglican churches), it was not generally received weekly as a taken-for-granted part of Sunday worship. Rather, communion was something that required careful, intentional preparation – and, in both Catholic and Protestant churches, engagement with a minister beforehand as well, whether via confession, examination by the session, or the more modest notification ordered by the Book of Common Prayer. One did not come to the wedding feast without one’s wedding garment! Rather, in a context which took very seriously Paul’s warning about the consequences of unworthy reception of the Lord’s Supper, people were taught to carefully prepare for receiving communion as a regular but comparatively infrequent part of worshipping God.

And then everything changed. In Anglicanism, this emphasis on communion preparation fell apart with the rise of the Parish Communion movement, which emphasized a weekly Eucharist at which everyone partook as the normative act of Sunday worship and deemphasized communion preparation. I’ve suggested that this change makes ‘communion without baptism’ imaginable and have pondered whether a move away from assuming weekly communion reception might be a good thing, even if the sacrament is celebrated weekly.

One common response I get to this line of thought is people wondering about what this earlier model of communion preparation looked like, since the (voluminous!) earlier literature of communion preparation has all but disappeared from popular use and knowledge. I happened across an example the other day that I wanted to briefly share with you all: The Earnest Communicant: A Course of Preparation for the Lord’s Supper, by the Rt Rev Ashton Oxenden, second bishop of Montreal (available for free on Google Books here). This bishop is most well-known today – to the extent he’s remembered at all – for his rather ferocious opposition to the ritualist practices at St John the Evangelist, the diocese’s most important Anglo-Catholic parish. But he also published a number of theological pamphlets and sermons, including this one, which a cursory look suggests went through at least six editions.

This particular text caught my eye mostly because of the connection to the diocese in which I serve; its content is not particularly extraordinary. But is important, I think, for exactly this reason! To be sure, it has its own theological perspective. It is evidently an evangelical, low-church text, as is perhaps most clear in the attention it gives to the communicant’s affections and a certain reserve in using instrumental language to connect the eating of bread and drinking of wine to the consuming Christ’s body and blood. But it is an evangelical, low-church variant of an entirely normal genre, one common across churchmanships in the Anglicanism of its day: the guide for communion preparation.

This guide, like many others of its genre, begins the Sunday before one will receive communion. There is a good liturgical reason for this, which Oxenden’s text itself suggests to us. The passage for the Sunday before communion, which it calls Invitation Sunday, begins like this: “My ears have been gladdened this day by an invitation to the Lord’s Tabe. Christ’s minister, in his Master’s name, has called me to the Feast.” Oxenden does not have a metaphorical invitation in mind. Rather, he is referring to a now mostly-forgotten part of Anglican worship. The 1662 Prayer Book (which was in use in Canada during Oxenden’s episcopate) instructs the minister to read an exhortation after the sermon on the Sunday or holy day before communion will be celebrated, in order to invite people to the Lord’s Supper. Because the exhortation is not terribly well-known, I’ll quote the whole thing:

DEARLY beloved, on - day next I purpose, through God's assistance, to administer to all such as shall be religiously and devoutly disposed the most comfortable Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ; to be by them received in remembrance of his meritorious Cross and Passion, whereby alone we obtain remission of our sins, and are made partakers of the kingdom of heaven. Wherefore it is our duty to render most humble and hearty thanks to Almighty God our heavenly Father, for that he hath given his Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, not only to die for us, but also to be our spiritual food and sustenance in that holy Sacrament. Which being so divine and comfortable a thing to them who receive it worthily, and so dangerous to them that will presume to receive it unworthily; my duty is to exhort you in the mean season to consider the dignity of that holy mystery, and the great peril of the unworthy receiving thereof; and so to search and examine your own consciences, and that not lightly, and after the manner of dissemblers with God: but so that ye may come holy and clean to such a heavenly Feast, in the marriage-garment required by God in holy Scripture, and be received as worthy partakers of that holy Table.

The way and means thereto is; First, to examine your lives and conversations by the rule of God's commandments; and whereinsoever ye shall perceive yourselves to have offended, either by will, word, or deed, there to bewail your own sinfulness, and to confess yourselves to Almighty God, with full purpose of amendment of life. And if ye shall perceive your offences to be such as are not only against God, but also against your neighbours; then ye shall reconcile yourselves unto them; being ready to make restitution and satisfaction, according to the uttermost of your powers, for all injuries and wrongs done by you to any other; and being likewise ready to forgive others that have offended you, as you would have forgiveness of your offences at God's hand; for otherwise the receiving of the holy Communion doth nothing else but increase your damnation. Therefore if any of you be a blasphemer of God, an hinderer or slanderer of his Word, an adulterer, or be in malice, or envy, or in any other grievous crime, repent you of your sins, or else come not to that holy Table; lest, after the taking of that holy Sacrament, the devil enter into you, as he entered into Judas, and fill you full of all iniquities, and bring you to destruction both of body and soul.

And because it is requisite, that no man should come to the holy Communion, but with a full trust in God's mercy, and with a quiet conscience; therefore if there be any of you, who by this means cannot quiet his own conscience herein, but requireth further comfort or counsel, let him come to me, or to some other discreet and learned Minister of God's Word, and open his grief; that by the ministry of God's holy Word he may receive the benefit of absolution, together with ghostly counsel and advice, to the quieting of his conscience, and avoiding of all scruple and doubtfulness.

As you can see, this exhortation invites people to communion and enjoins those who wish to commune to prepare themselves. The Earnest Communicant, then, is designed to help them do exactly that. Thus, the material for Invitation Sunday not only involves reflection on God’s goodness in inviting us (via the minister) to his Table but a resolution to prepare well. “With God’s help I will spend the next few days in solemn preparation for this holy sacrament,” the user of the manual would read, and then is given a prayer to implore God’s help in preparing for communion so that the occasion will be “a time of blessing, a season of refreshing from the Lord.” If (as intended) you read this material sometime after the service on Sunday morning, the text would help you recall the invitation extended to you and make a resolution to answer it with a good preparation.

Then, each day of the week then has a different subject, which is treated in four ways: a highly affective meditation, material for self-examination, resolutions to take on, and prayers. Monday is dedicated to repentance; Tuesday to faith; Wednesday to holiness; Thursday to God’s Word and prayer; Friday to Christ’s sufferings; and Saturday to love. When Communion Sunday comes around, a final self-examination, prayer, and meditation is provided for use before the service. An additional meditation is offered for when one arrives at church, and then the second part of the prayer book holy communion service is included along with additional prayers to be said immediately before and after receiving the elements. Finally, the week of spiritual preparation concludes with a Sunday evening reflection on receiving the sacrament, comprised of a meditation, a resolution, and a prayer. A few additional prayers close out the book.

Much could be said about the specific content of the book, for what it tells us about 19^th c. evangelical eucharistic piety or for evaluation for contemporary use. For the first, I think it is clearly a reminder that sincere and serious approaches to Holy Communion were by no means the preserve of high-churchmen or Anglo-Catholics! For the second, I’ll say that the text emphasizes more than I would the subjective experience of Christ’s nearness as a sign that one has received the Supper rightly. I think that Luther is right that the Supper must be approached as the gift of God freely offered from outside of us and am suspicious about correlating rightly receiving Communion to certain spiritual experiences, which I think this text at the very least risks doing.

But as I said at the beginning, while the particularities of the text are worth attention, it is more important for my purposes as a representative of a much broader genre. A plethora of books along with guides printed and bound with Prayer Books themselves provided advice for preparation in the time leading up to communion, devotions for the communion service itself, and thanksgivings or resolutions for afterwards. Keying this preparation to the days of the week before the Communion Sunday, beginning with the Sunday before and minister’s reading of the exhortation inviting people to prepare to receive communion the next Sunday, was also very common. And some of these guides were popular indeed, going through dozens of editions! Without suggesting that every communicant diligently used some manual or another before every communion, I don’t think it is too much to say that this genre strongly influenced Anglican communion piety for centuries, providing a normative model for proper communion preparation. That is, preparing for communion with a high degree degree of intention and devotion was (as we saw in the exhortation) enjoyed upon all Anglicans, and the popularity of these works suggest that many Anglicans, lay and clergy alike, took the call to careful preparation very seriously indeed. If there is a risk here, a risk of communion being seen as a reward for good behavior rather than a gift for sinners of of partaking becoming an occasion for anxiety rather than joy, so too is there a seriousness and devotion that I find quite inspiring. We are, after all, doing an awesome thing when we approach the Table of the Lord.

I’m hoping to do more work on this genre, both here on Substack and more formally in my academic work. If there are ones that I find particularly edifying for contemporary use, I will certainly let you know. But for now, take this as a glimpse into a lost world of communion preparation. For while the text isn’t from that long ago, at least from a historian’s perspective – only about 150 years! – what it teaches about how to engage with communion feels incredibly distant from communion practice today. It is my hope that precisely this strangeness will help us better evaluate contemporary communion piety, both for what it gets right and for what it might have lost – and might help us think about how those good things that have been lost might be recovered.