Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9009. Churches answer the question of who is welcome at the Lord’s table in three broadly different ways, and open communion is the practice I hold and teach. The alternatives are held by serious people for serious reasons, and I want to give them a fair hearing before saying why I am not persuaded….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9007. When the bread and cup come round, somebody in the room is always wondering whether they may take communion, and that wondering is usually a good sign rather than a bad one. The people who worry about it are rarely the people who should be worried. My short answer is that believers may…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9006. The Lord’s Supper goes by a number of names, and each carries some freight: communion, the breaking of bread, the Lord’s table, the Eucharist, and in some traditions the Mass. What we call it matters less than what we think is happening, and on that Christians have divided more sharply than on almost…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9097. How often should a church observe communion? Weekly, monthly, quarterly, or whenever the diary allows? I have been asked this by members moving between congregations and startled to find the practice completely different from what they were used to, and by leaders wondering whether their own habit has any basis beyond inheritance. The…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 9094. The phrase breaking bread appears often enough in the New Testament that people assume it always means the same thing, and that assumption causes a good deal of confusion about whether the Lord’s Supper was originally a full meal. It is a fair question, and the answer is more interesting than a simple…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 09064. The memorial view of the Lord’s Supper holds that the bread and cup represent the body and blood of Jesus rather than becoming or containing them, and that the table is chiefly an act of remembrance and proclamation. It is the position of most Baptists and independent evangelicals, and it is regularly dismissed…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 09063. The meaning of communion is not one thing but several, and I suspect that is why so many believers take the bread and cup each month without being able to say what they are doing. We know it matters. We know it has to do with the cross. Beyond that most of us…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 10007. The New Covenant is announced in Jeremiah with a named addressee, “the house of Israel and the house of Judah,” and yet the Lord Jesus lifted the cup and said, “this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood,” to a table of Jewish disciples about to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4190. We rarely stop to ask what the Holy Spirit is doing at the Lord’s Supper, and I think that is because we have quietly assumed He is not doing much. The bread and the cup are on the table, the words of institution are read, we eat and drink and go home. Yet…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 09008 The New Testament commands the church to observe the Lord’s Supper but does not specify how frequently. This has led to considerable variation across Christian traditions, from daily celebration in some Catholic and Orthodox settings to quarterly or even annual observance in some Protestant churches. The absence of a specific command about frequency…