The Practice Of The Lord's Supper
Although the liturgies of the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and certain Protestant communions may seem forbiddingly complex to members of nonliturgical Protestant traditions, the heart of the Communion service in all the liturgical groups is the great prayer of thanksgiving and blessing over the bread and wine. The prayer's roots extend all the way to the Jewish liturgy Jesus himself used. A combination of scholarly research and interconfessional discussion has brought a large degree of consensus about the main outlines of the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving in the early church. The fruits of this research and discussion, together with guidelines for constructing one's own form of this basic prayer, are offered in the following section.…
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Chapters & Articles in The Practice Of The Lord's Supper (5)
The Great Prayer of Thanksgiving follows a pattern given to us by Jesus himself, who built upon Jewish models. Alth…
Scholars played an important role in rediscovering how central the eucharistic prayer was in the very earliest hist…
The prayer of thanksgiving that follows was prepared for the plenary session of the Faith and Order Commission of t…
We find two main patterns for the prayer of thanksgiving at Communion services. One focuses primarily on Jesus' wor…
This eucharistic prayer uses traditional structure and elements to frame abundant biblical imagery, located especia…