The thorniest problem for the Liturgical Home Church Movement [LHCM] will be the selection of Eucharistic Ministers for the various home churches. To begin this discussion, let us set the likely environment we will be operating in.
As secular political persecution increases and as internal persecution in the institutional churches increases, small groups of faithful Christians will be forced to congregate in a new form of underground Church that we are calling the home churches. These may be groups of 2 to 7 or perhaps more persons. They will not have any ties to any institutional ecclesiastical body. In many ways, they will be on their own to establish how worship will happen within their particular home church. For those who come from a liturgical background, there will likely be desire to maintain a liturgical worship environment.
Central to this desire will be a commitment to follow the command of Jesus which says “do this in remembrance of me”. This command from Maundy Thursday is the foundation of the Eucharistic Feast, more commonly known as Holy Communion. In the tradition of Holy Communion, an ordained Priest or Pastor consecrates bread and wine to be the sacramental elements of Holy Communion. How those sacramental elements are viewed in different denominations ranges from the absolute body and blood of Christ to a memorial of Christ’s body and blood.
The key challenge here is who will perform the Eucharistic Rite? In Liturgical Theology, the Priest [or Pastor] is a person of deep Christian discipleship, a person of Biblical, Theological, and Ministry training, who is ordained, or formally selected by other ministers of the institutional church to carry out the work of consecration of the sacramental elements. From the Old Testament onward, the primary work of the Priest has been to “offer the sacrifice”. In the Eucharistic Rite it is the job remembrance of the one pure self-giving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the Cross.
Our first assumption is that a home church will have to make this choice autonomously. By design they will have no link to an institutional church and its hierarch of bishops, priests, deacons, etc. The LHCM is deliberately not setting itself up as some type of hierarchal presence to the home churches; our mission is merely to provide resources.
So, how will the home church make this determination of who the Eucharistic Minister should be? Here we will offer some guidelines to stimulate further thought.
· The person should be someone of good Christian character
· They should pray and read scripture daily
· They should be baptized
· They should be familiar with the basic elements of Christian Theology
· They should come from a liturgical church background
· They need not be the primary leader of the home church group
· They should sense some call from God for the Eucharistic Minister work
· They should be willing to hear confessions and pronounce absolution
· They should be willing to undertake the self-training resources provided by the LHCM for Eucharistic Ministers
· Their choice by the home church group should be unanimous after prayer and discussion
· They should maintain a deep sense of humility regarding the work of a Eucharistic Minister and understand they do this work by God’s will only
The chosen Eucharistic Minister will then have the responsibility to craft the model liturgy provided by the LHCM to meet the needs of their local home church.
It is envisioned that the Eucharistic Minister for a given home church is the minister for that church alone. He or she will have no authority to function as a minister for another home church unless that other home church explicitly requests his/her service because they have not been able to select their own minister. For safety, home churches should ideally be totally autonomous.
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