Last year, I attended a Quaker church service – well, meeting, as they call it. Quakers are famous for rejecting all sacraments, so there was no communion.

Now I’ve always had a soft spot for Quakers. We know them in part for their principled approach to business – creating firms like Cadbury’s, Clarks and Family Circle biscuit maker Huntley & Palmers.

But I did find the content of the meeting odd. We heard about the arms industry, a march for the environment and the book Quaker Faith and Practice. But while someone discussed the legacy of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, no one mentioned Jesus. Not once.

So I perhaps should not have been surprised when the leader of a UK political party described herself as a “non-theist Quaker”.

It does seem to be rather missing the point. People sometimes advocate keeping bits of religion but ditching God, but even in a UK of increasing secularisation, it fails.

In 2013, some atheists launched a Sunday church in London with high-profile media coverage. It’s still going, but if its online MeetUp attendee lists are right, it’s usually getting a mere handful of people.

The fact is that without Jesus, a religion is just something that occupies time. It loses its power.

Holy Communion sets the right focus

I think what happened in that Quaker meeting reinforces, to me, the importance of the eucharist in Christian worship. We can get bogged down and sidetracked. Pastors and priests can have hobby horses that they obsess about in their preaching. But if a weekly communion takes place, the most important bit of the faith is remembered.

In an Anglican church, communion gets the congregation to confess and repent of their sins, to run through the fundamentals of the Christian faith with a creed, and to remember what Jesus did on the cross through the bread and the wine.

What the Bible says

The first century church thought communion was worth doing frequently. In Act 2:24 (NIV), we read:

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

It’s not surprising really given that Jesus himself said to “do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19 NIV). He explicitly links the wine to the blood of the covenant. As Christians, we are members of this new covenant. What the communion represents is the central idea of the religion – that Jesus sacrificed himself on a cross.

So why wouldn’t we want to take Jesus’s instruction seriously and place a deep importance on communion?