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Dear Church Family, One of the things which most excites me about Covenant Fellowship is the way that children of all ages are included in the life of the church -- in the worship, in the cell life, in the web of mutual relationships between adults and children. I love to hear the children sing and worship, read Scripture, participate in discussions, and of course play together. Because we try to honor the children by including them as legitimate participants in the corporate life of the fellowship, the question naturally arises as to how the children are to participate in our sharing of the Lord’s Supper. I have been thinking lately about kids and communion and wanted to share some of these thoughts with you. I haven't actually arrived at a firm conclusion about the questions I will raise, and I invite input from you. Please, I am in process on this, and I invite help. I look forward to having communion with you this week. The question of children and communion (or paedo-communion as it is called) is important to me first of all because I am a father. What should I have my kids do when the communion plate is passed, or when the communion meal is shared? But the issue is also important to me as a pastor, because many of you are parents and you seek guidance on the matter, and a framework or boundary in which to decide about what your kids will do. It is important to me as a part of a local congregation because worship is important. Since communion is part of the corporate worship, and since we desire worship to be right and true and biblical, communion is important. Why should not all children of believers take communion? What is it that has caused certain large sections of the church to deny participation in this covenant ritual to children? Well, in general it is because we rightly think that abusing communion is very serious. Abusing worship in any way is serious. We learn particularly about the seriousness of the abuse of the Lord's Supper in 1 Cor 11:17-34, particularly verse 27. We have taken Paul’s warnings in such a way as to suggest that including children in communion would be an abuse of the Lord’s Supper. But before I get into that section, let me look at the question of paedo-communion from another angle. If we didn’t have that section in Corinthians, what would we conclude about children and communion? We think almost instinctively that before a child participates in the Lord's Supper he or she needs either to have a clear personal faith in Jesus or a clear understanding of what the elements of communion signify. But why do we think that? Do we insist that a child have a clear personal testimony before he or she sings songs of praise in public or private worship, or before the child prays to God at home. Jesus is the only mediator between God and man, and is the only way to the Father, but we don't think do we that a little child has to understand all of that clearly before he prays to his Father in heaven? Understanding clearly the Trinity, the mediatorial role of the Son, the significance of the cross of Jesus Christ -- certainly these are not prerequisites for our little children as they come to God in prayer. Nor are they prerequisites for singing the praises of God in public or private worship. We do not insist that children understand all the lyrics before we invite them to sing the hymn or chorus do we? Are we not doing right when we invite our children to worship God in various ways even before they understand some pretty important things about whom they worship? But communion for many of us is an exception to this principle of inviting children to worship before they clearly understand. Now why is that? If Paul hadn't said what he said in 1 Cor 11:27-32 about eating and drinking in an unworthy manner, eating and drinking judgment, etc., would we have derived the concerns we have about paedo-communion from the other passages which teach about this New Covenant rite? I am not sure that we would have. Apart from the 1 Cor. passage, most of what we actually know about the nature of communion comes from those sections in the Gospels that deal with Jesus' time with the disciples in the upper room just before His trial and death. These are Matthew 26:17-30, Mark 14: 12-26, and Luke 22:7-23. John also speaks in chapters 13-17 about the gathering in the upper room but focuses on other matters. Some believe that Jesus teaching in John 6 about being the Bread of Life is meant to refer specifically to communion, others think not. The first Lord's Supper was in fact a Passover meal. This is the way Luke introduces the time Jesus spent with His disciples in the upper room: Luke 22:7-16 Then came the day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, "Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover." "Where do you want us to prepare for it?" they asked. He replied, "As you enter the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him to the house that he enters, and say to the owner of the house, 'The Teacher asks: Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples? 'He will show you a large upper room, all furnished. Make preparations there." They left and found things just as Jesus had told them. So they prepared the Passover. When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table. And he said to them, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God." Christian communion is to be understood as the New Covenant “version” of Old Covenant Passover. What strikes me about the fact that the Lord's Supper comes out of the Jewish celebration of Passover, is that Passover was a premier teaching time for children! Not only were children welcomed to participate in Passover, the Passover after all being a real meal, a ritual meal, the Passover meal seemed significantly designed to teach children about the great deeds of the Lord. It was a meal designed to give generational continuity to Israel's faith in YAHWEH. This is the way it is put in Exodus 12:24-28. I encourage you to read the entire chapter. Exo. 12:24-28 "Obey these instructions as a lasting ordinance for you and your descendants. When you enter the land that the LORD will give you as he promised, observe this ceremony. And when your children ask you, 'What does this ceremony mean to you? then tell them, 'It is the Passover sacrifice to the LORD, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.'" Then the people bowed down and worshipped. The Israelites did just what the LORD commanded Moses and Aaron. The Passover was a ritual meal, a kind of reenactment of (and by this I mean not a re-sacrifice or anything like that but something which calls to memory the story of salvation) and memorial celebration of that greatest and most defining of events in Israel's history, her rescue from bondage in Egypt. Certainly Jesus wants us to make a connection between Passover and his own death. But now in the New Covenant the elements of the meal point not to the Exodus events and the Passover lamb, but to the broken body and shed blood of the Lord Jesus, to Christ our Passover. Indeed the Old Covenant Exodus and Passover prefigured the death of the Lamb of God on the cross of Calvary which achieved our rescue from bondage to sin and death. The meaning of the Old Testament Passover is fulfilled and completed in the atoning death of Jesus. Christ is the once for all Passover Lamb. I think the church through the ages has made a mistake separating the Lord's supper from a real supper, the communion meal from a real meal. Have you ever had a seder meal? There the "elements" are the parts of the meal and are actually eaten as a meal. In the Passover the children ate the meal like everyone else, and when a question came to them about what was meant by the various "elements" they asked their parents to explain. One gets the idea that the children were being set up just for that purpose, and that one of the main reasons for having the ritual meal was continually to connect the new generation to the defining events of the old. But we can't just go and ignore what Paul has to say in 1 Cor. 11 about the abuse of the Lord's table. I encourage you to read 1Cor 11:17-22. Try to see the problem Paul is dealing with. It is in the context of that particular problem that Paul gives his strong directives in verses 27-33. The question we take to that passage that has relevance for children and communion is this: Does Paul's statement about "recognizing the body of the Lord" refer in context to understanding the symbolism about Christ's crucified body, or does it refer to understanding the church as the one body of Christ? If the former is what Paul meant, then this might have bearing on the issue of children and communion, since partakers of communion would be required to have clear understanding of the symbolic nature of the Lord's supper. But even if the former is Paul's meaning it might not have bearing since what is required of adults is not always required of children. My own opinion is that Paul is referring to the sins of disunity and division and gluttony with respect to the Lord's Supper. What do you think? I leave the questions open and unresolved. As a father, as a pastor, as part of a local fellowship, I am interested in children and their worship. I do not want to deny what may be to their benefit, nor do I want to profane the true worship of the church. I invite your input. I will revisit the matter in a future letter. Our approach and policy at CF remains this: We leave it to parents to decide whether their children should participate. Parents, talk to your children about the Lord's Supper beforehand and let them know what you will permit them to do. In time we may work through a clearer church-wide approach that will relieve parents of this individual burden of decision. As a parent I know the burden a parent feels hearing a child say, "But Dad, but Mom, Billy's parents let him eat the bread!" Come to communion just as you come to worship of any kind. It's not really any different. We come to commemorate and celebrate what God has done for us in Christ. We take our sin and guilt to Him and we receive His forgiveness and cleansing. Communion is a happy occasion. It is the good news in visual form. It symbolizes what God has done and promises to do for us as we come to Jesus in repentance and faith. It is a corporate affair, a meal shared by us as a body, as Christ's body, and we come respecting the body and seeking its good and its unity. Joel |
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