Faith Works 10-6-18
Jeff Gill
World Communion Sunday
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Jesse Bader was, I'm proud to say, a minister of my particular Christian tradition, the Disciples of Christ.
He was born in Illinois, raised in Kansas, and got his higher education in Iowa, serving congregations in Kansas and Missouri, including a stint working for the YMCA serving the needs of troops overseas during World War I.
After 1920, Bader went on to serve in leadership for the general offices of our fellowship, and ultimately to the Federal Council of Churches (later the National Council of Churches of Christ). It was in his work with the wider church fellowship across the United States and Canada that he got a vision for a global fellowship meeting of our tradition, starting in 1930 the World Convention of Churches of Christ, which has met every few years ever since with representatives from 199 countries.
You can tell Bader had a passion for ecumenical work, and his move to the Federal Council of Churches only increased his interest in finding ways for Christians in general to express their unity in worship and service. But his move to national and global involvement took this Middle Western parson to places where he saw how the world was beginning to take a turn to conflict and crisis, and war was clearly on the horizon in 1939 . . . not unity.
Which led him to propose and work for a year to promote and launch World Communion Sunday, on October 6, 1940. The world was already descending into the World War that America was to enter later the next year, but Bader's vision and commitment told him that a regular occasion to remind Christians of the essentials that bind us together might be all the more important once the war, as all wars must, would end.
So it has been true that on the first Sunday of October ever since, for 78 years, many Christian traditions mark this particular Sunday as a time to include communion in their worship, and to remember that fellow Christians are doing so even as we are at our tables – all of us doing so in obedience to Jesus' call for us to do this "in remembrance of me."
Jesse Bader was actually noted more for his focus on evangelism than ecumenical work during his active career in the church. "Each one, win one" was his recurring phrase, and he continued in the wider denominational work, and as a national and global ecumenical officer to promote the priority of evangelism in Christian life. He pointed out at mass meetings and individual conversations again and again that the thing Jesus made primary could not reasonably be made by us a secondary matter. "Go, and make disciples" was the command of the Master that Jesse was faithful to, and his belief was that the service of communion was in essence an evangelistic more than a sacramental act.
To Bader, the heart of service at the Lord's Table was not so much the elements involved, but the invitation that was given. "Come and see," "taste and see," commands given again and again in scripture to invite others to this table, and in fellowship at the table of the Lord, by eating and drinking together, we see and taste and feel an invitation that goes even deeper, to become part of the family of God, to be sisters and brothers together in the fellowship of that holy meal.
So this great evangelist, who died in 1963, set up this minor festival of the churches in the hopes that we might use it to remember that ecumenism and evangelism are not in any way opposed to each other, but in fact should be understood as two sides of the same coin, inextricable one from the other.
The truth is we've found it hard to keep that in mind during the half-century and more since his death. The two fields and practices and denominational areas of interest have tended to grow apart, and branch into very different aspect of church life.
But the common celebration of the communion table quietly pushes those streams back towards each other, encouraging their outpouring to be rejoined and to pour out all the more strongly into a parched and cracked world. Evangelism and ecumenism can eat at the same table, just as tomorrow Christians around Licking County, and around the world will be mindfully doing as part of our worship. Not separately, but as one.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's looking forward to World Communion Sunday as he does every year. Tell him where you see unity growing at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
