ABSTRACT
The present, however, is a different matter, and the instabilities that inhere in the current formal understanding of first communion positively invite the investigation of alternative accounts for the celebration of the ritual today. By far the largest-scale study in this field has been carried out in Chicago, Illinois, drawing on the services of a large number of researchers to create a citywide ethnography of Church practice. In Britain, the studies have been on a smaller scale, but there is, none the less, a growing body of research into the study of congregations and their worship. Martin Stringer compared the experience of worship in four English churches that came from very different traditions. The first parish was in the inner city of Liverpool, just over a mile inland from the river Mersey. It was founded in 1861, and its present church was built in 1865.
