The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) practices what it calls the open table: communion offered to all, without examination of doctrine, without test of baptismal status, without verification of moral record.
It is one of the most radical practices in contemporary Christianity. And it is routinely domesticated into a slogan.
Larry Love — my co-author on Called — has stood at this table for thirty years. He has seen what the open table actually costs when it is practiced without qualification. When the person who presents themselves is genuinely the wrong person by the standards of the congregation’s comfort. When the welcome that was easy in principle becomes costly in practice.
Here is what he has observed, and what the middle chapters of Called are trying to work out theologically:
The open table is not primarily a policy. It is a practice of genuine presence. It requires of the minister and the congregation the same capacity that the watching mind requires of the individual: the refusal to flee from who is actually there.
The person who shows up at the table does not show up as a demographic category. They show up as themselves — with a specific history, a specific longing, a specific wound that has brought them to this table on this Sunday. The open table — the genuinely open table — requires that the person officiating and the community gathered be actually present to that specific person, rather than managing their welcome through the performance of a policy.
Alfred North Whitehead’s term for this quality of presence is prehension — the full reception of the other into one’s own experience, without reduction, without domestication. The open table is the eucharistic enactment of prehension. It is the communal practice of receiving the actual person — whoever they are — into the common life of the community.
This is harder than a policy. It is also, when it is achieved, the most profound thing the church does.
Larry Love brought this to every chapter of Called. Not the theology of the open table. The lived experience of maintaining it.
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The open table is the subject of the third essay of Called: A Faith for the Forward-Looking. Available on Amazon KDP. fredericjonesbooks.com
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