How DARE the pastor say that I shouldn’t take communion! Just because I’m in this big fight with someone in my church? How dare he! (Or. Dare he not?)
I always enjoy Dave’s posts over at our Redeeming Church Conflicts.com site. But this post was particularly challenging and edifying for me:
I hope you will click through and read the entire post, but for a quick summary, let me just say that Dave reminds us all of the seriousness of coming to the Lord’s Table in an unworthy manner; especially the warning in Matthew 5:23-24 concerning partaking in corporate worship before making any effort to reconcile broken relationships. He then responds to the people who were, shall we say, not pleased with this “fencing” of the Table when it happened recently at his church.
One reason why I think this post was particularly meaningful for me is because I spent my early years in churches that never taught this to me and thus, I have many memories of people (including myself!) taking communion while harboring bitterness and resentment in their hearts towards one another. What a mockery of the Cross! Jesus died to save us from our sin and make us his adopted children; he kisses us through His Supper to grow us all up into him, our Head. And we respond with cursing, gossip, slander, and bitterness? This is surely not the way it’s supposed to be. (And the human wreckage in these churches was great—“friends” who walk away from one another; marriages ending in divorce; even one of my churches splitting due to unresolved conflict. None of this pointing to Christ and glorifying the justice and mercy of God.)
My favorite years as a Christian were the years I spent in a church that fenced the table rightly. Pretty much every time we shared the Lord’s Supper, you saw people abstaining. Holding back. Letting the elements pass. It was a normal thing in the culture of our church and if it were noticed, it was only a call to pray. We prayed for our own hearts (when we were the ones caught in bitterness and refusing to even try to be reconciled). We prayed for wise and experienced peacemakers (laypeople and leaders) who were undoubtedly helping in the process. And we prayed for “the unity of the saints through the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:1-3); that the testimony of our lives would clearly demonstrate to a watching world that we are the Lord’s disciples:
Oh! Those Christians! Look at how they forgive and love one another!
May this be true in all of our churches.
In Christ Our Only Hope,
Tara B.
PS
If you haven’t re-read Bonhoeffer’s Life Together in awhile, I encourage you to do so. Chapter 5 (“Confession and Communion”) is alone worth the price of the book. Spurgeon also has a sermon that is worth the read (doesn’t he always?): Fencing the Table. The Spuurgeon paragraph most on point to this post (my emphasis added) is:
And, dear friends, once more, there is a necessity for us to examine ourselves, because we must know that there are, among us, some who are, doubtless, partaking of the Lord’s Supper unworthily. We have known, to our great sorrow, of some who have been harbouring an unforgiving spirit, yet who have dared to come to the communion table. When I have really known that this has been the case, I have prevented the wrongdoer from sitting down with us; but, unknown to me, and to other ministers, it must often have happened that persons have come, professing to be Christians, yet all the while not manifesting the true spirit of Christianity toward some offending brother or sister. You remember how even the loving apostle John writes, “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?”
PPS
In full disclosure, I found the link to the Spurgeon sermon and the wonderful graphic at the top of this post on JoeThorn.net. I do not know Pastor Thorn personally, but I am in a writer’s group with his (delightful! wise!) wife. I hope you check out his blog—especially if you are one of my many Baptist friends. I think you would enjoy his “byte-sized experiential theology” very much.
[A re-post from 2012]