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Andrew McGowan is Dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. An Anglican priest and historian, his scholarly work focuses on the life of early Christian communities, and on aspects of contemporary Anglicanism. 

Although the story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet (John 13) includes an injunction to continued performance just as clear as those attached to the Eucharist and Baptism, Christians in general did not develop a tradition of communal foot-washing such as those later “invented” in Medieval rituals for Holy Thursday or by pietist protestant groups. Some suggest an implied but short-lived communal ritual in the Johannine community, but there is no evidence for this. Scholars have however paid little attention to evidence for actual foot-washing, often practiced by women, particularly in prisons and similar settings of extreme need. These acts which were ritual and practical but not communal did not persist as a general practice beyond the third century or so, apparently not assimilable to the emergent notion of Christian worship as leitourgia, with its public and gendered implications, but had some survivals in ascetic communities.