Given my previous post, you may think that my shift toward Catholicism started in 2018. However, I was far from the Catholic Church at that point. In fact, I was far from leaving the NICOC. As I have already pointed out, the NICOC teaches and believes that it is the “one true church.” I was not risking my salvation on a hunch and a gripe about a school in Tampa.
So I stayed.
We joined and left a couple congregations over the intervening years as we moved from place-to-place. Eventually, we found ourselves in Orlando and not attending any congregation for a while due to the COVID pandemic. Even after the pandemic ended in 2021, we still did not attend the congregation near us in person due to their masking policy. While I was not a fan of masks, that in-and-of-itself did not stop us from attending. Rather, the issue was our two-year-old son. He loved pulling them off our faces, and we did not have the patience to fight with him in the pews while trying to worship. Thankfully, that congregation had an online service, so we watched the sermons via a stream on YouTube.
By the time we were actually in a church building, it was 2022. I will admit that I was excited to be “back with the family.” While my faith had certainly not floundered during COVID, I felt that my Christian spirit had withered a bit. There is absolutely something to coming together with others of like mind in-person to set you back on the path to Christ.
When we started attending in-person, though, a new wrinkle developed. Or, rather, an old wrinkle had added a couple layers unto itself. A gripe I heard my dad make once growing up was how some NICOC congregations treated the Lord’s Supper. He complained that we rushed through it. At the time, I did not think much of it. However, once we came back to in-person worship in 2022, I understood. It used to be that the Lord’s Supper was passed around in a gold or silver platter. Three or four men would go up to the front “altar” table which held the platters; one would pray for the bread, and that would be passed around the pews; then one would pray for the fruit of the vine and that would be passed around.
Looking back, I understand why my dad felt like we rushed this process. Usually moving the platters between pews was a question of expediency; you would have men meet people in the middle of the pew and snatch the plate away to get it over to the next row. As soon as everyone had partaken, we were immediately on to the sermon.
In the post-COVID world, though, things were very different and far more egregious. The platters and the altar table had been done away with completely. Instead, now when you walked through the front door, the usher would point you toward a small table holding two baskets. One basket contained a bunch of little Ziplock bags. The other contained tiny two-sided plastic cups that looked a lot like an hourglass. In one side was a tiny piece of bread, while in the other was a tiny amount of grape juice.
Granted, the NICOC does not believe in the actual presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Despite believing in sola scriptura and being Bible literalists, Jesus telling his disciples, “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him,” repeatedly is considered symbolic by the NICOC.[1] [2] Even still, the idea that this was how we now treated the symbol of Christ’s body disgusted me. There was no reverence to it at all! You were expected to throw it in your pocket and hang on to it until after Bible class.
What upset me even more, though, was how we were instructed to handle “the body of Christ.” Following Bible class, all congregants meet in the main worship hall. We would sing a few songs and then one of the men would get up and give a short sermonette on the Lord’s Supper. In the old days, after this sermonette would be when three or four other men got up and prayed over the bread and fruit of the vine before distributing it. Now, though, the same man who gave the sermonette himself said a quick prayer for the bread and after we were expected to peel back the cellophane on our plastic cup and consume the quarter inch cracker.
While we did this, a timer appeared on the screen behind the pulpit: one minute. We were timed to consume the symbol of the Lord’s body and meditate on his sacrifice in a minute. The second the timer hit zero, the next prayer started for the fruit of the vine, then: another minute. The second that minute ended, the song leader began leading us in a hymn and then we were given a five minute meditation period; but not for the Lord’s Supper. Instead, the screen behind the pulpit provided us with a scripture to read and reflect on in anticipation of the sermon.
I cannot count the number of times my deeply held meditative prayer was interrupted by a sudden burst of song that did not match the solemnity of the moment we had just experienced. It got to the point that one time I literally was shaking with anger, and Karen suggested we go home—I agreed. I knew it was not healthy for me to be so angry at church, but I did not know what to do about it.
[1] John 6:51–63.
[2] Here I do not address the argument for the Eucharist. I have no doubt I will write about it in a future installment, but I have gotten sidetracked enough as is while telling this story.
The Crossroads Commentary 
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