8.31.2026 - Lisa Liou

Lisa Liou is the Founder and Executive Director of All Gen Movement, a Christian ministry dedicated to healing the generations and renewing the Church. She previously served over 20 years with InterVarsity, most recently as Regional Director in the Western US. She is married to Jeff, an ordained CRC minister, and together they live in Monrovia, CA with their two teenagers.

Monday, August 31, 2026

1 Corinthians 11:26

For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

I spent three years serving on a church committee to choose a senior pastor during one of the most divisive times in recent U.S. history. Our committee was diverse and our beliefs about various hot topic issues spanned a wide range.

During that time, I had been asking God to help me see my blind spots. An unexpected answer to that prayer was a friendship with someone else on the committee who was completely opposite of many of my positions, but still very much aligned in a commitment to put God first.

This was such a unique experience because it was at a time when people were not interacting outside their groups. Over the course of our friendship, both he and I felt challenged by our perceptions. It was not so much that our views on the issues changed during the friendship, but we came to see that a follower of Jesus could be very sincere and come to different opinions. We realized that Christ’s family is much bigger than the group we think is right and we grew in respect for one another.

In the context of our verse today, Paul is dealing with a group of believers who are divided in spirit to the extent that some have started to partake in the communion in smaller subgroups. Since the Lord’s Supper at the time was more of a sit down meal at a table, the ramifications went beyond friendship groups.

The summer after I graduated from college, before starting my first ministry job, I spent a few months working at a big, beautiful banquet hall. As a server, we stood and watched wedding guests feast, drink, and dance. And then, at the end of the night, we ate whatever scraps were left of the cake or any plate of food that could be found from a guest who didn’t show.

Unfortunately, something similar was happening at the Corinthian’s fellowship meal.

Some were well fed and drank to the point of excess at the meal. Others who had to work went hungry, arriving after the first group had stuffed themselves. In response, Paul tells the believers they need to examine their motives when they come to the table and, when they eat, they should all eat together. This, of course, means waiting until everyone can get there.

Whenever the Church takes communion, ingesting the elements together, we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. There is order to communion. It cannot be treated the same as your daily breakfast, a dinner party, or even a church potluck. The sacrament has deep significance for the building and renewal of the Church and the believer.

This is what I love about communion. It is a sign and a seal pointing us to God’s covenant grace instead of our unholy tendencies. Our world has been operating in deep divisions that have permeated the Church. We have come up with our own additional standards of who is a “true Christian” and who is not, creating subgroups, not unlike the one who ate communion without the others, and not unlike the one I belonged to which distanced myself from the man who became my friend.

But how can we claim our own in-group to be the true believers while partaking from the body and blood of Christ which he shed for all of us. Don’t we all eat the same meal from the same table? Didn’t we all receive the same invitation?

If, in our hearts, we believe that other members of our church body or another church body are less-than us, then we are taking Christ’s once-and-for-all sacrifice, as represented in communion, and treating it as a special private-seating area of a high-end restaurant where it’s difficult to get a reservation. However, in Christ, there is no privileged seating or private room. No one eats leftovers in the back after hours. He welcomes us all to the table, not because of our special status or ability to think better than others.

So often we take our distinctives and work from there to determine who can be included in our fellowship, but the sacrament of communion builds the Church in the opposite direction. It first gives us the space of deepest fellowship with Christ and one another, and then we are to live it out from there despite our differences. We have no right to make Christ’s meal less than what it was intended to be.

The death of Christ is where his body was broken as a sacrifice for sinners. It is an honor to proclaim it to ourselves, one another, and the world.

Today, if you feel so moved, ask God to shine a light on any blind spots you may have in your walk with Christ and how you see other believers.

It’s not an easy prayer, but I can speak from firsthand experience that when we begin to let go of our own perceptions of others about their walk with Christ and give up our self-righteousness, we, the Church, are built up and blessed.