Our church is currently engaged in a rapid movement toward open eucharist, meaning open access to communion regardless of one’s baptismal status. This essay on the subject of open communion emerged from a spontaneous discussion at a clergy conference in the Diocese of Minnesota in the spring of 1998. It was presented at our fall 1998 clergy conference at the invitation of Bishop Jelinek. In the meantime, I have developed it further to take into account several newer insights and observations.
The wave of fervor to remove baptism as an “obstacle” to communion, as proponents identify the problem, has failed to articulate an adequate theology of what is for us a core theological, pastoral, and ecclesiological question: whether baptism should continue to precede communion. The question usually comes up in relation to printed and spoken announcements about who is welcome to come to the table and specifically whether the word “baptized” should be voiced in that invitation.
Parishes by the dozens have moved to adopt an open practice, so the practice is obviously in place. In my view, however, we have not considered the consequences to our identity, our baptismal theology, or our ecclesiology, except in a reactive way.
As I understand it, the rationale for communion being open to anyone, regardless of their baptismal status, has partly to do with hospitality and partly to do with the radical nature of Jesus’ own ministry to people on the outside of established religious practice. The rationale also appears as a reaction against thinking of baptism as a “ticket to communion,” implying that maintaining our historic practice is mere legalism and rigidity.
We can indeed be effective at putting up barriers between our faith communities and those who are seeking to belong. In trying to get around such barriers, there is power in the possibility that someone from “off the street” might, in an unexpected moment of grace, be fed at a sacred table with believers. On the surface, it would seem this is precisely what Jesus did all the time.
Without denying the potential power of such an experience in a eucharistic setting, scripture does not uniformly support the idea. For though Jesus did indeed eat with tax collectors and sinners, the institution of the sacred meal, a meal to be eaten “in memory of” him, took place with his disciples alone. The sixth chapter of the gospel according to John contains much upon which our eucharistic teaching is based. A close reading of the whole chapter suggests that there may be a difference between the Last Supper and the many other meals Jesus ate with people, however fundamental these other meals also are to our understanding of him. It is a difference that seems to have to do with the belief and commitment of his followers, or at least this may be how the disciple community interpreted eucharist by the time this gospel account was composed.
In the Johannine account, as Jesus begins to explain to the crowds that God provides the bread from heaven that gives life, many among them say, “Sir, give us this bread always.” When Jesus proceeds to tell them that he is “the bread of life,” they start to interrogate him. Since he was teaching this in the synagogue at Capernaum, the first objections were raised by those who we can assume were religious authorities. But the concerns are not limited to them. For some of his disciples were also bothered by the teaching. When they sought comfort from him about it, he came back again with the challenge that this particular teaching was “spirit and life.” Offended, many who had been following him decided this was too much, and they abandoned the quest. At the end of this passage, only the twelve were left, and Jesus already suggests that one of them is “a devil,” as he puts it. It is worth noting that this moment immediately follows the feeding of the multitudes, an occasion some would claim supports indiscriminate eucharistic table fellowship. Jesus is already aware that following him will take a specific and radical commitment on the part of each disciple.
This passage at least is enough to raise the question about just what sort of meal we are serving on a Sunday morning around our altars. Is it primarily about hospitality–and thus more like Jesus’ meals with tax collectors, sinners and the multitudes–or is eucharist primarily about community memory and identification with Jesus? It is certainly about belonging. But if it is about memory and identification and about hospitality, which has the prior claim? Or is one claim prior to the other? Neither this passage nor our desire to freely communicate the love of God are, I think, enough to answer this question. We have to dig also into the question of how we form our identity as Christian disciples and the nature of baptism itself.
There are two tacks I want to take here. One has to do with the work of social anthropologists and the other to do with what the Book of Common Prayer 1979 accomplished around baptism. On the latter, I can’t imagine that any of us are ungrateful for the revisions to the baptismal liturgy. The profound strengthening of the form and substance of our baptismal rite has begun to bear all sorts of fruit in our church. There is now a much more explicit standard for Christian living. The covenant is more solemn in its presentation, and more people take it seriously. Its honesty about the realities of human living– we are tempted, we do sin, we do fail–is coupled with a dramatic proclamation of the freedom from sin and death which trust and identification with Christ bring to us. The bar has been raised by this prayer book’s baptismal rite. And, indeed, I can think of little that has so helped to enliven us these past couple of decades than the Baptismal Covenant, its use in our liturgies, and its effect on our work in the world. As a result, I think we really have begun to have a better idea of who we are and to what purpose God is calling us.
Regarding social anthropologists, John Westerhoff, among others, has taught us much, especially with regard to catechesis and adolescent formation and rites of passage. Those teachings include the insight that over the millennia humanity has formed its most powerful loyalties and its most clearly defined communities through shared ordeals. In nearly all such communities, the ordeal is preceded and followed by ritual acknowledgement of the transition the ordeal is supposed to enact. Entry into the catechumenate at one stage followed some time later by baptism at the Easter Vigil have historically been our faith’s most analogous expression of this process.
What precise relationship open communion has to the formational process of baptism has not been made clear to me. Very little in the way of substantive theology has been written about it at all. Richard Fabian, rector of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, wrote an article in Open in Fall 1994, which Leonel Mitchell cautiously challenged in the same issue. Sara Grant, a Catholic nun in India, has written an article. But there is little yet that communicates precisely how open communion contributes to the formational process. Fabian’s article almost shuns the idea of baptismal preparation. I have heard of another more recent publication, “Font to Rail or Rail to Font?” but I have not seen it and cannot comment. It must be said of the other examples that only Fabian argues for official change. What we need to know about his parish, however, is that by many, if not all, reports it is unique among Episcopal churches and that he and his associate have spent nearly thirty years developing this way of living the liturgy within their community. None of these articles provides a well-framed description of the relationship between open eucharist and the formation of Christian identity. Of them, only Fabian is talking about taking a new approach to Christian formation, and his description inadequately addresses baptismal issues.
Even so, we are justifiably suspicious of asking people simply to jump through hoops. Rigid legalism is no answer. Many of us work hard to break down barriers that seem to be set before people who may not be like us, or who simply don’t believe– yet–and we have a deep discomfort with being such a barrier ourselves. We want to open doors, not close them.
I wonder, though, if we will in the end create the desired effect by opening eucharist up officially. And I want to be sure you understand that I’m talking about what we put in print and what we say to people, not what we do when the stranger comes to our altar, regardless of what we have said and printed. I, for one, have never turned away, nor would I turn away, anyone from the communion rail. The altar is not the place to address the issue. My main point here, though, is that churches everywhere are falling over each other to be the most accommodating, inclusive, accepting, welcoming place around. Sometimes the motives are deep and true; sometimes they have more to do with numbers and fear of offending others, or a subconscious lack of confidence in the institutional church as a locus of truth and love. I expect that sometimes both motives apply.
In light of the baptismal rite we now have, another question has to be asked if open eucharist is to become the norm. Are we willing to be as rigorous and deep in our baptismal preparation as we are unconditional in our eucharistic practice? We still have many parishes that practice private baptism. Even among those relatively few parishes that restrict baptisms to the principal Sunday service, preparation is usually limited to one or two sessions. Sometimes, a practice session before the service is the extent of the preparation.
A few years ago, Roy Oswald led a clergy conference in our diocese and asked about our catechumenal practices. It was clear how very few of us have ever had a catechumenate of even six months for adults. If this cursory preparation is how we treat baptism, then what does this say about how powerfully we ourselves identify as leaders with Christ in baptism? And does open eucharist help us to avoid our teaching responsibilities around the baptismal covenant? Even the dismissive label describing baptism as a “ticket to communion” suggests that many have already moved into thinking that eucharist is the destination.
Are we going to trade substantive, attentive, and deep reflection on entering the Christian journey in exchange for a hope that being what some would call radically open (Fabian) will somehow accomplish the main point about what it means to be Christian? Can we be eucharistically accommodating and at the same time offer a meaningful ordeal (Westerhoff) that forms loyalties and strong faith communities? Is even that new ordering– having fully open communion and fully developed catechesis–the better way? Would it not be worth considering how we are concretely hospitable in every way that we encounter others–in our narthexes, worship services, parish halls, homes, outreach ministries and study groups– and to invite and walk with those who would learn of costly discipleship and seek Christ in the waters of baptism?
In this essay, I have used the word “open” and the word “accommodating” to describe various intentions. I need to emphasize that when I use the word “open,” I’m assuming that we all want at the deepest level to be open to others. However, when I use the word “accommodating,” I intend to convey a sense that we are losing something of our identity. My insight on this aspect came to me when reading a lecture Edwin Friedman gave in 1992, entitled “The Challenge of Change and the Spirit of Adventure,” and is affirmed in a video of Friedman speaking on leadership. In the course of his discussion, Friedman identifies two significant emotional barriers that prevent decisive, differentiated and creative leadership from happening. It was the second of these that struck me concerning the baptism/eucharist issue. He states that the “contemporary fashion of valuing empathy over responsibility locks us into a pathological orientation.” This orientation creates imaginative gridlock, preventing us from being able to bring about substantive change. “. . . Somehow it became popular to believe that feeling for someone [compassion] was not enough; one had to feel within them. Far from being empowering,” he says, “valuing empathy over responsibility actually takes away strength as it transfers power to the most dependent. . . . Most important, the focus on empathy rather than responsibility keeps us from seeing that the essential nature of all pathology is relational in character.”
I have cited Friedman here, because I found myself wondering whether our ways of including and accepting others are sometimes guided primarily by our empathy for them in the sense that Friedman uses the word empathy. Is it our desire to invite anyone to the sacred meal, regardless of whether or not they themselves have chosen a commitment to this eucharistic faith, because we have empathy for their situation? Is this desire based upon our fear of speaking openly about the cost of discipleship, or our fear of being clear and differentiated about who we are as people of a covenant, or our fear that they’ll go away and not join us? Are we simply afraid that we’ll hurt their feelings?
At Trinity Church in Excelsior, Minnesota, where I serve as rector, we have worked to integrate all generations into our worship in as unselfconscious a manner as possible. Young and old are actively involved in worship leadership every single Sunday–as cantors, lectors, dancers, lay eucharistic ministers, instrumentalists, and so forth. The effect, we have been told, is that visitors feel as if they’ve entered an inclusive community, even if they themselves have not come to communion that day, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the status of their baptism. People say they feel drawn and welcomed because we seem to be practicing what we’re preaching. Our verbal invitation to communion has also been commented upon as feeling inclusive: after welcoming visitors, we add, “but especially know that all baptized persons are welcome to receive communion, and all persons are welcome to be baptized, coming forward to the altar in the meantime with the community for a blessing during communion.”
This all begs yet another question: if we have provided grace-filled hospitality in every other way, is it not okay for people to say they don’t want to join us? Do we so lack confidence that we will be truly accepting in our day-to-day relationship with the stranger or outcast? By indiscriminately opening communion, are we offering a gesture, even our best and most deeply precious gesture, as an easy atonement for our own shortcomings? Or is it because we do not yet know who we ourselves are in Christ? Or, is it that we are unwilling or unable to be hospitable in other, material ways?
Or, indeed, is there instead a genuine, responsible voice here, calling us to a new relationship with the stranger and outcast? And if so, who has articulated for our whole church and not merely for a particular parish the structure within which that new relationship will take place? I would add to this a question about whether it is legitimate for us to restrict our articulation of a new baptismal/eucharistic theology–a bedrock concern of the whole Episcopal Church–to the particularities of a local environment. It would seem that without open discussion that applies to us all, local congregations can undermine the broader polity. If the broader polity is not of concern to the locality in which change is taking place, we encounter the ecclesiological dimension of this issue. At the very least, I would suggest that Episcopal clergy in particular who seek this change have an obligation to make a case for all of us. That way, the conversation is engaged at lay and ordained levels, and, above all, it is engaged beyond the walls of a particular community.
As we seek to answer these questions, the stakes for our church are profound, for we live in a culture that is plagued in the most deadly sense of the word by undifferentiated inclusivity. And yet in baptism we have a rich opportunity to provide differentiated, strong leadership. The final questions then are basic: Who are we, really? To whom do we belong? And how are we going to communicate our faith to others hospitably?
A Possible Bulletin Notice For Communion We invite all baptized persons, regardless of age or denomination, to share in Holy Communion. If you have not been baptized, we invite you to come forward with the community for a blessing. Indicate that you seek this blessing to the ministers of communion by crossing your arms across your chest. After the service, we invite you to speak to the clergy about the new work of faith begun in you and about the process of being baptized into the community of Christ’s disciples and living out your faith. (A spoken version of this is included in the body of the essay.)