What is a Fellowship Meal?

The biblical and traditional views are given below.

The dictionary meaning of the phrase, “fellowship meal or love feast”:
1) A meal eaten in common among the early Christians to express and deepen brotherly love.
2) A banquet or gathering of persons held to promote good feeling, restore friendly relations, honor a special guest etc.
3) A social gathering intended to create good will among the participants.
4) A religious meal shared as a sign of love and fellowship practiced by a number of Christian denominations.

Denominational outlooks: If you were to ask the ordinary Christian today, what a Christian meeting was like in the days of the apostles, you would probably get different answers. An Evangelical Christian would probably answer that, it consisted primarily of preaching and singing. A Charismatic/Pentecost Christian might reply that it primarily incorporated worship, praise, and the exercise of miraculous gifts/divinely inspired powers such as instantaneous healing, speaking in tongues, prophecy etc. An Anglican might reply that it was principally a celebration of Communion/Eucharist (a symbolic consecrated bread and wine eaten and drunk during the ceremony of communion). Of course all of these responses are partially right. However, a dominant part of apostolic worship that many Christians would think of today is that it centered around a meal. That’s right, a meal.

How did the love feast originate? Let us examine the scripture. For the origin of the love feast, we need to look no more than the Last Supper. The Lord’s Last Supper ordained at Passover was a full meal. While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples saying, “Take and eat, this is my body” (Matt 26:26). So the very first Communion was instituted by Jesus in the context of a meal. A meal continued to be the normal setting in which Christians met together for fellowship and worship which was also a command of Christ.

Acts 2:46 tell us, “Everyday they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts”. However, the phrase, “they ate together with glad and sincere hearts” would also imply that this was more than Communion and it was a meal.

Nowhere this practice is more clearly confirmed than in the Communion passage of 1 Cor 11:20-34. Paul begins there by saying, “When you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, for as you eat,….. another gets drunk”. Now this is obviously talking about more than just the Communion. Nobody gets drunk from the small amount of wine taken in Communion, nor is it credible that various persons would receive Communion before others, because they are hungry. No, Paul is certainly describing a full meal -the love feast- that preceded the actual Communion. So the Communion celebrated at the end of the love feast (or as part of it) is quite clear from the verses 23-30.

Acts 20:11, describes ‘eating’ as an integral part of a New Testament worship service. It says, “then he(Paul) went upstairs and broke bread and ate. Here, Paul didn’t preach, he ate for sure.

The well known and the only explicit NT reference to the love feast is found in Jude 12 where Jesus’ brother refers to “ those who are blemishes at your love feasts……”In the classic NT reference 1 Cor 11:17-34, Paul lamented the abuse of these meals by those who over-indulged.

Jesus’ response: In the stories of, feeding the 5000 and 4000 (Matt 14, 15, Mark 6, 8), Jesus asked the disciples to feed the large crowd of listeners just after teaching/preaching. Even though they told Him it was unnecessary, in both events Jesus provided them full meals. Here Jesus showed them that the food for a weak body is not declined after the spiritual food is served.

Early Christianity: The early Christians referred to this common meal or banquet (with plenty of food and drink) as the agape feast (a Greek word), referring to selfless love or God’s love for humanity. Such meals were widespread, though not universal, in the early Christian world.

What happened to the love feast? The love feast was an integral part of apostolic worship, but the pattern was eventually altered. Even though Jesus and His disciples handed down the model of having a common meal before the Eucharist, some churches began changing this after the apostles died. During the second and third centuries, the agape was eventually separated from the Eucharist. Churches began celebrating the Eucharist in the morning and hosting the love feast in the evening. Perhaps it might have deteriorated into merely an occasion for eating and drinking or for ostentatious displays by the wealthier members of the community, as happened in Corinth, drawing the criticisms of Saint Paul in the passage mentioned. If the original apostolic pattern of holding the love feast and the Eucharist together had not been broken, perhaps the lovefeast would have continued on down to our times.

The genuine agape feasts were of apostolic origin (2 Pet 2:13, Jude 12), but were often abused by hypocrites, even under the very apostolic eye (1 Cor 11:21). This was more or less same situation in the Galatian and Greek churches too. Different Councils like Laodicea, Carthage etc. legislated different Canons to restrict abuses. Even after the death of the apostles, the pre-Nicene church (ie. Before the Nicea Creed of AD 325) continued to practice the agape or love feast. Within a century or so after the first Christian Emperor Constantine’s conversion (AD 313) this important part of apostolic worship totally disappeared and then replaced by Eucharist liturgies with symbolic amounts of bread and wine only. The love feast of apostolic origin, eventually fell into disfavor and was ultimately forbidden to be held in the churches.

Protestant revivals of the Practice: After the Protestant Reformation (a religious movement initiated by Martin Luther, Germany, in 1517) a move among some Christians brought back the lovefeast practices of the New Testament church to experience this historical form of Eucharist. Some other Christian churches after celebrating the Communion, now routinely participate in sharing of “light refreshments or light to full meal” eaten together while engaging in conversation that is functionally an agape. This post-communion gathering is often called “fellowship hour”, and is regarded by many clergy and pastors as a particularly opportune time for making casual interactions or to create new or restore friendships in an informal setting, or else it may be hard to happen in a busy community.

What the Scholars say about the love feast? An amazing thing is that nearly all biblical scholars, Catholic and Protestant, liberal and conservative alike, are agreed on this matter, that the NT worship consisted of the love feast followed by preaching and the Eucharist/Communion. In the opinion of great majority of scholars, the love feast (agape) meal had the double purpose of satisfying hunger and thirst, and giving expression to the sense of Christian brotherhood.

Who is responsible in the Church for this meal and meeting? How to conduct this ministry efficiently, what name this ministry should be called, who is in charge of ordering the food and selecting its items, how much cost efficient it should be, etc are all the choice of each Church management. The important matter is to share the meal and spend time together in peace, love, unity and fellowship.

Conclusion: The “Fellowship Hour”(or any name selected), is an important part of Christian character and it is a great opportunity for any church to incorporate and serve as a "ministry" of the church.