I’m back home in Santa Maria this week for Thanksgiving. I got in town this last Sunday night and went straight to a Thanksgiving party hosted by the Hallway. The Hallway is a group I started in March of 2012 and led for a while before I moved to Orange County the following August. The group is still going today and full of new faces. I’ve never really wrote much about the Hallway publicly and thought I would finally do so. A little bit.

Most people (including me) find themselves fumbling over their words when they try to explain what the Hallway is. The most unique factor about this group is the overwhelming feeling of genuine community that you get when you are a part of it. To this day I have never been a part of any group of people for any purpose that has shared a similar acceptance, grace, value, and organicity (the dictionary told me that was the noun form of organic; boom).

It’s a place where anyone can open up about anything they are going through and there is no judgment or lowering of status. For some people in the Hallway it’s the only place that they know of where they’re actually not judged. This began in the early days of the Hallway when we decided to take Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians seriously when he says “Everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial.” We wanted a group that practiced genuine grace and accepted people through anything, but were also able to be honest and say “Hey, what you’re doing is kind of messed up. You should stop.”

It all started purely as a theory; a radical proclamation of wouldn’t it be awesome if…!?

And it worked. It actually worked.

Even writing those words is awkward for me because I’m still surprised that it actually worked. I’m especially surprised because when we started I had friends who weren’t in the group (and like half the people in the group) thinking I was crazy. And it actually worked.

Another huge thing the Hallway practices is a refusal to take responsibility of others’ beliefs. You must take responsibility for your own beliefs. There is no person in the group that everyone in the group is encouraged to emulate. My friend, Jacob said you’re practically forced to make your faith your own. And in doing that, I’ve seen so many people get miraculously closer to God through that process. In being exposed to other people’s honest stories of their own faith, you grow.

So this last Sunday I walked in to see my favorite familiar faces and even plenty of new ones. We ate and laughed together and then my friend, Jacob suddenly started passing out butter crackers and filling people’s Styrofoam cups with apple cider. My friends, Anthony and Garreth held our cups and crackers and joked about how it reminded us of communion. Anthony and I recalled memories of the hundreds of communion Sundays we had been a part of growing up. We remembered the classic wait as you listen to the minister explain communion and feel the crumbs of the cracker roll down your fingers. Then after drinking from the little communion cups the proper thing to do is to then grab your row’s communion cups and stack them on yours and then pass your stack to the guy who is building a stack high enough to see from across the sanctuary. We laughed at this and then I realized that everyone was holding a cup and a cracker and I asked Jacob “Wait, are we actually doing communion??”

Apparently I was the only one who didn’t realize it. And yes, they wanted to do it with Apple Cider and butter crackers. Yes, they are a bunch of weird hipsters sometimes. But I love them.

I asked if I could lead it because I had never done it before and they were happy to let me.

And I basically said this:
At the last supper Jesus said: “This is my body given to you. Do this in remembrance of me.” When he says this I don’t think he is only referring to the ritual but to something bigger at the same time. I believe he is saying “This is my body given to you. So give of your bodies in remembrance of me. This is my blood poured out for you. So pour of your blood in remembrance of me. Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice for the healing and reconciliation of this world to God. Continue my work and be my body in this world as I go to the Father.”

I believe that when we take communion in remembrance of what Christ did for us we are agreeing to take on the responsibility of being his body in the world. We are committing ourselves to give of our bodies to this work of literally re-membering (to member, meaning piece together) and putting life into a new body of Christ. We consume the symbols that represent Christ’s blood and body in a promise to then be his body. That’s why Paul says not to do it in an unworthy manner because you are taking on a huge responsibility, so don’t commit yourself to this if you’re not willing to follow through with it.

The Hallway ate and drank and I then asked Jacob to pray.

This is what I believe all Christians should see. We partake of communion out of thankfulness for what Jesus did for us, but thankfulness reaches its full completion with a promise to give the gift you’ve been given to others. Lewis Hyde points this out in his book, The Gift by comparing it to the first and last steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. The first step of Alcoholics Anonymous is to admit your problem and commit to learning how to get better. The last step is to share that message of how to get better with other alcoholics. You cannot jump from the first step to the last step as some desire to do. You must let the teaching change you first and the last step of letting it fully change you is then using the teaching to help others.

Taking of the body and blood of Christ works in the same way. We consume it out of thankfulness and thankfulness comes to full completion when we continue Christ’s work in us to others around us. And what has blessed me most about the Hallway is that they live by this without even realizing it all the time. And I am extremely thankful that God has brought us all together for such a great purpose.