Should gender matter in administering the Lord's Supper on Sunday?

If you attend a church (Protestant) that has a weekly observance of the communion sacrament (referred to as the Lord's Supper for the remainder of this essay), does your church require that only men are eligible to “serve on the table?”  I realize that immediately for some reading this, the language already sounds weird.  Hang with the essay to get my bigger point on this issue.  This essay is more practical than theological, but it certainly has theological undertones.  

The practice of observing the Lord’s Supper goes all the way back to the first century church.  The significance of the Lord’s Supper is theologically connected to the Old Testament Passover feast.  Jesus, drawing on the theological connection between the bread and the wine of the Passover meal from Exodus, instructs His disciples to continue the observance with newly assigned symbolism.  The bread is now the body of Jesus, and the wine is now His blood that will be poured out on the cross in a few short days.  Not central to this essay, some scholars suggest that Jesus actually instituted the Lord’s Supper during a pre-Passover meal that traditionally took place on Thursday prior to the Friday evening Passover meal.  It works better literarily if it was Friday evening’s Passover meal because it better connects Jesus’s foreshadowing of His own imminent execution and the narrative connection to the Exodus story in the Old Testament from which the Passover feast originates. 

But nonetheless, the point is Jesus is sharing a meal with his disciples and takes the opportunity to use the power of metaphor to make a deeply spiritual connection that He is indeed the slain Passover lamb that will take away the sins of the world.  Over time, the early church would continue to observe this meal-sacrament on every first day of the week (see 1 Corinthians 11). 

While this essay is not intended to get bogged down in Church history, it is important to understand some of the background music with the sacraments as it relates to gender dominance and the administration of the sacraments.  For a lot of reasons, some having to do with the evolution of the early church and her forms and practices that would not be codified until well after the first century, men held the dominant roles connected with the sacraments after about 300 A.D. when the Roman emperor Constantine Christianized the west.  

From this point, the Church became an extension of governmental powers and structures.  As a result, the Catholic Church functioned as a superpower in the lives of all people.  It will not be until the Reformation that this power entity would be challenged and eventually re-cast and re-organized around a different set of theological doctrines and practices.  For centuries, the Catholic Church only empowered men to administer church sacraments.  It helps that during most of these centuries, women were denied a lot of social and religious access to power positions anyway.  As a result, some two-thousand years later, there are thousands of churches that administer the Lord’s Supper (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or even quarterly) that only allow men to function in whichever capacity needed to facilitate the sacrament. 

Now to my observation this morning in church, I attend a church that is part of a larger tribe that administers the Lord’s Supper weekly.  This particular church has its roots all the way back to pre-civil war era in our city.  For those many years, men were only allowed to pass the trays (which is essentially the serving part) and pray or speak prior to each emblem being served.  This gender “no-fly” zone is part of a bigger narrative around gender roles in church.  This same church has recently come to their own conclusions that it is time to join many other similar churches in our tribe that have lifted the “no-fly” zone on some gender roles.  In fact, we attended a prominent church in Dallas that allows women to pass the trays, and I suspect, when they first made that concession it was, and is for some, still controversial. 

As I think about the ways men have preserved and created power relationships over women throughout history, not just in churches, I am reminded that it doesn’t take very long in our society for men to create rules and regulations that are fraternal in nature and almost always operate in tandem relationship with a male created subservient category for women. One contemporary example is the social and cultural milieu on many public college university campuses.  President Jimmy Carter, in his recent book, identifies the male/female caste systems between fraternities and sororities that lead to very troubling trafficking. There isn’t the room or the effort in this essay to discuss many of these social constructions that have lasted well-over a millennia, but for the sake of the Lord’s Supper, I am more convinced for non-theological reasons that men should be the only ones that serve this particular sacrament.

Before you unplug, let me explain.  I think men should be the only ones to serve in this particular sacrament in our churches because it is one of the only ways that men can weekly take up the metaphorical towel and water basin and serve our ladies in our churches.  It is ironic that the very dinner in which Jesus instituted the Supper (and yes, I realize that there are probably only two mainstream evangelical denominations that would argue that Jesus is not instituting in this instance in as much as he was instituting foot washing when he modeled that act of humility), it is probably a woman who is preparing the meal and is probably serving the meal.  And, yet, somehow through a well-established set of cultural norms and religious forms and functions, women are denied social, and sadly, theological upward mobility.  I should pause and give a voice to many ladies I know that say, “I could care less about passing a tray during a service.” Or, “I think men should serve in those roles anyway because I believe God ordered men to hold positions of authority over women based on order of creation.”  

I realize this is not the intended practice or language of churches that have opened up gender access to their Lord’s Supper practices.  But isn’t that what we are really doing consciously or not?  Forget that there are zero scriptural references to make a solid theological argument for both the way we currently conduct the Lord’s Supper (not in a meal setting as practiced and modeled in the first century church of Corinth or meal setting Jesus has with his disciples) and the gender prohibitions that have lasted this long.  I have read and heard the logic around gender roles on this issue that I am currently not too interested in getting back on board this circular train.  I get that women were not given authority in the first century for whichever reason you believe (God ordained or cultural), but something that is intended to be a meal that connects the spiritual meaning to Jesus’s imminent execution and the ways we believers are able to continue to commune with Him spiritually, has been relegated to yet another “office” reserved for only people with rightly designated anatomy.  For a more recent rendering of this type of biblical proof texting, see court case Fremont Christian School v. The United States Appellate Court over the issue of providing health benefits to women in 1986.  In this case, the Assembly of God's K-12 Christian school only offered to pay health insurance to men at their school because they believed that the Bible legislated that since men were to be the head of the household, then they would only pay for insurance for heads of households. Keep in mind, 95% of teachers in this country are women.  As a result, they lost because their practices were deemed discriminatory.  I would have to search  long and hard to find a person in my networks that would disagree with the Ninth Circuit's ruling.

And now, we men have convinced ourselves that we are ready to give this role over to ladies.  I chuckle a bit when I hear that this act of empowering ladies by letting them stand on an aisle and pass a pewter plate with the unleavened bread that they probably made (if your church still uses that kind of bread) and cups they probably filled (if your church uses more than one cup, and I sure hope they use more than one cup these days) somehow is a way of saying that the kingdom of God is not about segmenting or devaluing based on gender.  Again, I hear the well-articulated arguments for this modest access, but I am not buying it.  In this case, and this case only for the purpose of this essay, I am saying men we need to pick up the slack and serve our ladies.  And our service does not need to be something that we establish as a gender Ace card we play undergirding our religious power monopoly.  Instead, we simply let those who partake of the sacrament know that we are doing this for multiple reasons: reminder of Christ’s death and resurrection, our new life in Christ, and as a reminder that God has called us to love our wives as Christ loved the Church. 

I suspect if your church is anything like the ones I have attended, the ladies are the real servant-leaders.  While they don’t get the titles, pay, places in the board rooms for the elder and deacon meetings (And you know what? They don’t serve for those reasons anyway.), they do the heavy lifting of many of the elements in our churches that keep us growing.  For that reason alone, men stand up and pass the plate as a modest gesture and message to our ladies that in a world and history that has and continues to expect service from women, we wish to serve you in this particular means of grace in our churches.  Churches if you have come to your own conclusions that it is time to ask the ladies to pass the plate, be careful that overtime you don’t relegate the entire task to all of the ladies in your community of faith.  Some of the most meaningful things that we do in our churches that facilitate relationship and community are the things our ladies are already doing.  Let's not pile on with yet another thing that we men will deal away if given the opportunity.

Please resist the temptation of proof texting on why you think the Bible teaches that women cannot hold authority over men, and that women ought to remain silent in our churches.  I am only commenting on one particular act of service in our churches that has its roots in a very intimate conversation between Jesus and His disciples.  From this, we have somehow flipped it into an office of which access is only granted through anatomical makeup.  This entire reasoning seems disjoined in 2015.  Confession, our church is large enough that I never have to stand up and pass the plate.  To be candid, I sometimes think that churches keep their gender fly-zones intact because they realize that they have waves of men that if they didn't have this simple task of passing a plate, they would disengage all together.  Maybe call it what it is, "We have churches that would much rather sit idle and let the ladies take care of the work." I don't specialize in forecasting, but I tend to suspect that we are a generation away from a lot of the "no-fly" zones from going away.  And then we will be left with the same set of questions that confronted the first century Christians.  How do we live out the story of Jesus in our lives so that the world knows we are called to a particular kind of holy living that emits a particular grace filled aroma that is pleasing to our Heavenly Father.  There is little room for jockeying for social positions of power when we strap on the cloth and take up the water basin to serve.