Mary Lee Talbot
Staff Writer
At the 8 p.m. Sunday Sacred Song Service in the Amphitheater, the Department of Religion is planning an ecumenical Communion service. The title for the service is “With Whom Do We Pray?: A Service of Ecumenical Communion.”
For 130 years, worship at Chautauqua was a mix of preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, theological reflection and music to lift the soul. On Aug. 1, 2004, Chautauqua celebrated a historic milestone: For the first time, Communion — the Lord’s Supper — was celebrated during the 10:45 a.m. Sunday morning worship service.
The Rt. Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton, senior pastor at Chautauqua, and Joshua Stafford, director of sacred music and the Jared Jacobsen Chair for the Organist, felt it was appropriate to have the Communion service during Sacred Song in 2024. Because of the pandemic, there was a hiatus from 2019 to 2024.
“We decided that the 150th anniversary was a good time to re-establish the custom,” Sutton said.
Stafford added, “We decided to do it at Sacred Song since it is a more intimate service than morning worship.”
Planning for the service means finding some of the treasures used for Communion from 2004 to 2019. These treasures include Bishop John Heyl Vincent’s chalice; chalices made by students and faculty at the School of Art in 2004 for the first Eucharist in the Amp; and wooden bowls carved from trees at Chautauqua for the bread.
In addition to wine and grape juice, there will be gluten-free Communion wafers in place of bread. Planning also means looking for people to help set up for the service, for people to serve the Communion and people to help clear after the service.
In 2004, the late Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, with her deep ties to the ecumenical movement in the 20th century and into the 21st, thought it was time for Chautauquans to celebrate Communion in an ecumenical service, not just in separate denominational houses.
“Recent years have seen ecumenical breakthroughs, agreements of full Communion resolution on key church-dividing issues and a willingness to live toward full Communion as expressed in the World Council of Churches’ critical document Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (1983),” she wrote for the Daily in advance of the history-making service.
The Consultation on Church Union, begun in 1962 through the efforts of the United Presbyterian Church in the USA and the Episcopal Church, and its descendant, Churches of Christ Uniting, provided the atmosphere for congregations to take the World Council document to heart.
“Any sign of Christian unity, done with the grace of God in a broken world, is a sign for Christians, for Jews, for Muslims. Any sign that is meant to include people means that the broken can be healed,” Campbell said in 2014. “I have had Communion all over the world, and rarely in grand cathedrals. Most of the time, it was in houses and in places where people’s lives were in danger, but the spirit was very much there. Even in China, we were able to share the bread and wine.”
