This is another part of a brief look at my journey in appreciating The Lord’s Supper. The prologue looked at the The Deal in the Meal, where the first part gave an indication of my initial church upbringing and its effect on my view of the meal.
In this first part my perspective of the meal did not play a huge part in my life. Its observance was something done more by routine and ritual, rather than out of a sense of something deep, intimate and relational going on.
In spite of that, while I was growing up at home in Wellingborough, my Mum had a love for Andrae Crouch and it was in those initial years that I came across Sweet Communion. At the time, the tune meant little to me other than being a decent filler tune that came before my favourite tune on that Finally album called All The Way. Yet, as God would have it, there was enough in that song to bring me back to it and for it have a greater significance to me over the years.
A lot happened to me in terms of spiritual development when I left home and went to university. From my sheltered upbringing, I was exposed to all manner of things, including different expressions of Christian life.
I knew of it when I was in Wellingborough but there was no reason to get caught up in them for any reason. After all I was a part of the true church so what else was there to learn?
In His mercy, God began to address some of the things that had been assumed up to that point and challenged me to develop a faith in Him for myself rather than rely on my parents’ faith.
In the light of that challenge a number of things went up in the air of uncertainty. Interestingly, for all the various breakthroughs in faith that took place from 1997, it still took the best part of 7 years for the Lord’s Supper issue to be addressed properly.
In that time I remember having one or two awful and harrowing experiences of Lord’s Supper. These were based around being in a stale spiritual environment.
The gathering was heavily into traditional forms and rituals like the men in black and women in white deal, and the separation of men and women and only the ordained dishing out the bread and wine. It was a ritualistic observance of the bread, wine and foot-washing. In and of themselves these traditions were not wrong, but their adherence didn’t add or highlight anything about the purpose of the time together.
In some of those awful times, there were some ugly scenes that were justified as being about spiritual warfare, but actually left a bad taste in the mouth about how church could get messy in meaningless utterances and conduct with little in the way of edification. Those experiences finally got me to wake up and explore for myself what this Lord’s Supper business was all about.
That awakening would change everything. As I’ll share more of in the next part of this journey.
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
C. L. J. Dryden
Life With CD 
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