The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb: Searching for Jesus’ Path of Power in a Church that Has Abandoned It

by Jamin Goggin

From the perspective of worldly power, this practice is meaningless and feeble. Perhaps this is the reason so many evangelical churches have dismissed Communion from regular practice in corporate worship. In the Lord’s Supper we proclaim a power in weakness for the sake of love that is foolishness to the world. Such a proclamation is the result of not merely the facets of the ritual, but the way in which the ritual is practiced. When Jesus established this meal as the centerpiece of community life for the people of the way, he did so in the context of washing his disciples’ feet. Jesus was demonstrating the way of power and leadership he was calling his followers into (John 13:15). Power in the kingdom gives birth to service, rather than power forcing servitude as the world continually presumes. But the table flattens out the hierarchies we like to create. At the table, we all come equally; and at the table, the power structures of the world collapse. As much as we tend to reject this idea, we do not come to this table only as individuals, but as members of a family, as brothers and sisters in Christ. The Communion Table is a place of partaking in the love of Christ at the cross, and therefore receiving the kind of love that Christ offers. Similarly, to partake in this meal is to receive and accept the call to love Christ’s body, and to give ourselves to one another in life and in death (John 15:13). The Communion Table, therefore, provides us with a pattern of reconciliat...