First of all, open communion usually rests on the all-too-typical
Evangelical presumption that the Lord’s Supper really isn’t that
important. Communion is, as Flannery O’Connor’s infamous socialite
conversation-partner once put it, “a wonderful symbol” but that’s about
it. The issue isn’t the event itself, but the insult of the exclusion,
in the same way that 1950s and 1960s civil disobedience wasn’t about how
great the food was at the Woolworth’s lunch-counter.
Too often in our contemporary Evangelical church culture, the act of
barring a member from the table seems quaint or even meaningless. After
all, who really cares if he is deprived of a wafer and a splash of
grape juice?
Sometimes Christians in other traditions assume that all low-church
Protestants take this kind of view, but that’s simply not the case.
While disagreeing with the sacerdotal theologies of many of the older
traditions, Baptists (before we were to this extent washed up in the
riptide of parachurch Evangelicalism) shared with other Christians a
common conviction that the Lord’s Table is a place of profound
gravity—much more than the kind of “communion” we might have with the
Lord and with one another while talking about the Holy Spirit over
coffee and doughnuts. Read it all HERE
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