What was the practice of the early church for the Lord's Table?

[BuddyOfDavidClarkson]

Did they sit? Did they stand? Did they kneel? Did they all drink from one cup? Did they have individual cups?

 

[Prufrock]

That's a great question David. As far as I've deduced from most church historians (and what seems to have happened in scripture...), the eucharist was not separated from an actual meal -- it was done in context of every one gathering together for fellowship to eat at a common table, in the course of which they partook of the bread and wine. (This 1 Co. 11 -- it's a feast) But this gradually began to change. Here's a selection from Phillip Schaff -- I cite him because he's a basic, easily accessible resource for most people:

In the apostolic period the eucharist was celebrated daily in connection with a simple meal of brotherly love (agape), in which the Christians, in communion with their common Redeemer, forgot all distinctions of rank, wealth, and culture, and felt themselves to be members of one family of God. But this childlike exhibition of brotherly unity became more and more difficult as the church increased, and led to all sorts of abuses, such as we find rebuked in the Corinthians by Paul. The lovefeasts, therefore, which indeed were no more enjoined by law than the community of goods at Jerusalem, were gradually severed from the eucharist, and in the course of the second and third centuries gradually disappeared.

And, in the western church, part of the transformation in the early centuries:

The celebration of the eucharistic sacrifice and of the communion was the centre and summit of the public worship of the Lord’s day, and all other parts of worship served as preparation and accompaniment. The old liturgies are essentially, and almost exclusively, eucharistic prayers and exercises; they contain nothing besides, except some baptismal formulas and prayers for the catechumens. The word liturgy (leitourgiva), which properly embraces all parts of the worship of God, denotes in the narrower sense a celebration of the eucharist or the mass.

One question that has always intrigued me is a difference in practice among Jewish and Gentile congregations. But to this, I have no answer.