Christ Episcopal Church
	Riverton, New Jersey
	COFFEE, TEA AND ME! --- God.. October 2007 Acts 2:42 The [disciples] devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. In this one verse St. Luke the Evangelist gives us a wonderful thumbnail description of life in the earliest Christian Church. From that time in Jerusalem during the 50s, to the earliest monastic houses in Egypt in the 300s to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, this little passage has been the definition of the most basic set of criteria for what it means to be church. It is simple and contains four steps: 1. apostles’ teaching, 2. fellowship, 3. breaking of the bread, 4. prayers. All of these occurred at the same time: the Lord’s Day (Sunday) and the same place (someone’s home). Church happened in people’s houses because: a) the congregations did not have the membership or the affluence to erect their own buildings; and b) the members of the earliest Christian communities still considered themselves Jewish. As such, they generally belonged to and worshipped in a synagogue and participated in the seasonal rituals of the Temple in Jerusalem. The Sunday schedule was something like this. After a time for exhortation and study (apostles’ teaching), the opportunity for offering petitions for themselves and others (the prayers), and sharing the sacred meal in the Eucharist (breaking of the bread), they had fellowship. What Luke calls ‘fellowship’ was very much what we would call today a pot luck or covered dish supper, where everyone brought something, and all were invited to share with each other. We have some sense about how this worked (or didn’t), because as is so often the case, the Corinthian congregation abused it and needed to be set right by St. Paul (I Corinthians 11:20-24). These Lord’s Day gatherings were a one stop experience, as people gathered from all over a city and congregated in this house church. They came willingly and expectantly, as they were a small and oppressed minority, and needed God’s and each others support to make it through the week. This sense of being apart, yet longing to be united I think is poignantly expressed in what is now our hymn 302. It comes from an ancient Christian poem contained in an early second century prayer book called the Didachē: Watch o’er thy Church, O Lord, in mercy, save it from evil, guard it still, perfect it in thy love, unite it, cleansed and conformed unto thy will. As grain, once scattered on the hillsides, was in this broken bread made one, so from all lands thy Church be gathered into thy kingdom by thy Son. Our spiritual ancestors felt like grain randomly strewn all over the place. So they longed to be one with God and connected to each other like the bread they shared in worship every week. The fellowship activity of the church’s worship tended to decline over time I suspect, because as numbers of believers increased, it became more difficult to share a meal in one place. But also, as Christianity became the universal religion of the Mediterranean world, everyone in each parish, be it in an urban neighborhood or rural village saw everyone all the time. There was no longer the same need to develop relationships with each other, since they often went back generations, and they all were of one faith. So, until the last 60 or so years, church buildings were built on this village model. There was space for worship, but not for fellowship. In the 19^th Century, with the rise of Sunday Schools, locations for instruction were either built or carved out of the church basement which then was glorified with an appropriate Episcopal appellation like “undercroft”. Yet fellowship took a back burner The campus of Christ Church is typical. The original church building was built in 1860 and moved our present location in 1870, but didn’t have room for any other purpose than worship. According to the Revd Dr. H.H. Weld, writing in 1882, it wasn’t until “the Fall of 1875 [that] a Sunday School building, a model of utility and good taste, was erected and presented to the Church by one of its officers…” But it was far too small for any major gathering. (If you want to have a look, it still stands as the shoe repair shop on Main Street). The present church building was erected in 1884 without fellowship space. An appropriately sized parish house built in 1895, yet there is no convenient connection to the church building. Clearly there was no thought that people might actually go from worshipping in the church to the parish house for fellowship. The neighborhood / village model of the church has changed drastically since the end of World War II. In fact, the vast extension of auto dependent suburbs has pretty much finished it off. In the growing areas of the South and Southwest, even Episcopal churches (a denomination not known for big congregations) have thousands of members located on major highways surrounded by large parking lots. I think the loss of this sense of community was reflected in the fact that four of the churches I have been associated with in my lifetime built parish halls for fellowship in the 1950s. So while Riverton still has a small town look and feel, its citizens are mobile and not dependent upon walking to shop, school or church. At this point, only about 20% of our parishioners still come from Riverton, and on any given Sunday, there are at least a dozen municipalities from two states represented in our pews. We as a parish family are more spread out than the people of the early church, and this scattering of the sheep makes the need for fellowship as important as it was for the church 2000 years ago. In response to this, the parish leadership is seeking to improve the opportunities for fellowship at Christ Church. At its September meeting, the Vestry authorized the creation of a Fellowship ministry that will help to coordinate and assist in developing opportunities for members of the parish and the wider community to gather together. I support and look forward to the work of this group (and if you are interested in parties and other fun events, please let me or Warden Harry Shea know). Also, after the 10 AM we are offering coffee, tea and the opportunity for conversation in the back of the church. It is low-key, 21^st century re-creation of the early Christian experience as found in Acts chapter 2. While the location is not ideal (and some may find the aroma of coffee brewing distracting!), at least we can take a few minutes to connect with each other before heading out into the world. And in doing so, we also connect with our spiritual ancestors for whom fellowship was as much a part of Sunday worship as the Holy Eucharist itself. Too soon we rise, we go our several ways, The Feast, though not the love, is past and gone… Yet, passing, points to the glad feast above, Giving us a foretaste of the festal joy… (Hymn 316) See you in church (& coffee hour)?! Richard+