Dr. Harrison Perkins addresses the question of communion frequency in his recently published book, Take & Eat: Recovering the Regular Celebration of the Lord’s Supper. As the subtitle of this one-hundred-twelve-page volume suggests, the “regular” administration of communion needs recovering in the local church—restored to a more frequent interval than the tradition has slipped into. Perkins shows his reader that “when we know what Christ intends this meal to be and do” we will better know how often it should be received (xiii). Rather than arguing for frequency first and justifying it theologically after the fact, he lets frequency emerge as the natural consequence of the role the Supper plays in the Christian life.
Perkins’s tactic is to first establish what the Supper is and then allow its frequency to fall out as the logical consequence. His thesis appears early in the book: “A proper understanding of the Supper will lead us to recover a frequent and regular celebration of this meal” (3). By establishing his theology of the Supper first, Perkins leaves little room to quibble over frequency. This book is structured in five chapters with a Preface, Conclusion, Bibliography, and Index’s. It is not lengthy, however it is filled with in-depth research that is robustly footnoted.
Christ is recognized as the sole source of the Supper’s meaning. This becomes the central theme in chapter one, where Perkins endeavors to define the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. The sacrament/ordinance terminology debate is set aside as beside the point, and he targets a confessional middle ground against the transubstantiation of Rome and the memorialism of Zwingli. This orientation alone signals the depth of Perkins’s historically Reformed position on the Supper. The elements involve “a real, albeit spiritual, reception of Christ’s body and blood and all his benefits,” since “the substance of the sacraments is the Lord Jesus”—a position he echoes from John Calvin (8).
With the substance of the Supper defined, Perkins outlines the two things it accomplishes. First, it brings people into relationship with one another, and that bond constitutes the strength of the church. Second, the Supper binds the believer to Christ in relationship. Again, he quotes Calvin: “What is said of the word applies as well to the sacrament of the Supper, by means of which the Lord leads us to communion with Jesus Christ” (11). Closing the chapter, he confronts the argument that frequent engagement with the Supper cheapens it, drawing on Westminster Shorter Catechism Q. 88 (means of grace are ordinary, not rare). In a sharper move, he points out that habitually declining frequent communion functionally invites treatment as an unrepentant excommunicant—since exclusion from the Table is the confessional penalty for unrepentant sin (16).
Perkins draws on the Old Testament and New Testament parallel of sacrament to show that God has always fed his covenant people at holy ground with holy food. The place the Lord’s Supper is celebrated takes precedence in chapter two—and that place is in gathered corporate worship. The Regulative Principle—which outlines the Supper as prescribed, not just permitted—supports a frequent offering of the Supper (36). The church “must proclaim the Lord’s death with rigorous regularity as the central feature of our worship.” This proclamation seals the weight of worship that is acceptable to God by including praise, sin confession, and God-glorifying belief—setting our own agenda aside.
In chapter three, Perkins presents a deep dive into the biblical and historical-theological pattern for celebrating the Lord’s Supper. Evidence for a weekly communion table is found in the Didache’s instruction to “gather together and break bread” on the Lord’s own day. This pattern pairs well with a canonical presentation of Eden, Melchizedek, manna, and showbread that ties the holiness of the food (bread) to the holiness of the space (the holy of holies). Ultimately, this historical tie to biblical and theological interpretations of the bread recovers—rather than innovates—a regular interval of celebration, and confronts Zwinglian memorialism directly. A “bare memorial” view “empties [the Supper] of its significance as God’s work to help and nourish [his people]” (60).
Chapters four and five build an airtight case for weekly communion specifically but stop short of saying so outright—allowing readers to draw that conclusion for themselves. Chapter four presents the blessing in celebrating the Lord’s Supper and argues that the Supper works in unison with the preaching of the Word. The bread and the cup are more than decoration—rather, they are the completion of the sermon preached. The potency of this point is drawn from Perkins’s interpretation of the Emmaus Road experience in Luke 24.
Risk and grace are held in tension as Perkins presents the manner of celebrating the Lord’s Supper in chapter five. Through his treatment of the warnings in 1 Corinthians 11, Perkins shows how the Supper supports our flight “from sin because we receive the Supper” (92). Frequent communion, he argues, actually strengthens church discipline, since infrequent celebration lets censured members quietly avoid the one visible marker of exclusion.
Perkins is a supporter of the Reformed Calvinist “real spiritual presence” plus means-of-grace framework for the Lord’s Supper. Here are two relatively recent volumes that support this view and two that do not. Guy Prentiss Waters, The Lord’s Supper as the Sign and Meal of the New Covenant (Crossway, 2019), frames the Supper through covenant signs and meals rather than presence-language per se, but lands in the same place as Perkins: real communion with the “covenant Head.” Waters is a good complementary source since he is more exegetically focused on covenant structure, whereas Perkins is more historical-pastoral. An older, but directly ancestral, connection worth naming is Keith Mathison, Given for You: Reclaiming Calvin’s Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper (P&R, 2002). This is a less recent publication; however, Perkins is functionally continuing Mathison’s project of retrieving Calvin’s own (higher) sacramentology against low-church Reformed drift.
Two books that disagree with Perkins on the manner of Christ’s presence include John W. Kleinig (Australian Lutheran College), The Lord’s Supper: A Guide to the Heavenly Feast (Lexham Press, 2025), and Thomas Schreiner and Matthew Crawford, eds., The Lord’s Supper: Remembering and Proclaiming Christ Until He Comes (B&H Academic, 2011). Kleinig’s is the sharpest live disagreement to put next to Perkins: he holds that Christ’s body and blood are received orally, in, with, and under the bread and wine—not merely spiritually by faith through the Spirit, as Calvin and Perkins hold. Same “real presence” vocabulary, genuinely different metaphysics of how that presence is delivered. Schreiner and Crawford’s volume, though not as recent, remains the standard current Baptist-memorialist reference text and is still in print. If you want a genuinely recent Baptist-side title instead, Bobby Jamieson’s Understanding the Lord’s Supper (B&H, 2016) is closer but still not brand-new.
Perkins draws on classic Reformed sources with uneven depth—his richest engagement stands alongside a few missed opportunities worth noting. The greatest load-bearing source is Calvin, and it shows. Calvin is not just a decorative citation—he’s structurally necessary to every chapter. Perkins uses Calvin’s actual sacramental definition—”the substance of the sacraments is the Lord Jesus”—to do the doctrinal work in chapter 1. The end of chapter 1 returns to Calvin for support—”no meeting of the church… without the Word, prayers, partaking of the Supper” (Institutes 4.17.44), closing the chapter on Christ as the true meaning of the Supper. In chapter three, Calvin undergirds the “God as messmate” reading of the manna-showbread pattern. Calvin operates in three different dimensions—doctrinal grounding, historical-practical argument, and biblical-theological argument—and each seems to be carried by the same source without strain. It’s a genuine case of letting a classic author’s whole corpus—Institutes, sermons, catechetical material—do sustained argumentative work, rather than mining him for a single proof-quote.
The engagement with Owen and Turretin is thinner by comparison, cited chiefly to establish that they held a position rather than to explore why. Owen is invoked only to establish that he “argued for weekly Communion” (p. 20)—a historical fact, not an engagement with why he argued for it. Owen’s sacramental theology is developed at length in his own writings on communion with God, and leaving that aside is a missed opportunity for Perkins to sharpen or deepen his own argument. Turretin fares similarly: he is cited once, in a footnote, for a narrow typological point on New Testament language applied to Old Testament sacraments (1 Cor. 5:7). Given that Turretin is arguably the Reformed scholastic on precise sacramental categories—his Institutio offers an extended, technical treatment of the Supper that directly addresses the three-way dispute between Zwinglian, Lutheran, and Reformed positions—reducing him to a single typological aside is another missed opportunity. A book this concerned with distinguishing the Reformed view from its neighbors would have been strengthened by even a page of Turretin’s own precision on how spiritual presence differs from both bare memorial and corporeal presence, rather than relying on Calvin’s more pastoral language alone to do all of that dogmatic work.
In Take & Eat, Harrison Perkins makes a compelling case that a properly Reformed understanding of the Lord’s Supper—as a real, spiritual means of communion with Christ and a ordinary means of grace—naturally leads the church to recover its frequent, regular celebration rather than treating frequency as an optional preference. Concise yet thoroughly researched and pastorally clear, the volume is a valuable resource for churches seeking to restore the Supper to its rightful place in corporate worship.
