Pizza and Coke for Communion?

After my post on children taking communion (Kiddies Menu: Children at the Lord’s Table) I received some great questions. I wanted to address them more fully than in a crammed comment cage.

Have you ever thought of these provocative variables in the form and substance of the Lord’s Supper:

• Should we not emulate the NT church’s practice of sharing an entire, sit-down meal?
• Must the bread be unleavened?
• Must the wine be alcoholic?
• Must the wine be red or can we use Champagne instead?
• Where does one draw the line? For example, can pizza and Coke count as communion? I.e. can the bread be sweetened, or have a topping? What about milk and cookies?

Makes the blood boil a bit, doesn’t it? You may have got stuck on the milk & cookies on, and you would probably say: “Obviously not, don’t be dumb.” And you’d be right to say that…but why?

Here are some principles by which we can make these decisions.

   1. Jesus instituted a practice of breaking and sharing bread and wine, therefore the substance of the meal must correlate with his intention.

Thus breaking bread is essential, as it represents the breaking of Christ’s body.

The bread represents the body. It was the symbol Jesus selected, perhaps because he also called himself the Bread of Life (John 6:35).

This is why he said “Do this in remembrance of me” as he broke the bread. He clearly meant “Break bread.” Not, break a cookie, or cut some pepperoni pizza slices.  Continue at Clint Archer

Table Manners

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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