In my church, we like to invite anyone to join in the celebration of the Lord's Supper, regardless of their age, denomination or background, provided that they love the Lord Jesus as their King and Saviour.
So we offer three ways to take wine:
1. sip alcoholic wine from the chalice, or 'common cup'
2. dip the bread into a cup of alcoholic wine reserved for that purpose; this is sometimes called 'intincting' or 'intinction'; which comes from the Latin 'intingere' (according to Lexico.com) which means... you guessed it, to dip (something) into (something - most likely something coloured)
3. drink non-alcoholic grape juice from a tiny individual cup
A bit more information about those three options:
The shared cup is intended to remind us that Jesus served wine to his disciples from one cup, and perhaps also that we all share in the same blood. The wine is usually fortified, ie. more alcoholic than ordinary table wine, and that helps with killing any germs people might accidentally share.
Dipping the bread in the wine is preferred by some people, but for a few different reasons. Some ministers insist on dipping the bread before they give it to the people. Some dip because that's what they were taught to do. Some choose to be tea-total - they don't drink any alcohol at all; if their church doesn't offer a non-alcoholic alternative, dipping the bread means that they can take part fully in the celebration of the Lord's Supper, but limit the amount of alcohol they take.
Some dip because they are concerned about either giving or receiving germs on the rim of the cup. That's probably the least valid reason, because unless people have scrubbed their fingers and nails just before they dip, they risk transferring many more germs into the wine than if they sipped. In fact in several Australian dioceses, people are being encouraged not to dip for that reason.
This (slightly humorous) article talks about the more theological reasons for not dipping: First, that Jesus did not combine the bread and the wine when he served his disciples. Second, that the purpose of celebrating the Lord's Supper is to remember Jesus' sacrifice of himself to atone for our sin - such a sacrifice is foreshadowed in the Old Testament, where the priests were instructed to pour out the blood separately from the body of the sacrifice.
Some people are rather scornful of serving the wine or grape juice in individual cups; they see it as a new invention, perhaps a utilitarian approach to serving the Lord's Supper, which degrades the ceremony in their eyes. I have a rather different view.
For one thing, I have known people who struggle against alcohol, so that even the smell of alcohol on my breath as I serve them makes celebrating the Lord's Supper an ordeal. For their sake, I would offer non-alcoholic grape juice every time. There are also many children who grasp what Jesus has done for them as fully as any adult, and I want to include them in our family celebration. There are others who have a compromised immune system, and simply can't risk exposure to other people's germs.
What about the theology of individual cups, rather than the pragmatics?
In other traditions, people are encouraged to eat and drink when they feel ready, and not on some schedule imposed by the service leader. The bread and wine are available at their seat throughout the service. This is unusual to me, but I can see that it might help people to 'do business with the Lord' in prayer more than trooping forward and queuing up at the rail in a more traditional ritual.
From my reading of the accounts of the Last Supper, it seems likely to me that Jesus gave thanks for the wine, and then served it from a jug into each person's separate cup. I'm in the middle of a little bit of research to find out if my hunch is right, and am ready to eat humble pie if I'm wrong!
Whether that's right or not, I don't think drinking from separate cups devalues the act of celebrating the Lord's Supper. If you eat and drink in remembrance of Jesus' sacrificial death for you, quite frankly, I don't think it matters if you drink wine from a shared cup or orange juice from a cardboard carton, kneeling in a church at a specially made rail or sitting at a picnic table in the park.
I do think that it's preferable, but not essential, to celebrate with other Christians rather than alone. In the early church, the disciples 'devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer' (Acts 2:42). Breaking bread would be what you'd do when you ate with people, like on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:20 "When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them."). And the apostle Paul emphasises the shared, unifying nature of Jesus' sacrifice for us - his death gathers people from the ends of the earth into one body, one family, one nation.
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