Many have Misunderstood Communion

When I was a young boy, two main things entered my mind on the Sundays our church gathered around the communion table. First, I knew it would be a long service because the pastor was not about to give up sermon time. This meant Church would end no earlier than 12:15 — instead of 12 noon.

The second thing I recall is a strange sense of fear. With his deep voice, the pastor would always read and make a strong point from I Corinthians 11:27-30 (the King James Version):

“Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.”

Who wants to get sick or die?

Like most protestant pastors (following the lead of most commentaries on I Corinthians), he stressed the need to be careful not to come to the table with unconfessed sin. Thus the call to “examine ourselves” lest we eat and drink “unworthily.” With this emphasis, the focus turned inward as each person searched his or her soul for unconfessed sins.  Keep Reading >>>

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

IMAGE