Dear EFC Subscribers:

I am continuing the series we started last month by including another short essay from my upcoming book The Christian Story: Finding the Church in Church History Volume IV.  This is a short essay on the question of who ought to be sharing with us as Christians in our churches when we take the elements of the Lord’s Supper. The book will become available summer, 2022.  The essay is below.

Merced

In the meantime, we are getting so much closer to the church planting that my wife Jan and I will be leading to Merced, California.  We have now purchased a home there and the church will be meeting in our home (1195 Pinnacle Dr. Merced, CA 95348) for Bible study and for Sunday worship after the first of June.  Our web site is https://www.mercedchurch.com Will you consider moving to Merced to join our team? It is a beautiful and growing university town with a surprisingly low cost of living.  Are you ready to get out on the edge, spiritually?  Or, if not, might you want to support the new church planting.  Please contact us through the web site or me directly if you want to join us, for a few days or to live in Merced or to contribute financially to the work.  John Oakes 858-344-5323  john.oakes@gcccd.edu Here is a youtube about our planting:  https://youtu.be/Uaznn0PJ1cY

New Material

I am now nearing completion of a New Testament Survey class, designed for interns in the West Coast School of Ministry.  Here are the materials, including 10 hours of audio, power points and many sermons:  New Testament Survey    Here is a series of sermons from Acts  Acts Sermons  as well as a series of lessons on Spiritual Formation as well as a new sermon In Christ the Veil is Removed  There is plenty more at the web site.

Please stay in touch and please be praying for Jan and I as we prepare to lead a church planting to Merced in just one month. Essay below.

John Oakes

Who should take Communion?

The question of who should take communion is one which has persisted throughout the history of Christianity. Some Christian groups have advocated for open communion, while others have restricted the Lord’s Supper to church members only. Key to this question, of course, is what a Christian group believes the purpose and meaning of the Lord’s Supper is. In the primitive church the communion was closed. It was for baptized disciples only. It is not completely clear whether this was because they believed that only those who are saved ought to take part in the sacrament, or was it out of security concerns of a highly persecuted minority? By the early Middle Ages, the eucharist had become a re-enactment of the sacrifice of Jesus and a sacrament which imparts saving grace to those who were already in the Church. Communion was for members of the Orthodox or Roman Catholic Church only. End of story.

Of course, the purpose and meaning of the Lord’s Supper was re-evaluated by the leaders of the Reformation. To them the only sacraments were the biblical ones—baptism and the eucharist. Yet, the practice of members-only participation in the communion was maintained as church-state Christendom had not yet broken down. This especially held true in the Reformed tradition of Zwingli and Calvin. For example, with the Puritans, the restriction of who was allowed to take part in the communion was even more highly restricted than under the ancient Orthodox or Roman Catholic churches. Only those who could demonstrate their conversion to the community were given access to the sacrament. Access to the Communion became a weapon to enforce a particular view of who is a Christian on the community. One had to be part of the accepted Christian club to be given access to the sacrament.

Fast-forward a couple of hundred years, and the question of who should participate in the communal sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is asked in a fundamentally different historical setting. The second Reformation has happened. Christendom is at an end, and, with this has come an explosion in the number of Christian groups. Believers can go anywhere they like. Church-shopping is an endemic practice. All kinds of folks show up at our worship, and in many cases, especially with larger churches, it has become impractical to do a denominational member-check on the way in. Under these circumstances, for practical reasons, completely open communion has become the norm for most groups. In this light, we ought to ask ourselves what is the core meaning of the Lord’s Supper, and what this reasonably ought to mean about who should take part in our churches. Is the eucharist simply a remembrance of the death of Jesus Christ? Or is it a grace-imparting participation in the death and resurrection of Christ?

If a Christian group concludes that the communion is simply a remembrance “Do this in remembrance of me,” then it seems that fully open communion is the correct path. Why not let even those who are not committed believers remember the death of Jesus as a part of our community? For that matter, even smaller children can be encouraged to remember Jesus in this way. Or perhaps we believe that the eucharist is the participation by a baptized believer in the death and resurrection of Jesus. In this case, perhaps we will not allow unbaptized children to take part. But in this case, in order to be consistent, we may need to examine visitors, and only allow members to participate.

The purpose of this very short essay is not to decide this issue, but to cause us to ask the proper questions. It seems that we should not allow expedient to determine our practice or even our belief. We need to ask ourselves what we believe God intends for the Lord’s Supper to be. Once we have done this, then we need to consider the 21^st century setting and decide whether we will have fully open communion or not.