7 April 2025
Press release
One of the major challenges that ecumenical dialogue between estranged Christian churches always faces is the question of eucharistic intercommunion: Can they share the Lord’s Supper, or Table of the Lord, or Eucharist, as varying traditions call it?
After struggling with this question for nearly ten years, the board of Bridgefolk — the grassroots organization for dialogue between Mennonites and Roman Catholics — decided that they could not resolve it. There were simply too many ecclesial and liturgical differences. They would need to explore a different approach in order to celebrate, liturgically, the measure of unity and communion that Bridgefolk participants were experiencing when they came together.
As a result, the Bridgefolk board charged Professor Mary Schertz of the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary and Abbot John Klassen OSB of Saint John’s Abbey with the task of creating a liturgical framework for footwashing. Now, after practicing this rite in its annual conferences for nearly 15 years, Bridgefolk is making it available to all Christians on its webpage, at www.bridgefolk.net/rite-of-footwashing, along with background materials.
As is well known, in John’s Gospel, chapter 13, where one would expect to find an account of Jesus handing on the Eucharist to his disciples, instead he washes their feet in a profound act of service and humility. Since deepening ecumenical relationships involve precisely those commitments, and since John’s Gospel provides a precedent, a rite of footwashing seemed to offer an alternative expression of communion where the sharing of Eucharist is not yet canonically allowed.
In response, Schertz and Klassen created a full liturgy that draws on both Mennonite and Catholic traditions. It includes a formal opening with the sign of the cross, a formal liturgical greeting (from Saint Paul), a specially crafted opening prayer, followed by a Liturgy of the Word (first reading, responsorial psalm, Gospel, and homily). They also composed a major prayer modeled after a eucharistic prayer which includes an institution account, an epiclesis, and anamnesis. After this prayer, the invitation to the sacrament of footwashing follows. The rite concludes with a sign of peace, intercessions, a concluding prayer, and an invitation to an agape meal.
Schertz and Klassen likewise structured an agape meal with formal prayers and scripture that echoes eucharistic language from the early Christian centuries (Didache, chapters 9 and 10). The liturgy opens to a simple meal shared by all participants. A variety of hymns and chants from both Mennonite and Catholic traditions can surround these elements, and a menu of possible scripture readings is available for different situations.
“Bridgefolk has found that this foot washing-agape rite has served us well as a body,” notes Klassen, “because we have freedom to choose preachers and presiders, men or women, from either tradition. The celebration of this rite has become the high point of our conferences each year because it embodies our unity in the mission of Jesus Christ.”
Klassen also notes that the experience of taking an existing rite and shaping it for Bridgefolk’s specific purposes has brought the group to a fundamental insight about the work of mutual exchange. “In formal ecumenical dialogues, there tends to be little formal prayer and liturgical experience because usually those very elements are contested, and adequate ecumenical agreement does not yet exist to practice them. As Bridgefolk, we found it essential to create and shape some existing liturgical experiences to help us celebrate our being together.”