Introduction

Somewhere in the fever dream that was late March 2020, I sent out an email to the members of the 787 Collective. I made a commitment in that email to send resources twice a week and offered to hold space once a week at noon on Tuesdays as a way to connect with each other and share both laments and celebrations as we walked through this time of trial. Like most faith communities around the world, congregations in our Collective were called to pivot on a dime. People found themselves managing their own anxieties around this uncertain reality while also bringing ministries online and working to remain in service to their communities, especially those deeply and directly affected by the onset of COVID 19. We were all finding our way through the dark, hesitant and unsure, but showing up weekly to discern each next faithful step in this new reality. As the months wore on, small in-roads were made as to how to survive these wilderness times. Or so we thought. Retrospectively, March and April of 2020 were only harbingers of months ahead in which many “unprecedented” new realities would change us all.

In late May of 2020, the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning that ensued brought the reality of this small community’s commitment to a new level of intimacy and understanding. Those of us who are privileged to be white-bodied began to unpack and engage the work that was upon us, actively pursuing our own journeys to understand the implications of white supremacy in our lives, communities, and churches. To remain in integrity, and to serve as allies to our siblings of color, it was time for us to change and for the conversations we facilitated around racial justice to grow increasingly honest. Truth edged from being a nicety to a necessity, and our capacity to hold space for each other while engaging the painful reality of both our hurt and culpability at the hands of racism’s destructive nature expanded. One of our elders describes it as a commitment “to tell the whole truth,” and this commitment became a staple of what it meant for us to be together in a time of suffering and upheaval.

Was it then that our community began to shift from a weekly life raft in the early pandemic to a firm place holder and joyful shelter from the storm? A commitment emerged among us to show up across generations, across race, and across faith backgrounds and to search earnestly for Christ’s call to be in communion with God, with ourselves, and with each other. A commitment of curiosity toward this call, and to how it shows up in our daily lives, is something many of us have in common. While we adjusted to the restrictions and risks of the pandemic, we still seemed to be finding our way into something new.

Somehow, along that way, we found our feast. Change began the painful but redemptive work of flooding the world we knew before, and the faithful folks each Tuesday had no choice but to ride that wave. Our feast was the time we held together each week, the life raft we fashioned to make sense of the world and learn how to love better and more fully in the midst of these changes. Showing up and making space: This was our act of communion. Bearing burdens, sharing celebrations and laments, and listening whole-heartedly were the liturgy. Zoom was our table. The body and blood of Jesus bore out in the desire each week to understand the world and each other in the light of Christ’s life and values. How do we integrate these values at every turn in this new world? How do we repent when we fail?

In many ways, communion never felt so alive to me. During these years, with each Tuesday, it moved from liturgical practice to embodied endeavor. Growing up largely Presbyterian, I’d always heard people refer to “celebrating” the sacraments. It felt odd, because even though I knew communion was special and I held it dear, it never felt anything akin to a celebration as I understood it. The word “celebrate” stems from the Latin celebratus which means “much-frequented; kept solemn.” Celebrate is the past participle of celebrare, which insinuates the act of “assembling to honor,” as well as “to publish; sing praises of; practice often.” Considering celebration in this light, it was true that each weekly gathering was a solemn occasion in their own right, and much frequented: We’ve gathered almost 121 times at last count. We assemble to honor the God that brings us together and support each other in the work of Christian practice through life events both big and small, encouraging and honoring the faithful, yet different, ways these practices emerge in each individual’s life.

Time persists, as do we. Life does not get easier. As I write this, the country is recovering from two mass shootings over the past two weeks. In one, twenty-one people, nineteen of them children, were shot and killed in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, 160 miles southeast of where many of us call home. The week before that, ten people were killed in Buffalo because of their skin color while they shopped for groceries, an overt hate crime carried out by a young person misguided by racism and white supremacist ideology. Yet every week we persevere, nourished by the sight of familiar faces asking hard questions in unfamiliar circumstances. We take the time to see each other, to behold each other in the hard and the happy moments of life, to take time out of otherwise busy schedules to prioritize relationships, learning about our commonalities and our differences, and feasting on the common desire we share to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.

The time we spend together each week feels like communion to me, and in the following pages you’ll see how those of us that gather continue to question, understand, and celebrate communion in our own lives and faith communities. Keeping the feast means dwelling at the Table that we find in the center of our lives and congregations. For some people in our Collective, this means drawing closer to the mystery of God. For some, it means stepping back to re-assess. For others, it is a perpetual call to the work of justice. And yet others find communion at the margins where they choose to serve, or in the liminal spaces we all inhabit from time to time. For each of us, the call to Christian fellowship was our first, and often still our primary, call to communion. How each of us in the church, and every modern faith community, will continue to keep the feast is the pressing question of our generation. That is perhaps the greatest lesson of the last two years, and the final word of hope. Just as our faith instructs us that death is not the end, living through hardship and isolation affirms for us that keeping God’s feast is an on-going and agile endeavor, movable and transmissible over time. For where two or three are gathered, there is God. We are not exempt from the suffering of this world, but in the best of Christian communities, we are able to hold spaces that help us endure them. What else is communion if not this?

It’s my hope that something you read here might spark a desire to participate in the creation of that experience wherever you find yourself, with an eye toward building intergenerational community and honest spaces where diversity thrives. Participating in this feast with my Tuesday friends opened a new chapter in my heart, and a renewed hope in me for the church. It brought into fruition a Christian space that I’ve longed for many times, but as an adult, had yet to experience. It’s shown me how to see to believe, a maxim that seems antithetical to faith when we’re often told that belief is the precursor for realization. While at times and in cases this might be the truth, it seems the church has rested on this concept of “believing to be” for too long. Our call now is to faithful action. We must participate in our universal communion actively and without abandon. We must work to become the change we wish to see in our lives, in the church, and in the world. And we can not do it alone.

Martha Lynn Coon, the former Director of Congregational Innovation at Austin Seminary, is a co-founder of The 787 Collective. She is also a writer, blogger, and mother of two. Her work resides at the intersection of faith, creativity, storytelling, and justice.