THE AGAPE MEAL IN THE
LATE NINETEENTH-AND EARLY
TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRETHREN IN CHRIST CHURCH
Heidi Oberholtzer Lee
From its salted pickles to its red beets and snitz pie, the love feast, or agape, of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brethren in Christ Church represented for this religious community a central moment and site of pious practice, sacred eating, theological wrangling, and evangelization by gastronomy. The love feast had been a characteristic and distinctive practice of the church from its emergence in 1780 among the rural German-speaking population of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.1 It continued in popularity and practice through the nineteenth century and still exists in many Brethren in Christ congregations today. Other now extinct denominations, such as the German Seventh Day Baptist Church, which reached its height in the mid eighteenth century, as well as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Glasites or Sandemanians, also practiced the love feast. The historic and contemporary congregations of the Moravians, Primitive Methodists and United Methodists, Old Order River Brethren, Church of the Brethren, Catholic Neocatechumenal Way, Mennonites, and some Masonic traditions, likewise, in many cases, maintain a tradition of some form of love feast. For the Brethren in Christ in particular, the love feast, with its tradition of congregational feet washing, fellowship meal, and communion meal, once required of each of its host churches many months of planning, food enough for two days of feasting by hundreds of (or even one thousand) church members and visitors, and overnight housing. The typical event included a time of personal testimonies for most of a Saturday; Saturday evening with a feet washing ceremony, fellowship dinner, and subsequent sharing of a communion (Eucharistic) meal; Sunday morning with a church service and afternoon with sharing, preaching, and religious instruction.2 The order of service varied, though, from one congregation to the next or from one region to the next.3 Congregations sometimes held the services and meals in barns, church buildings, and homes, and occasionally even outdoors. In the late 1800s and early 1900s it was not unusual for a congregation to hold at least two love feasts per year, one in the spring and one in the fall, sometimes intentionally planned to coincide with the full moon so that congregants would have sufficient light by which to travel home on Sunday.4 Today most Brethren in Christ and Brethren love feasts consist primarily of feet washing and one potluck meal for local congregants and generally include a time of sharing, church services, and sometimes baptisms as well.5
This chapter focuses particularly on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century lay and clerical narratives and remembrances of the significance of the love feast. In the church’s history, at the turn of the century, the love feast served as a notably pivotal ceremony by which church members could assert their sect’s distinctiveness even while gesturing toward an ecumenical welcome and gentle embrace of those not a part of the church.6 The Brethren in Christ traditionally thought themselves called to be “a peculiar people,” to be “separate from the world,” literally separatist, but they also showed interest in demonstrating hospitality to their neighbors for the purposes of evangelization, charity, and simply reaching out toward others with the love of Christ. Because religious meals can help a church articulate its own standards for holy living in contradistinction to the “worldly” values held by the surrounding culture,7 the Brethren in Christ love feasts both drew together the community and set them apart from others. Furthermore, lay members celebrated the spiritual refreshment and renewal they received at and from the love feast as well as the excitement and socialization it provided, especially for young people. They remarked on the physical expressions of faith the feast prompted, evidence of “somatic piety.”8 Like early American Baptists, the Brethren in Christ experienced through their love feasts Commensality and Love Feast an “embodied faith … as belief was experienced through the body.”9 The Brethren in Christ looked for spiritual development to bloom from their bodily fellowship and ritual feasting.10
While the seemingly separatist “Brethren” distinguished themselves from many other churches and religious groups by their plain dress, untrimmed beards, pacifism, forswearing of oaths, practice of the “holy kiss,” and baptism by trine immersion, their language and descriptions of their love feasts reveal their connection to larger religious trends and controversies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During that time, American separation of church and state, as from the early days of the nation, continued to allow for and promote the proliferation of many new Protestant denominations, sects, and religious groups. The authority of these groups did not go unchallenged, however, as many of them struggled to preserve moral and social control of their communities during the late nineteenth-century rapid urbanization of America. Propelled by a dramatic increase both in international immigration and in emigration of rural populations to urban centers that offered economic opportunity, cities hosted large populations of people unacquainted with and sometimes uninterested in the beliefs and behaviors of the churches in their midst. These churches subsequently often initiated programs of social reform to try to help educate the urban poor, with the goal that the poor adopt as much as possible the manners and beliefs of these social workers, reflected, for example, in their habits of hygiene.11 In this period, most American Protestants strongly emphasized a relationship between sanitation and faith. A purity or cleanliness of body, they believed, could demonstrate or even develop a purity of heart, a spiritual conversion, or a spiritual wellness.12
The Brethren in Christ remained largely and intentionally separate from much of mainline American Protestantism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because of their linguistic, ethnic, and theological particularities and emphases as well as their situatedness in still predominantly rural and agricultural communities, but they did reflect their connection to the larger American Protestant world in a few significant ways. The letters and opinion pieces they sent to their church publications, and particularly to the church newsletter the Evangelical Visitor, called for congregants to improve their love feast, for example, with both greater hygiene and better conduct, as well as to eschew wine. Thus, like their contemporaries, the Brethren in Christ linked sanitation and etiquette with spirituality. Abstention from alcohol similarly associated foodways with spiritual health and was a hallmark of nineteenthcentury American religious controversy and alimentary reform at large, especially as related to Eucharistic debates.13 This suggests that there was some continuity between or even influence of the larger Protestant world on this small denomination. Like many other Protestant churches at the time, the Brethren in Christ also engaged in missions, revivalism, and evangelism.14 Whereas their denomination was not characterized by the extensive urban social work movements of other contemporaneous denominations, their church documents about overseas missions and some urban missions reflect that they, too, were grappling with how to respond to the differing practices of hygiene and behaviors that they encountered in the peoples that they had attempted to convert and who, in many cases, had then become a part of their own church.
While Brethren in Christ archival material about the love feast shows the denomination to be rooted in many of the same cultural issues and debates that concerned other denominations of their day, these documents, at the same time, contain some material clearly unique to their own denomination’s internal debates. Brethren in Christ pastors, for instance, wrote treatises on the love feast that insisted that congregants not conflate the love feast as a whole with the communion meal in particular. They argued that, while the love feast had been practiced in the New Testament, Christ had only instituted the communion meal, not the love feast. Clearly, nineteenth-century members of the Brethren in Christ community had elevated the love feast to such importance, and articulated its “gustatory theology” through a language of feasting and commensality, that pastors felt it imperative to offer a corrective to what had effectively become for some church members a sacrament regularly celebrated by this decidedly nonsacramental church.
LOVE FEAST AS ORDINANCE
Because the historical Brethren in Christ Church generally rejected the language of “sacraments,” associating sacraments with Roman Catholicism and “works-based salvation,” the clergy tended to emphasize the love feast as falling under “the means of grace,” as opposed to “the doctrine of the sacraments.” The love feast, explained Bethany Biblical Seminary professor William M. Beahm (1896–?), “is regarded as one of God’s means of grace,” and the “character and intention of the minister, and especially of the communicant, are important for the validity” of the ordinance, as opposed to a Catholic sacrament that would not depend upon the purity or intention of the priest or communicant.15 According to most clerical descriptions of the love feast, the feast should entail three or sometimes four parts: a time of preparation, feet washing, fellowship meal, and communion meal (or Eucharist, though the Brethren in Christ seldom, if ever, labeled it as such). The time of preparation and of feet washing are often folded into one broadly conceived time of preparation. Rarely do lay accounts of the love feast preserve so clearly the distinction between these four parts.
In Jesse Engle’s 1889 Evangelical Visitor article titled “The Lord’s Supper,” which was later compiled with his other articles into a short treatise “approved by a Committee of the Church and published by order of the General Council,” Engle explains to readers that love feasts, also called “feasts of charity” or “agapæ” in Greek, “were in practice among the early Christians as seen in Jude, verse 12, and incorporated but were clearly not the same as the communion meal. The author insists that charity was “the main characteristic” of the love feast and that all who were able to contribute food or funds were expected to do so. He further cites the writings of church historians to underscore his point that while love feasts in the early church were “frequently celebrated in connection with the communion … not one of these writers makes any reference to these feasts as a command, given either by the Savior or his Apostles; should these feasts have been considered indispensable, by our Savior, we would have much reason to regret the imperfection of the Gospel, since they are nowhere commanded therein.” By contrast, the author points out, Jesus clearly commanded and instituted the practice of the communion meal, as recorded in Matthew 26:26, 27, Mark 14.:22, 23, and Luke 22:19, 20, and confirmed in 1 Cor. 11:24, 25.16 His insistence on separating out the communion meal from the love feast as a whole suggests that at least some laity had conflated the two or did not clearly understand that the church practiced the former in response to Christ’s direct command while it considered the latter to be an ordinance, or holy practice, but one instituted by humans, not by God himself. This distinction was especially pressing as the church sought to distinguish its own stance on the love feast from that of the Dunkers, who had elevated the love feast to the status of a sacred meal that could perhaps be placed on the same table as the fellowship meal.17 Thus church teaching on this matter served both to reiterate the Brethren in Christ’s own position on the love feast and to distinguish its position from that of other churches that might influence its congregants.
LAY REFLECTIONS ON THE IMPORTANCE AND
REMEMBRANCE OF THE LOVE FEAST
The Evangelical Visitor, an official Brethren in Christ church publication self-described in many of its issues as “a semi-monthly religious journal for the exposition of true, practical piety and devoted to the spread of Evangelical truths and the Unity of the church,” yields a wealth of lay response to the love feast, their memories of how their home congregations had recently practiced the ordinance of the love feast, and what this ordinance meant to them. These lay accounts typically take the form of letters written to the church paper, first published in 1887 and continuing its publication and circulation until 2004. These writers generally communicate their sentiments through simple and unadorned language that concisely relates their deeply felt religious experiences and describes their reenactments of the rituals that their church traced back to the interactions of Christ and the apostles. As contemporary Brethren pastor Frank Ramirez writes in The Love Feast, “Jesus says we should wash feet. We wash feet. The text says we should share a meal. So we eat something.”18 This self-aware literalism and terse explanatory style characterizes many of these accounts. Perhaps this style at least partially reflects the fact that, as late as the second half of the nineteenth century, many Brethren in Christ church members spoke only German until they went to elementary school, so their prose could display some linguistic discomfort with English or qualities of bilingual language processing. Furthermore, the Brethren in Christ emphasis on humility and the church’s religiocultural resistance to or distrust of education in general fostered both a habitual and cultivated plain style of expression.19
These lay reports of love feasts tend to follow a certain form—first an account of the location and date of the feast, followed by a short remark on the weather, numbers of people in attendance, and from where they came—their towns, their counties, their states, or even their countries of origin. Clearly, the further the congregants had traveled to attend the feast, the more the local congregants felt the honor of their presence and emphasized how these distant church relations were now bound to them more effectively after having communed with them. As S. G. Engle notes in a report about a love feast held at Philadelphia Mission in 1900, “What helped to make it a blessed feast, must be largely attributed to the visiting brethren and sisters, who came spirit-filled, and we believe that they were the better for their having been with us. … We invite the brotherhood to pay us repeated visits as a mingling with each other is for improvement.”20 The age of the attendees also occasionally bore mention, as in the case of an anonymous 1907 account, which explains that the “participants ranged in age from ten and twelve years to upwards of eighty. A fair proportion were young in years. Thus, time after time do we observe these memorial services.”21 The awkwardly inserted “thus” suggests here that at least this author found the age of the participants a marker of the important continuity of this ritual from one generation to the next, not an unusual phenomenon in cookbooks and recipes, as these means of transmission importantly function to preserve memories from one generation to the next, create continuity, and transcend time to bind together different generations.22 Henry Davidson, at one point editor of the Evangelical Visitor, anticipates this historical insight, remarking on the importance of passing ministerial responsibility from one generation to the next, which the planning of the love feast and its attendant testimonies highlight. He writes, “To those who are younger but upon whom devolves much of the responsibility of the work now feel that the responsibility is very great [sic].”23 More often, though, letter writers comment on the youth in attendance as a celebration that their congregations clearly have a future and that beliefs are effectively being transmitted across the generational divide. George Detwiler remarks that “some yet young in years, were present, and their readiness in testimony gave added interest to the service.”24 S. G. Engle further notes of the Philadelphia love feast, “Such fathers [visiting lay members from nearby counties] in Israel are a real help to the younger ones here.”25 Mentoring of youth through the love feasts clearly was a valued function of this ritual.
Often a summary of the content of the love feast testimonies and sermons followed the record of attendance, with a short remark on who delivered these addresses and, at times, an account of the attendee’s personal spiritual response to the event, but more often an assessment of how the event was experienced communally. Record of community response may have given these writers what they thought to be an appropriate venue for or veiled expression of their individual response, for, had they focused exclusively upon their personal response, they might have run the risk of displaying pride, egotism, or self-importance. In 1891 Evangelical Visitor editor Henry Davidson pleaded with congregants to provide the newsletter with accounts of the “result of these meetings,” recommending that congregants “not think these accounts should be in that stereotyped style that so often is the case, but meetings and the interests in meetings should be given as though we felt the interest.” He charges, “If there is any special circumstance connected with it that is especially interesting let us make a note of that, if the attendance is large, if the experiences are especially warm, if the behaviour is good, if the preaching is with more than ordinary power, if sinners are awakened or converted, if any unite with the church, give all these incidents.” He reassures his congregants that while “some think these accounts and the church news look like bragging … we don’t. … An honest faithful account of God’s work … will be to his glory.” He reiterates that “it is not boasting, it is only telling what God has done even though he has made you or some other brother or sister the instrument by which the work was accomplished.”26 Subsequent reading of issues of the Evangelical Visitor suggest that few congregants took up his charge to break away from the stereotypical form of report that Davidson discouraged, perhaps because the appearance of pride or braggadocio was indeed so frowned upon by and a particular concern of the Brethren in Christ church. However, the very “stereotyped style” of the report, as Davidson calls it, may indicate more than simply a resistance to boastfulness but likely also a fond adherence to the standardization of form of what essentially functions like a recipe or cookbook, the predictable formatting of important gustatory memory for easily referenced communication to other congregations and younger church members.
LOVE FEAST PREPARATIONS
As with any feast, the love feast required extensive individual and communal preparation. Prior to partaking of the meals, church leaders charged congregants to engage in a period of self-examination and to consider whether they were in need of “making themselves right” with God or with others, both inside and outside the church. Sister L., of Martinsburg, Pennsylvania, for instance, remembers in her account of the October love feast at Woodbery that congregants “heard much what it is to eat unworthy of the embldms [sic] of the Christ’s body.”27 If a member found himself to be unworthy, he was encouraged to repent, confess, and mend the broken relationship. Leah Steckley, of Bethesda, Ontario, remembers, “Then came the love feast and communion, and I was tempted to stay back, fearing that I might eat and drink unworthy, but I went with the rest and felt better until the next love feast.”28 Spiritual preparation and physical preparation for eating went hand in hand, or even foot in foot, as both clergy and laity considered the feet washing ceremony to be part of the preparatory process for the subsequent feasting. During the feet washing ceremony, same-gender congregants removed their shoes, socks, or stockings and washed each other’s feet in a basin, modeling their behavior after Christ’s washing of his disciples’ feet in the New Testament as explained in John 13 and commanded in verse 14 of that same chapter. Feet washing symbolized the humbling of oneself in love to another, and it was intended to foster fellowship and open the means of grace as well as symbolically to purify and cleanse the self, both for the subsequent events of the love feast and through the general spiritual process of sanctification.29 According to Noah and Mary Zook, in a 1900 report, “On Our Mission,” “The consequence [of feet washing at this love feast] was love and unity prevailed which is essential to holding a real love feast.”30 Presumably, then, a false love feast, or an inauthentic or ineffective love feast, would produce divisiveness rather than the sense of community that this portion of the feast promoted.
Feet washing prepared participants for the meals and church services that followed by requiring a physical demonstration of humility that could prompt additional spiritual humility and devotion. Church members sought to follow “their blessed Lord in this humble command” and “earnestly prayed that their hearts might be washed in Jesus’s blood as they had washed each other’s feet.”31 After participating in his first feet washing ordinance, Charles Cocklin of Gormley, Ontario, remarks, “I think this communion is a very important matter. The apostle Paul tells us the bread is the body of Christ and the cup is his blood. When we look at these things dear brethren and sisters, are they not binding? Yes, they bind us together as one.”32 His use of the word communion here seems to point both to the feet washing itself and to the meals that follow, the line between them seemingly unimportant to him as he elides his experience of the former ordinance with the commemorative body and blood of the latter sacrament, each serving a similar function of unifying the community.
THE FELLOWSHIP MEAL
In the Evangelical Visitor few church members comment specifically on what foods they ate or what foodways were practiced during their fellowship meals, but archived diary accounts and later twentieth-century interviews with elderly congregants who remember the love feasts of their youth provide ample material on what congregants actually ingested during their fellowship meals and the arrangements by which they did so. Church communities served their congregants and visitors “family style,” with appointed servers filling and refilling dishes, and, when one group finished eating, they would clean their plates with a piece of bread so that the next group could take their places at the same table to use the same utensils and the top or bottom sides of these same unwashed dishes. Standard meals included bread, fruit, coffee, soft-boiled eggs, and beefsteak for breakfast, and then afternoon and evening meals of the breakfast leftover meat, served cold, or beef noodle soup, as well as pickles, red beets, cheese, rolls, apple butter, snitz (dried apple) pies, coffee, cheese, and stewed prunes and dried peaches.33 Some Brethren in Christ churches, such as the Ringgold congregation in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, could seat up to two hundred people at one sitting for their typical meal of beef, applesauce, stew, prunes, red beets, cheese, apple butter, and coffee.34 Other congregations savored meals of bread, beef, potatoes boiled in the beef broth, rice soup, salted pickles, red beets, snitz pie, coffee, and crumb cakes.35 While these foods were not restricted to the menus of love feasts, their sheer abundance at the feast or their status as holiday foods or foods suitable for hosting company set this menu apart as something special.
This menu reflected not only the celebratory nature of the meal but also its representativeness of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century special occasion food culture, and particularly German American food culture during this time. The love feast chefs significantly featured sugar in their meals, for example, because by the late nineteenth century sugar was fully democratized and continued to be increasingly more sought out throughout America as a desirable ingredient, one capable of marking the importance and sentiment of an occasion.36 Sugar also enabled these love feast cooks to honor easily the principle of “seven sweets and seven sours” that characterized their Pennsylvania Dutch (a corruption of Pennsylvania Deutsch, or Pennsylvania German) cooking heritage. They served their sweets, such as their dried fruits and hallmark apple butter, not as desserts but instead as side dishes presented simultaneous with the main meal and with their sours, like the pickles or distinctive pickled red beets. Even in their unique use for the love feast, their noodle dishes, snitz creations, crumb cakes, and pies likewise historically and even today distinguished their meals as rooted in mid-Atlantic Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, even as their church growth and missions sometimes transported these cooking habits to new regions.37
This mid-Atlantic regionalism persisted even as American home menus from 1820 through 1920 became more homogeneous as a result of the growing urbanization of America and as a diverse nationalized cuisine gradually and typically displaced much of the cooking of smaller ethnic communities like that of the Brethren in Christ.38 While soups had gained popularity in America during this time, especially with the opportunities afforded by mechanized food processing techniques, particularly canning, this had little impact on the Brethren in Christ love feast soups, which were homemade.39 However, industrialization and mechanization likely affected the Brethren in Christ’s patterns of meat consumption. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the increasing role of beef in most Americans’ diets, promoted by the development of the beef industry in the American West, as well as railroads and new refrigeration methods, did not directly contribute to love feast cooks’ use of beef instead of the pork that the Pennsylvania Dutch had historically preferred, since these cooks still largely came from agricultural communities that raised their own beef. Indirectly, though, industrialization affected them, as they had to consume more of their own home-raised beef when their English neighbors, who had previously purchased this beef, began purchasing it from other sources made available by the railroads. Eventually, though, even cooks from rural Pennsylvanian communities began importing their beef from the West and thereafter reduced pork in their diets. Poultry, especially chicken, was also central to the Pennsylvania Dutch diet and to most American diets during this era, as was an expanding palette of vegetables and fruits that met the demand for more diverse dietary options, sometimes even vegetarian options as related to spiritual and health concerns.40 The love feast menus, reported in archival documents in the form of extensive lists, showcase this diversity of foods as well as the treasured traditional foods of this church community. Their inclusion of new trends and old favorites signals the special nature of the feast, designed to welcome new guests as well as familiar faces from the congregation.
In addition to requiring planning for special foods, love feasts also called for special seating arrangements and physical accommodations. Depending on the church venue, congregants enjoyed their meals at special pews that had “adjustable backs hinged at the ends … [that] converted into a table … [or that] reversed so that persons seated on it faced the table.”41 Without pews like these, Samuel Baker, of Gormley, Ontario, remembers that at the love feasts he attended usually “there was a table on each side of the barn floor and part way across the end, leaving an open space of three or four feet between the tables. At the centre of the end table around this space the ministers were seated, and the remainder of the tables at that end were occupied with brethren and in front by sisters, until all were seated. Then the remaining seats at the table were filled up with those attending the meeting and all ate together.”42 Evidently both position in the church as well as gender factored into the seating arrangements, though the attendant commensality was intended to erase lines of division and foster unity and harmony among all. As in medieval English guild feasts, this feast’s “defining rhetoric of honorable equality and commensality enabled new relationships to be legitimately forged, often between participants of markedly different background or economic status.”43 While the homogeneity of the typical Brethren in Christ congregation would not have required those of “markedly different” backgrounds to find common ground with one another, the commensality the congregants enjoyed at these feasts surely did help to forge new bonds between diners who otherwise would not have known each other very well, either because of age difference, geographical distance between their homes, or religious difference, the latter in the case of “worldlings” visiting the congregation from outside the church community.
SPIRITUAL FEASTING
While church members relayed in their diaries and later rehearsed in interviews their delighted memories of what they physically ingested at their love feasts, in more formal church records, like the Evangelical Visitor, church members place much more emphasis on the spiritual feasting that accompanied the physical feasting. Indeed, a gustatory language fully pervades these accounts of spiritual development, even while church members remain reticent about what they actually ate. They clearly saw their spiritual and physical refreshment as intertwined, perhaps reflecting a form of belief in the “somatomorphic soul,” because the vocabulary to which these writers turn to describe this refreshment of their souls is frequently bodily oriented.44 S. G. Engle, for instance, remembers the love feast as a “feast to our souls” and muses that through the love feast “Heaven may come to us. We need not like Moses, when upon Pisgah’s Mount, could view [sic] a land of milk and honey which he dared not enter, nor like Baalam view the tents of Jacob, in which he had no interest, but we can here in this vale of tears, eat of the fruits that grow upon the hill-top of glory.”45 Similarly reflecting on the relationship between physical and spiritual dining, Jesse Engle makes a point of referencing both the Hebrew and Greek etymologies of the love feast to assert that even though the communion meal might consist only of two small elements it is indeed still a feast and not merely a “full meal,” for “when we hear of some who say, that, to take a small slice of bread, and a sip of wine, could not possibly constitute a feast (deipnon), we must conclude that such have a very limited knowledge of the body, and blood of Christ.”46 A feast need not be represented by quantity, he implies, but rather by its ability to fulfill, sustain, and provide joy. Even more explicitly, he later notes, “When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, and enter by the Spirit, into the essence of the mystical body of Christ, we do not only have a supper (as the amount we eat, does not make the supper, but the time in which we participate), but we have much more than a supper, we celebrate one of the greatest feasts, that the Christians can celebrate on this side of millennial glory.”47 The communion meal is thus a climactic meal of physical and spiritual feeding.
HOSPITALITY AND EVANGELIZATION BY FOOD
Many Brethren in Christ congregations, though not all, hoped that they could reach others outside their immediate communities by extending to them love feast hospitality. While at some points in church history certain congregations practiced “closed communion,” not allowing “worldlings” to participate in their feasts, this was not standard practice in the church as a whole, and much more common was the view like that expressed by S. G. Engle, who framed the feast as an open, accessible, and inviting event, not as an exclusionary meal that separated believers from nonbelievers or church members from those not members of the church.48 Monroe Dourte, for example, approvingly remembered, “Many of the unsaved folks would say, and I quote, ‘we want to go to Lovefeast to eat.’”49 If love feast and its food attracted visitors and had the potential to evangelize them in addition to feeding them and unifying the congregation itself, so much the better. In Sallie K. Doner’s account of a love feast held at Mapane Mission, South Africa, she happily notes that the “natives and workers” gathered together for a love feast. Her mention of both categories of churchgoers points out that they were united in the feast, yet simultaneously marks her awareness of them previously existing in different categories within the church.50 The love feast at least initiated a process of further unification that had not existed to such an extent prior to the event.
Love feasts also provided opportunities for evangelization. Congregants requested prayer “that God’s presence may be made manifest … by leading sinners out from the world of sin into the ark of safety and divine protection,” that “the ungathered sheaves” not go to “waste,” or that congregants allow themselves to be used “in rescuing the lost of the earth.”51 Such mention at first tended not to be a part of love feast descriptions, as the focus of the love feasts was on community and unity, not separation.52 However, in some cases, the love feasts did draw visitors from outside the church, sometimes simply visitors from other denominations, and the feasts became tools of evangelization.53 With the advent of revivalism in the Brethren in Christ denomination in the late 1880s, which accompanied similar and often even more aggressive revivalist movements in other local churches, the Brethren in Christ began to try to develop a “more outgoing ministry, both within and without the church’s boundaries.”54 Congregants’ growing attention to and documentation of the effects of love feasts upon visitors suggest this increasingly outwardlooking perspective or awareness of a world outside their own churches.
THE COMMUNION MEAL
The Brethren in Christ church ascribed to a memorialist understanding of the communion meal. Most laity contributing to the Evangelical Visitor described the meal in terms such as those used by Alvin H. Berry, who remarked on the meal as a “beautiful memorial service whereby we can remember His suffering and death and the great price that was paid that we might have eternal life through the blood which flowed on Calvary’s Hill.”55 Memorial, memory, remembrance, and commemorative recur throughout these accounts, reiterating the church’s Protestant and rather nonsacramental, or even antisacramental, understanding of the holy meal as symbolic and emblematic only and not consisting of transubstantiated elements. Communion was practiced by men and women simultaneously, though separately, and communicants used strips of unleavened bread and, historically, drank from a common cup. Communicants broke off their own small pieces of bread from the larger piece, passing the larger piece to their neighbors while saying, “Beloved Brother [Sister], ‘The bread which we break is the communion of the body of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.’” As they passed the cup, they repeated to their neighbor, “Beloved Brother [Sister] The cup which we drink is the communion of the blood of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.’”56 These addresses reinforced the symbolism of the elements as well as the sense of familial unity that this commensality was intended to promote.
Of course, the communion meal, even more than the fellowship meal, fostered spiritual feeding and not just physical feeding in communicants. Among Evangelical Visitor contributors, Sister L. stands out as uncharacteristically verbose or personally revelatory in her recollections of her spiritual response to this meal. After communing, she remembers, “It seems to me I could, with faith, look up and see our dear Lord and Master led to Calvary’s hill in the garden of Gethsemane nailed to that rough tree, to see him bleed and die for you and me. Not only you and me, but for the whole world. I often think of that dark and doleful night when the Savior of this world was crucified for the sins of the whole world.”57 She then turns to the more typical commentary on the communal response to the love feast as a whole, noting that the next day Sabbath meeting “began with experiences,” as “brethren and sisters told how they had been built up by coming there, to the meeting, and their desire to still go on in this narrow way and live for the Master while life shall last.”58 Their love feast meals had sustained and even fortified these congregants not only physically but spiritually.
A gustatory language of spiritual refreshment reverberates throughout these Evangelical Visitor accounts. One anonymous participant in a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania love feast comments that “the seasons of testimony were times of refreshing, the testimonies having a clear ring, as regards the enjoyment of salvation through Jesus Christ.”59 The particular selection of the word refreshing echoes the language of gustatory theology as far back as colonial America, when Puritan writers sought affirmation of their spiritual development through literal gustatory change and bodily experience of “refreshment” upon reading Scripture, hearing the preaching of the Word, or praying.60 In “Love Feast at Springfield, O.,” one Evangelical Visitor contributor remembers the “time of enjoyment” prompted by the distribution of “the bread of life” and, in a related passage praising the entwining of bodily and spiritual pleasure, comments that the “testimony services” were so “inspiring” as to prompt love feast attendees to raise their hands in prayer.61 The love feasts encouraged what in these rather restrained accounts passes almost for effusiveness, as congregants expressed deep pleasure in these communal experiences. These are “good feasts,” “season[s] of refreshing,” and times that prompt “rejoic[ing] on account of the feast” that “greatly refresh and strengthen the brotherhood.”62 When F. K. Bowers comments “we were truly fed,” it is not at all clear whether this refers to spiritual feeding or physical feeding, presumably because for this author the distinction between the two types of feeding is unimportant or impossible to make, for the love feast feeds both body and spirit.63 Indeed, citing a plethora of biblical verses about eating and drinking, participants in love feasts expected to experience the “lifegiving—and vitalizing,” “all cleansing, and refreshing,” “soul-quickening, and soul-reviving power” of the “everlasting feast.”64 This was eating and drinking unlike that typically experienced at any other time of the church year.
LOVE FEASTS REFLECTIVE OF THE LARGER CULTURE
The unique or special qualities of the love feast meals demanded a kind of behavioral and spiritual commitment that other meals would not have required, and interestingly it is these behavioral qualities that evidence the participation of Brethren in Christ church members with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture outside their own church. In an attempt to prevent the love feast rituals from becoming “mere performance—in which case there can be no blessing to the partaker,” one Evangelical Visitor contributor exhorts congregants to make sure “they ‘worship … in spirit and truth’” and walk with Christ in “love” and “light,” bearing “the fruit of light which ‘is in all goodness and righteousness and truth.’” This done, “we shall see him as he is and be like him. ‘And every man that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself even as he is pure.’ (I. John 3:3 R.V.)”65 This writer’s concluding emphasis on purity, a quality that binds together the preparatory portion of the love feast, with its time of self-examination and feet washing, then the fellowship meals that follow, not only draws on a biblical language of purity but also invokes another language of purity common in the nineteenth-century American sanitation movement. A language of purity, particularly bodily purity, often gestures toward anxiety about maintaining class and economic divisions.66 A church may focus on purity as related to the bodies of believers because these bodies are “centers of transcendent faith” that function “as instruments of spiritual salvation” and as a “channel of belief.”67 Many nineteenth-century American churches grappled with how to respond to new medical and scientific understandings of hygiene that could affect how congregants took the bread or cup, who touched it and when, and who could touch it after them, and the implications of all this for maintaining both unity and social division with the church. Beginning in the 1870s, the American public had become increasingly more aware of recent scientific discovery of the germ theory of disease transmission, which many churchgoers and clergy soon applied to the circumstances of communion, wondering if they were passing disease by drinking from the same cup or touching the bread that another had touched.68 The physician William Baker, in an Evangelical Visitor article titled “Religion and Sanitation,” quoted C. O. Probst, secretary of the Ohio State Board of Health, to explain the biblical basis for interest in sanitation. He then went on to himself assert that “it is just as scriptural for the minister to pour the wine in a separate cup for each communicant as to have it passed from lip to lip.”69 While many Brethren in Christ congregations embraced the advent of individual communion cups for reasons of hygiene, some of their members regretted what they perceived to be a dismantling of the unifying purpose of their communion table commensality.70
Concern about behavioral expectations for the love feast could be particularly acute among the more diverse Brethren in Christ congregations. In her account of a South African mission love feast, for example, Sallie K. Doner remarks, “We again met and commemorated the suffering and death of our dear Savior. Thirty-seven partook of the Lord’s Supper. Sunday evening Sister Frey gave a talk on etiquette.”71 Why give an etiquette talk as part of a love feast? Perhaps Sister Frey intended this talk specifically to instruct the native peoples participating in the feast, who presumably were perceived as needing education on proper civilized behavior, and, just as likely, the talk was additionally targeted toward the etiquette of the Lord’s Supper meal or love feast itself, as it stood at the nexus of the spiritual and physical practices of Brethren in Christ belief. Similar references to conduct and etiquette appear in other accounts of love feasts. Henry Davidson notes with pleasure that “general conduct was good” at the love feast he attended at Brother Zerchus’s home, where the crowds grew so large that services expanded from the barn to outdoors, and he similarly finds that “the behavior of the people” during a love feast in North Dickinson County, Kansas, in 1892, was “exceptionally good,” while “conduct” at a love feast in Belle Springs, Kansas, was likewise “very good.”72 Most strikingly representative of nineteenthcentury concerns with hygiene as related to particular behavior and etiquette at the communion meal are the comments of Evangelical Visitor contributor Asa Bearss. He writes, in an 1891 submission titled “Some Things We Like to See and Some Things We Don’t,” that
we like to see members clean and tidy. … We like to see all the members forward and participate in the ordinance of feetwashing and wiping to show that we are willing to hold still to each other and all will be wiped away. But we don’t like to see members handle boots, shoes and stockings and then break the bread to each other with unwashed hands, especially those that officiate on the occasion; hence the necessity of a basin of clean water on hand, as “cleanliness is next to godliness and godliness with contentment is gain.”73
His sentiments were echoed by physician William Baker, who also recommended that church deacons provide “a wash-basin, water and towels” for congregants to wash their hands after feet washing.74 Some church members even advocated the use of individual foot tubs for reasons of hygiene.75 If the corporate touching of communion bread generated controversy and contention because of classist assumptions overlaid on congregational and ministerial hands, the potential for even more controversy and contention existed in the Brethren in Christ church when both hands and feet factored into this ceremony of unity.
The elements of the communion meal likewise drew some comment from later writers about love feasts, once again pointing out that the broader religio-alimentary concerns of nineteenth-century churches in general touched the lives of the separatist Brethren in Christ, too. Throughout the nineteenth century, many Protestants churches, their clergy and their laity, wrangled with the implications of the temperance movement for the practice of the communion meal. Should they use fermented wine, unfermented wine, make their own wine, or purchase one of the new unfermented grape juice products? What, exactly, did Jesus drink? Did Jesus and/or the Bible teach against immoderate consumption of wine or promote complete abstention from alcohol?76 In a column titled “Temperance,” which immediately precedes another column charging congregants to announce their love feasts in the church paper well in advance of the feasts themselves, Henry Davidson remarks on “the terrible consequence of indulging in this dangerous beverage [alcohol]” and the lamentable results of drinking beer, whiskey, or wine, “a terrible experiment which may prove fatal to your earthly hopes and may finally destroy both soul and body.”77 Explicitly contrasting secular consumption with sacred consumption, Charles Cocklin writes in the same issue of the newsletter of “the love” he felt as “the effects of the love feast,” in contradistinction to his growing conviction that “tobacco and liquor” should have no place in his life, after which he “shunned” these substances and “received the blessing.”78 Jesse Engle, in “The Lord’s Supper,” even more clearly spells out a connection between temperance and the meaning of the love feast, as he draws on portions of 1 Corinthians 11 to argue that the apostle Paul clearly had to correct the early Corinthian church’s practice of the Lord’s Supper, as they had fallen into their pre-Christian, “idolatrous” ways and made of the meal a disordered, disorganized, and drunken feast. Such behavior, particularly drunkenness, he argues, has no place in this sacred rite, even if wine is present, not just because drunkenness interferes with the sacred but also because it destroys the witness of the church to the poor and visitor, who might walk away from such bacchanalian displays disillusioned with how the church had stewarded its resources.79 The issue of whether to use fermented wine, as had been the practice of the early Brethren in Christ church, or unfermented wine, which became increasingly more popular in the church in the 1880s, repeatedly came before the church governing body. The General Conference ultimately decided to recommend that the unfermented kind be used “as much as possible,” but that each congregation could resolve this issue at their own discretion, with “forbearance” of each other’s preferences and beliefs being practiced by all.80 Attempting to sustain the spirit of unity characteristic of the love feast, the church hierarchy refused to make into doctrine their stance on alcohol as communion element if such a ruling would introduce divisiveness into their congregations.
The love feasts of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brethren in Christ church thus reflect both the unique distinguishing characteristics of this generally separatist church, such as humility and unity, as well as their participation in the conversations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture at large, such as those about hygiene and temperance. The church developed a simply stated and simply practiced, though complex, gustatory theology, through which they bound themselves to one another, both in their home districts and in other counties, states, and countries, as well as extended hospitality and evangelized others through the means of food. Their faith was profoundly embodied, even as they looked to this physicality as a means by which to experience spiritual development and God’s grace. While their love feasts clearly could not erase all church division, whether of class, economy, gender, or ethnicity, they certainly did promote a spirit of harmony and peace and gave congregants practical methods such as feet washing and commensality by which they could physically enact the love they knew they should feel and be able to demonstrate as fruit of their faith. At their love feasts they made clear to themselves and to others how they could fully realize the metaphors of the body of Christ and Christian brotherhood that their Brethren in Christ community so valued.
Notes
I would like to thank Glen A. Pierce, director of the Brethren in Christ Historical Library and Archives, for his time, expertise, and attentive assistance, as well as Rachel Yaegle, Messiah College English department work study student, for her help with photocopying and sorting through archival materials. I also appreciate the scholarship grant that Messiah College provided to me for the purposes of researching and writing this article.
1. For a history of the Brethren in Christ church, see Wittlinger, Quest for Piety and Obedience; and Climenhaga, History of the Brethren in Christ Church.
2. Davidson, “Love Feast” and “Untitled Submission” (June 1893). Davidson reports in the former that approximately three hundred communicants participated in Saturday evening ordinances, and Sunday attendance at the love feast was estimated at one thousand people. He also outlines the “usual order” of the love feast events. In the latter report, attendance figures for a love feast in Belle Springs, Kansas again stand at three hundred communicants at the “commemorative ordinances” and eight hundred to one thousand at Sunday dinner. One Evangelical Visitor article reports of a love feast that attracted four thousand participants and at which over one thousand people were fed at one meal. Davidson, “The Brethren Conference.”
3. Some congregations intentionally eliminated Sundays as potential days for love feasts because of the work it would take them to host the feast on what was supposed to be a holy day of rest. Their feasts thus were one-day affairs, rather than two-day events. Monroe Dourte, “Love Feast at Mastersonville, Rapho District: 1898,” unpublished MS, 1898, Brethren in Christ Historical Library and Archives, Messiah College, Grantham, Pennsylvania, 1, and “Mastersonville, Rapho District,” 2.
4. “Communion Seasons”; and Dourte, “Love Feast at Mastersonville,” 1.
5. See, for example, Brubaker, “Anticipating the Future.”
6. All of these narratives are now housed in the small Brethren in Christ church archives located in Murray Library, on the campus of Messiah College, in Grantham, Pennsylvania.
7. Puskar-Pasewicz, “Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys.”
8. For this phrase, see Juster, Doomsayers, 103–104.
9. Lindman, Bodies of Belief, 2.
10. While the love feast was indeed a profound physical as well as spiritual experience, that physicality rarely, if ever, took the form of expressing sexual or erotic love. The love feasts, like most church events, fostered a degree of socialization and thus allowed young people to meet one another and perhaps to initiate the process of courting. However, there would have been little opportunity and certainly no expectation, but rather strong censure, of sexual encounters of any kind during the love feast. Male and female sleeping accommodations were separate, and there was no cross-gender kissing or feet washing. While the church papers occasionally included church members’ complaints about disruptive behavior, such as lack of hygiene, at love feasts, there is no record of complaints about sexual behavior. Only brief expressions of “filial” or “brotherly” love appear with frequency in church documents. Even church members’ descriptions of their love feast encounters with or experiences of the Divine are not marked by the ecstatic, erotic vocabulary or overtones that one might find in mystic or some late nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century communal societies’ accounts of love for or with the Transcendent. Moreover, food at the love feasts is described by terse cataloguing, rather than by sensual, savoring detail, so this spiritualized gastronomy is paradoxically nonsensual, at least in print, though surely not in experience.
11. Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 731–762; Boyer, Urban Masses; and Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity.
12. Brown, Foul Bodies, 9, 11, 291, 325–326, 361.
13. Sack, Whitebread Protestants, 9–59; Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 733; and Boyer,Urban Masses.
14. Ahlstrom, A Religious History, 733, 743.
15. Beahm, The Brethren Love Feast, 3–4.
16. Engle, “The Lord’s Supper,” 68–69. See also this same article in Engle, A Treatise on the Lord’s Supper.
17. Emerging from German Radical Pietism, and with an Anabaptist view of the church, the Dunkers were much like the Brethren in Christ theologically and culturally, and certainly influenced them, though the two groups were not directly related. The Dunkers, whose name was derived from the obsolete German word tunken, or “to immerse,” were called such because of their manner of baptizing adults by trine, forward-motion immersion. They were also sometimes called “Dunkards” or “Tunkards,” as well as German Baptists or German Baptist Brethren, though they were unrelated to Baptist denominations. For more information on the Dunkers or the Church of the Brethren, see Durnbaugh, The Church of the Brethren, and Fruit of the Vine; and Gordon, “Brethren Groups.” For a brief comment on the difference between Brethren in Christ and Dunker love feasts, see Wittlinger, Quest for Piety and Obedience, 66–67.
18. Ramirez, The Love Feast, 16.
19. Sider, Messiah College, 9–11.
20. Engle, “Love Feast at Philadelphia Mission.”
21. “Miscellany.”
22. Theophano, Eat My Words, 86.
23. Davidson, “Our Visit East,” 185.
24. George Detwiler, “Untitled Submission,” Evangelical Visitor 28 (June 1915): 4.
25. Engle, “Love Feast at Philadelphia Mission.”
26. Davidson, “Church News.”
27. Sister L., “Our Love Feast,” 347.
28. Steckley, “My Experience.”
29. Beahm, “The Brethren Love Feast,” 6–7.
30. Zook and Zook, “On Our Mission.”
31. Eyster and Eyster, “Lovefeast at Intokozo,” 13.
32. Cocklin, “Let Us Be Careful.”
33. Hess, “The Brethren-in-Christ Love Feast,” 10; Dourte, “Love Feast at Mastersonville,” 2, and “Mastersonville, Rapho District,” 3.
34. Kipe, “Report of Early Love Feasts,” 1.
35. Dourte, “Mastersonville, Rapho District,” 3.
36. Woloson, Refined Tastes, 2–6.
37. Plaisted, “Mid-Atlantic Region,” 2:90–98; and Zanger, “German American Food.”
38. Williams, Food in the United States, 4, 6; and Elias, Food in the United States, 2.
39. Williams, Food in the United States, 27.
40. Plaisted, “Mid-Atlantic Region,” 2:92–93; Zanger, “German American Food,” 563; Elias, Food in the United States, 12; and Williams, Food in the United States, 33, 39–40, 206–209.
41. Wittlinger, Quest for Piety and Obedience, 85.
42. Baker, “Early Customs of the Church in Canada.”
43. Rosser, “Going to the Fraternity Feast,” 432.
44. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, 11, 295, 306.
45. Engle, “Love Feast at Philadelphia Mission,” 437.
46. Engle, “The Lord’s Supper,” 69.
47. Ibid., 70.
48. Wittlinger, Quest for Piety and Obedience, 64–66.
49. Dourte, “Love Feast at Mastersonville,” 2.
50. Doner, “Untitled Submission,” 5.
51. Winger and Winger, “Untitled Submission.”
52. E., “Love Feast at Rosebank”; and Doner, “Untitled Submission,” 5.
53. Correspondent, “Love Feast at Springfield”; and Winger and Winger, “Untitled Submission,” 4.
54. Sider, Messiah College, 12.
55. Berry, “Untitled Submission.”
56. Wittlinger, Quest for Piety and Obedience, 64.
57. Sister L., “Our Love Feast,” 347.
58. Ibid.
59. “Miscellany,” 2.
60. Lee, “‘The Hungry Soul.’”
61. Correspondent, “Love Feast at Springfield.”
62. Aaron Ebersole, “Untitled Submission,” Evangelical Visitor 21 (November 1907): 4; Davidson, “Our Visit East,” 186, “Love Feast,” 184; and “Communion Seasons,” 362.
63. Bowers, “Love Feasts.”
64. Engle, “The Lord’s Supper,” 70.
65. “Miscellany,” 2.
66. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 126–127.
67. Lindman, Bodies of Belief, 5.
68. Sack, Whitebread Protestants, 9–59.
69. Baker, “Religion and Sanitation.”
70. Kipe, “Report of Early Love Feasts,” 3; and Climenhaga, History of the Brethren in Christ Church, 317.
71. Doner, “Untitled Submission,” 5.
72. Davidson, “Our Visit East,” 186, “Love Feast,” 184, and “Untitled Submission,” 184.
73. Bearss, “Some Things We Like to See,” 106.
74. Baker, “Religion and Sanitation,” 210.
75. Kipe, “Report of Early Love Feasts,” 3.
76. Sack, Whitebread Protestants, 9–59.
77. Davidson, “Temperance,” 264.
78. Cocklin, “Let Us Be Careful,” 195.
79. Engle, “The Lord’s Supper,” 69.
80. Wittlinger, Quest for Piety and Obedience, 64–65.