My Beliefs about the Extent of Communion

I believe that you should encourage to participate in the Lord's Supper any and everyone who, if he or she were a member of your church, you would not discipline out. That states my understanding of the extent of the Lord's Supper in its entirety.

A few corollary thoughts:

1. This presumes that your church has the framework in place to exercise church discipline and the guts to do it.

2. Our church is a Baptist church. That means that if one of our Sunday School classes started sprinkling infants and refused to stop, they would be subject to church discipline simply because they were sprinkling infants. Believer's baptism is not just our preference, it is the clear and indisputable teaching of God's word. Thus, any pedobaptist member of our church is necessarily someone against whom we would start discipline proceedings.

3. The reason why I never make statements about the extent of communion using language like "Like Faith and Order" is because too much of a focus on baptism erroneously and dangerously conveys the impression that so long as you are saved and have been dunked subsequently, you need not consider the matter further. But truly every Christian ought to examine his or her own heart and ask the question, "If my fellow brothers and sisters knew about all of the attitudes in my heart and all of the things that I've done this week, and if I persisted in them unrepentantly, would I be a legitimate candidate for church discipline?" If the answer to that question is "Yes," then I need to spend some time getting my heart straight with the Lord before participating in the Lord's Supper. I tell people that only those who are believers and who have repented of their known sin should participate in the Supper. I further clarify that having refused scriptural baptism is a sin.

4. It surprises me not at all that a sizable number of SBC churches are probably basically Stoddardian in their approach to the Lord's Supper since church discipline is all but lost among us.

   In my opinion, it is far more important (and is prerequisite) to recover a meaningful idea of church membership before trying to repair what has happened to our theology of the ordinances. It is difficult to make lasting and meaningful repair to the crack over the doorway before addressing the problems in the foundation.

5. I am actually optimistic in the long term. More is being written and preached about ecclesiology today than has been the case for at least a couple of generations preceding us. Biblical preaching always bears fruit. I think that this problem will solve itself with time and with the help of the Holy Spirit.

It's Really About Baptism

Lifeway Research is reporting that 52% of Southern Baptist churches no longer really consider obedience to Christ's command to be baptized to be that big of a deal.

That's the true, central meaning of this report. Although the subject of the report is ostensibly the Lord's Supper, the shift in Southern Baptist practice actually reveals movement in Southern Baptist thinking about the OTHER ordinance. It would be different, I suppose, if 52% of SBC pastors had responded that the Lord's Supper should be provided to whomever wishes to participate, but that's not how the survey came back. SBC churches are willing to dictate who should and who shouldn't partake; they just don't think that baptism is all that important—not significant enough to enter into such deliberations.

This is hard evidence of the movement away from being Baptist that is sweeping through SBC churches. What factors have brought us to this point? Here are my thoughts.

1. Cowardice. Going open-communion is easy. On the other hand, anyone who leads a church to make refusal to be baptized a bar to open communion is going to have to be prepared to endure enormous pressure for doing so.

2. Evangelicalism. It is the nature of market-driven evangelicalism to de-emphasize ecclesiology in general and the ordinances in particular. These things are but impediments to the growth of one's market.

3. Liberalism. The flight of paedo-baptists from liberal denominations into SBC churches has filled our churches with people who do not share our core convictions.

4. Pragmatism. Atheological pragmatism—the worship of method and numerical success—bothers not at all with whether Christ has really commanded that we baptize and be baptized or whether ongoing rebellion against Christ's command is reason for one not to partake of the supper. Rather, it simply asks what will be the cost of closed communion in attendance and dollars.

5. Permissivism. The loss of church discipline is an important factor in this downgrade. Really, without church discipline, our Baptist understanding of baptism and the Lord's Supper doesn't make any sense.

Why I Find David Rogers's One-Loaf Argument Unconvincing

Five years ago David Rogers penned a blog post entitled The Illustration of the Hypothetical "Common Loaf Denomination". He intended it as an argument in favor of open communion. I stated then, and continue to state now, that it is an equally effective argument in favor of open membership. I can't recall what David's response was to that assertion.

And so, the present public state of things, as far as I can tell, is that both David and I accuse one another of inconsistency (please don't read mutual hostility into the word "accuse"). David accuses me of inconsistency because he believes that I make the smaller details of the biblical witness regarding baptism a test a fellowship while I do not make the smaller details of the biblical witness regarding the Lord's Supper a test of fellowship. I accuse David of inconsistency because I believe that he makes the smaller details of the biblical witness regarding baptism a test of fellowship when it comes to local church membership while he does not make them a test of fellowship when it comes to the Lord's Supper.

For five years, as Baptist blogging has touched upon the relationship between pedobaptists and credobaptists, David has from time to time linked back to this original article and used it in ongoing debate. Others have linked to it and have defended it. By the way, nobody, to my recollection, out of any of the endorsers has ever explained why this wouldn't apply equally to open membership as well as to open communion.

I thought I had already written to refute David's argument, but I cannot find that I have done so. I confess that other people often keep better track of my blogging than I myself do. If this is a repeated post, then I apologize, but I give you the reasons why David's pedagogical attempt does not convince me.

1. Immersion is not really a "mode" of baptism. Yes, I and others have used that terminology for convenience's sake. We have made "mode" a property of "baptism" and have asserted three possible values for that property: "Immersion," "Aspersion," and "Affusion." This is convenient terminology, but it is inaccurate. It does not reflect reality.

   The reality is that there is no such thing as "baptism." There is only "immersion." We know definitively that "baptism" is a made up word, a transliteration of βαπτίζω concocted into the English tongue for the sole purpose of avoiding the accurate translation—the word "immersion"—in the New Testament. The world being as it is, we cannot avoid the use of the word "baptism," it being as firmly established as it is, but linguistic drift does not alter reality: Immersion is not a "mode" of baptism; it is the essence of "baptism."

   For this reason, the credobaptist vs. pedobaptist controversy is not a question of "The New Testament commands that you baptize: How does YOUR church do it?" Rather, it is a question of "The New Testament commands that you immerse: Does your church obey this command or not?"

   Rogers refers to this part of the discussion as the linguistic argument. In an attempt to show the validity of his illustration and his accusation of inconsistency, he states that there is a corresponding linguistic argument regarding the Lord's Supper:

   Linguistically, the term "breaking bread," generally accepted as referring to the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, directly implies the use of a "common loaf."

   This assertion fails for several reasons. First, it fails because any number of loaves of bread can nonetheless be broken and a church can still have accomplished, linguistically, the breaking of bread. Furthermore, the loaf can be broken at any time during the Lord's Supper, or even beforehand, and the breaking of bread can still have been accomplished. In 1 Corinthians 10:16, the phrase, "τὸν ἄρτον ὃν κλῶμεν" simply refers to "the bread which we break into pieces." If you have bread, and if it winds up being broken into pieces, then you've entirely lived up to the linguistics of this phrase. The same cannot be said of βαπτίζω and the sprinkling of water onto a baby.

2. More than "mode" is at stake in the disagreement between pedobaptists and credobaptists. Differences in "mode" followed differences in meaning and differences in sequence and differences in candidate. Sprinkling is merely a symptom of the choice to force baptism upon unwilling, unregenerate babies in the service of the foolish notion that spiritual benefit can accrue to them thereby. Almost everything about baptism is different between these two groups. The only similarities that I can find are that we all use water, we all use human beings, and we all talk about Jesus when we do it.

   Where the "mode" really IS the only thing at stake, we've actually been much more generous. For example, we know that John Smythe and Thomas Helwys merely poured water upon one another. The same is true of Roger Williams. I regard these men as Baptists.

   Of course, these men are an historical anomaly. With the benefit of further light on the subject being disseminated widely, nobody on the planet holds the view of Smythe, Helwys, and Williams today. All those who reject pedobaptism routinely perform their baptisms by immersion. To begin to perform baptism by sprinkling or pouring today is to reject much more than the only scriptural "mode" of baptism.

3. A single common loaf was not necessarily (and I think cannot possibly have been) the eucharistic practice of the New Testament church. The Jerusalem church simply was too large to have celebrated the Lord's Supper by using a single loaf of bread. Yes, if one receives as inerrant truth the hypothesis about house churches in Jerusalem or David's own "city church" notion, then one might make a case for each cell group celebrating with its own single loaf of bread, but I don't believe that even David would assert his theories of New Testament ecclesiology as being so iron-clad that one should build his entire doctrine of an ordinance in a way that would crumble to the ground if "city church" ecclesiology later proved to be untenable. After all, the New Testament explicitly states that the entire Jerusalem church met in one accord at Solomon's Portico (Acts 5:12). The weight of that one statement alone should be enough—even if house church advocates can form some answer to it—to give us pause before we build our entire theology of the Lord's Supper upon the presumption that every celebration of the Lord's Supper in the New Testament used a single common loaf.

   In David's article he makes the assertion flatly:

   Historically, in the examples we read in the New Testament (Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19, 24:30, 35; Acts 2:42, 46; 20:7, 11; 27:35; 1 Corinthians 11:23-24), it is apparent that the Lord’s Supper was celebrated with a "common loaf."

   It is true that "apparent," like "beautiful," can exist in the eye of the beholder, but I believe that I have at least demonstrated that David's assertion here falls far short of being invincible.

   There is some recourse for David's argument. He might assert that it is not necessary that the New Testament share a single common loaf across the entire congregation. Rather, he might say, he is merely asserting that each Christian believer received the Lord's Supper from a loaf that he or she shared in common with at least one other Christian believer. In other words, if the Jerusalem church had to distribute 500 loaves at Solomon's Portico, then even if the congregation did not all share the SAME common loaf, we can presume that groups of ten people or so all shared a loaf with one another within the congregation. The implication would then be that we can only partake the Supper rightly if the bread we consume has come from a loaf that went to feed at least one other person during that celebration of the Supper. I do not see that David can reasonably argue any more than this, but even this, I would assert, is an argument from silence.

   If the average loaf of unleavened bread in Jerusalem in AD 33 was enough to serve 12 people during the Lord's Supper, and if there were a congregation of 1200 people partaking, then the math is simple enough: Just bake 100 loaves of bread and distribute them out to people grouped by the dozen. But what happens when the congregation grows to 1201? Are we suggesting that New Testament churches could never have encountered the situation in which a loaf of bread was completely consumed when the penultimate member of the congregation took her or his piece? Certainly the New Testament speaks nothing to us of any precautions that were taken to prevent this from happening. But that's all it would take for a New Testament congregation to have celebrated the Lord's Supper in such a way that at least one member of the congregation didn't share his particular loaf with anybody else.

   Perhaps a simpler way to understand the New Testament is that the collective amount of bread held by the congregation for the Supper—however many loaves that might have been—was broken up into pieces that were then collectively shared by the congregation such that every member was fed. Such a viewpoint goes no further than what the biblical text asserts, and it requires no extra-textual assertions about maximum numbers of loaves allowed or minimum numbers of people to consume from each particular loaf. Of course, it is also a way of understanding that poses no problems (as far as I can see) for the way that Southern Baptist churches generally celebrate the Lord's Supper.

4. The extent of "sharing in the body of Christ" in 1 Corinthians 10:16 is necessarily neither coterminous with nor dependent upon the number of people who could receive the Lord's Supper from a particular loaf of unleavened bread. David Rogers, above all people I have known, would assert that two believers who have never been in the same hemisphere with one another and who have never partaken from any shared physical loaf together are nevertheless people who join in "a sharing in the body of Christ." I would almost say that this concept strikes at the heart of David's defining contribution to Southern Baptist blogging. I do not think that he will retreat from it now. But if he will assert that we only have a sharing in the body of Christ to the extent that we have a sharing in the same loaf of bread, then he must.

   The "sharing" in this passage refers to our sharing in the collective group of loaves of bread that have symbolized the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper. We might easily descend here into the sixteenth-century Ubiquitarian controversy, but we can surely agree that the partakers of different loaves in the Lord's Supper are nonetheless sharing in the same broken body of Christ (symbolically and memorially, I believe). And it is precisely THIS sharing—what we share with Christ more than what we share with one another—that is the thrust of 1 Corinthians 10, with its warning that we not share Christ with the cup of demons.

   I am not asserting that the common sharing with one another is entirely absent from 1 Corinthians 10. Rather, I am asserting two things: First, I am asserting that our sharing with Christ is primarily in view in this passage and that the sharing among ourselves is decidedly secondary and incidental. Second, I am asserting that the sharing with one another is a consequence not of how many loaves of bread were used in the Supper, but of the fact that we are all sharing in the body of Christ. However many loaves can communicate a sharing in the body of Christ, those are how many loaves can communicate our sharing with one another. The sharing in the body of Christ comes about through regeneration and is, I believe, symbolized equally well by the concept of sharing I articulated in the preceding point as it is by David's idea. David and I would both agree, I think, that it is by conversion that we become sharers in the body of Christ, and that the Lord's Supper, with however many loaves, appropriately symbolizes this spiritual truth.

   In contrast, the sprinkling of unwilling, unregenerate infants and the passing off of this practice as Christian baptism resembles this situation with the Lord's Supper not at all. It explicitly extends a symbol of Christian mortification and regeneration to those to whom it does not apply. It is, ironically, a violation of the very prohibition given in 1 Corinthians 10—it is the profaning of something sacred that believers only should share by dragging it into fellowship with the property of demons. David writes:

   Symbolically, on the basis of 1 Corinthians 10.16-17, the use of a "common loaf" represents physically and visually an important spiritual truth: the essential unity of the Body of Christ ("For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread").

   As I hope I have demonstrated, David himself believes that the "loaf" of the body of Christ extends across many physical loaves of bread. Consequently, the only way that "the essential unity of the Body of Christ" can be illustrated in the Lord's Supper is if the number of loaves employed is of no consequence. As I also hope I have demonstrated, the precise principle asserted and defended in this passage—the importance of protecting from defilement by the profane world of unbelievers those things which are sacredly shared by believers—is a principle that necessarily denounces the practice of pedobaptism.

5. There is a difference between commandment and description in the New Testament. With regard to immersion, we are commanded to immerse. With regard to the Lord's Supper, we are commanded to take, to eat, to share, to remember…but nowhere are we commanded to have a common loaf and to break it out among one another at a particular moment in the observation and in a particular way. The corollary to a refusal to immersion would be if we could find a group of people who passed out the elements of the Lord's Supper, looked them over, prayed a little prayer, and then threw them away without eating them. Or, perhaps, it would be the Quakers, who refuse to observe the Lord's Supper at all. These are people who are clearly in violation of the imperative commands of Christ in the New Testament with regard to the Lord's Supper, and they stand in parallel with those who do not obey the imperative command to immerse.

6. If David WERE right, what would the remedy look like? David begins his post by preemptively stating: "Please understand that what I am writing here is just an illustration to prove a point. I am emphatically NOT suggesting the founding of a new 'Common Loaf Denomination.'" One must ask the question, why not?

   Or, at least, to make allowances for David's (and hopefully all of our) distaste for denominational division, one must wonder why David is not working to encourage local churches to adopt this manner of observing the Lord's Supper. If David's argument is as strong as he says it is ("I believe it forcefully and poignantly drives home a point"), then shouldn't he be urging us all to implement it in our churches without fail? Are those who have quoted and cited David's article changing their own churches' practice of the ordinance?

   Why is it that we use allegations of inconsistency in this day and time always to urge people to be consistently lax and never to urge people to be consistently faithful?

   If we were to find David's argument compelling and if we were to take David's words seriously, what would be the outcome? In that circumstance, in order to be consistent in our treatment of the Lord's Supper and baptism, we would have to require people who were joining our churches to set aside their old way of observing the Lord's Supper and, from this point forward, to adhere to the right way of doing it.

   In other words, even if everything that I have written in this post were somehow set aside and David's "common loaf" theory were 100% vindicated, nothing would change about the way that our church receives members or opens the Lord's Table. That's because baptism is a punctiliar ordinance while the Lord's Supper is an ongoing ordinance. If our church has a conviction about how the Lord's Supper ought to be observed, we need not worry whether those who seek membership in our church or who observe the Supper in our meeting house with our church will observe it rightly. We control that. Everyone who partakes here will partake in the manner of our practice and conviction.

   Baptism, on the other hand, is different. We do not re-baptize. We merely have the awkward duty sometimes of informing people who think they have been baptized that they have not. Alike, in both the case of the baptism and the case of the Lord's Supper, the remedy is simply that those worshipping the Lord in this congregation and having been exposed to the teachings of the Bible must, if they will join with this congregation, observe the ordinances according to the New Testament commandments of Christ from this point forward. There is consistency there.

   It's just that doing so with regard to the Lord's Supper is not controversial at all, while doing so with regard to baptism can generate conflict.

And so, there is my answer to David Rogers. I apologize for waiting so long to post it. As you can see, it is not a brief task, and blogging is not, after all, my primary calling from God. I mean no disrespect to David Rogers in the publication of this post. Indeed, it appears only because of his request that I interact with his ideas. It is actually the case that I post this out of respect for him, not disrespect, for he deserves an answer to a question that he has posed more than once in the past five years: What do we think, we who disagree with him, about his "common loaf denomination" illustration?

Why I Say What I Say When We Observe the Lord's Supper

Growing up Southern Baptist, I learned about three different positions on who should partake of the Lord's Supper. One view restricted the Lord's Supper strictly to the members of the local church where the Supper was taking place. A second view welcomed any who professed a Christian conversion experience to partake of the Supper. The final view opened the table beyond the membership of the local church, but only to those who were members of another church "of like faith and order." The phrase "of like faith and order" was generally interpreted to signify another Southern Baptist church.

As an adult and a pastor, if I were to classify my view according to this schema, I would place it in the third category: the "like faith and order" viewpoint.

And yet, if you were to be present at FBC Farmersville when we observed the Lord's Supper, you'd never hear me utter the words "like faith and order" and would hear me say very little about church membership. Instead, you would hear me emphasize that those who partake in the Supper must be born-again believers who are free from stubborn, rebellious, unrepentant sin in their lives.

There's no bait-and-switch here: These are precisely the same point of view on the Supper, just expressed in two different ways. I avoid the way that I heard it in my childhood and express it the way that I do today for a number of reasons:

1. I have substituted biblical language for extra-biblical language. The biblical basis for limitations in the observance of the Lord's Supper comes chiefly from Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians. In the fifth chapter of that letter—a chapter whose main subject is unrepentant sin and the failure of church discipline within the church—Paul commanded the church to restore sound church discipline against unrepentant sin for the sake of the health of the church's observance of the Lord's Supper:

   Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed. Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. (1 Corinthians 5:6-8, NASB).

   Purification was a central element of the precursor feast of Passover, and Paul reminded the Corinthians church that, in the New Testament, the Lord's Supper calls us not so much to the purification of kitchen utensils and dough, but to the purification of the believers who participate.

   A few paragraphs down the letter, in the eleventh chapter, again the Apostle chastises the church for allowing the sins of divisiveness, drunkenness, and arrogance to corrupt the church's observances of the Lord's Supper. Here Paul explicitly warns of the dangers of observing the Supper "in an unworthy manner." Although in 1 Corinthians 5 Paul enjoined the church to "fence the table," in 1 Corinthians 11 Paul commanded each individual believer to examine himself and to purify his own heart in preparation for the Supper.

   And so, when I speak of having been born again and of examining oneself to purify one's heart from unrepentant sin, I am speaking New Testament language. This is an important objective, in my opinion, in the execution of a New Testament ordinance. "A Baptist church of like faith and order," on the other hand, is not language found in the New Testament.

2. I am telling disciples WHY rather than merely WHAT. True, "Baptist church of like faith and order" is what I believe about the Lord's Supper, but it is my observation that merely telling disciples what your church believes without telling them why you believe it is a recipe for the abandonment of your principles within a couple of generations. Indeed, I would suggest that much of the present state of our churches is a symptom of this very disease.

   And so, I want people to see that the Bible teaches that born-again believers should purify themselves from unrepentant sin before they partake of the Lord's Supper. I want them further to see that it is unrepentant sin to have refrained from New Testament baptism or to have held oneself aloof from biblical membership in a New Testament church. I'm happy for disciples to hold the same convictions that I hold, but I would rather that they arrive at the same conclusions as those to which Bible study has led me.

3. I want to show correctly the relationship between church membership and participation in the Lord's Supper. It is false, I believe, to suggest that church membership is the basis of participation in the Lord's Supper. It is a sentiment NOT FAR from the truth, but it is not the same as the truth.

   The basis of participation in the Lord's Supper is not membership in a New Testament church; rather, membership in a New Testament church and participation in the Lord's Supper share the same basis: conversion and discipleship. This reality links church membership and the Lord's Supper closely to one another, but they share a peer relationship rather than a cause-effect relationship. To remain aloof from church membership is a sin. No believer should partake of the Lord's Supper while persisting stubbornly in that sin. Also, any sin that would place a believer under the hand of church discipline and would tarnish one's church membership would also jeopardize one's place at the table. Conversely, any persistent sinful rebellion that would make one need to refrain from participation in the Lord's Supper would also be grounds for the exercise of church discipline in relation to one's church membership.

   This peer relationship between the Lord's Supper and church membership is why it is so nonsensical and unbiblical for any church to be both open communion and closed membership. If it is a matter of unrepentant sin to refuse New Testament believer's immersion, then how dare a church set aside 1 Corinthians 5 and open the Lord's Table to the unrepentant?! If it is not a matter of unrepentant sin to refuse New Testament believer's immersion, then how dare a church withhold church membership from a brother or sister over a mere personal preference?!

   By using the Lord's Supper to emphasize those things that are also the basis of New Testament church membership, I am able to underscore rightly through this ordinance the themes that lead our church to a better understanding of church membership as well.

4. I'm pretty sure that "Baptist church of like faith and order" no longer means what it once did and is, due to contemporary circumstances, a more complicated position than the one that I am now articulating. The one big advantage one might offer for just using the phrase "Baptist church of like faith and order" is simplicity. It only takes seven words to say it. Jargon is popular for a reason—it always represents a shorter, simpler way to communicate complex ideas among people who share common inside information.

   But are we all really confident which are the "Baptist churches of like faith and order" any longer? The rise of the crypto-Baptists and the rise of the pseudo-Baptists have changed our Southern Baptist reality, greatly complicating the idea of "like faith and order."

   Crypto-Baptists are all of the churches out there that eschew public identification as Baptist churches. Some of these are genuinely Baptist. Not a few, having the benefit of being early church plants with little institutional history, are more solidly Baptist in their ecclesiology than are some of our established churches. So, when somebody in your congregation hails from something like "Alive Fellowship of the Cross," how do you know whether that is or is not a "Baptist church of like faith and order"?

   Pseudo-Baptists are all of the churches out there that are affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention (and may even have the word "Baptist" on their signs), but are not Baptist ideologically or ecclesiologically. Indeed, even without quibbling over where a church ceases to be Baptist, we can agree that the diversity with regard to church membership alone has completely destroyed any possibility of our regarding membership in another Southern Baptist church as a basis for participation in the Lord's Supper. Imagine that the Jacobs family visits your church and you refuse church membership to them because they are sprinkled Methodists. Now, imagine that the very next week they go to a Southern Baptist church across town and obtain membership in that church without being baptized. They visit your church the third week and find you observing the Lord's Supper. Are they members of a "Baptist church of like faith and order"? If they are, does that really mean ANYTHING?

   Any Southern Baptist consensus that may once have existed on matters of ecclesiology is broken. Presuming upon it for something as significant as participation in the Lord's Supper is foolhardy, in my opinion.

   It is so much simpler and more understandable, I believe, simply to state that only those who have been born again and are, as far as they know, not in open rebellion against any command of Christ should partake of the Supper.

5. I want to avoid giving my church members a free pass. I have long believed that the great weakness of tying participation in the Lord's Supper to membership in a "Baptist church of like faith and order" is the suggestion it places into the minds of my members that, being members of our congregation, they need not give their participation in the Lord's Supper a second thought. Heavens no! The command of scripture is for self-examination, and this command appeared in a letter sent explicitly to the members of a local congregation.

   Even in a context of robust church discipline, church members are vulnerable to secret, hidden sins. It is my responsibility in preparing the flock for the Lord's Supper to call upon every person in the room to entertain the possibility that she or he may not be ready to receive the Lord's Supper. Are they estranged from a brother or sister? Are they fighting with the Lord over some sin in the recesses of their hearts? Have they refused New Testament believer's immersion? Are they church-hoppers who remain aloof from and uncommitted to the disciplined commitments of biblical church membership? For all of those for whom any of these things are the case, they should get their hearts right with the Lord immediately and obey, or else they should abstain from the Supper.

   I want to preach before the observance of the Lord's Supper in a way that causes every disciple to ask "Is it I?" of the Lord before they sup with Him.

Simply saying, "Those who are not members of Baptist churches of like faith and order should not partake," is insufficient, in my opinion, to accomplish these objectives. It is an inferior approach, I believe. And so, I would encourage all of you who are pastors to say more rather than less when you prepare a congregation to come to the Table.

So Let Him Eat of the Bread and Drink of the Cup

This morning FBC Farmersville is observing the Lord's Supper.

When someone asks you, "Who ought to partake of the Lord's Supper?" you probably will take that question to mean, "Of those attending today who are not members, which, if any, ought to partake of the Lord's Supper?" The latter question is an important one and worthy of serious study. I do not belittle the work that has gone into seeking to answer that question biblically. However, I fear that our noble and worthwhile efforts to answer that question have distracted us from what may be a larger and more important question.

How often do you ask yourself, "Of those attending today who ARE members, which, if any, ought to partake of the Lord's Supper?"

The Bible presumes the Lord's Supper as (at least) a predominantly local-church activity. Nowhere does the Bible explicitly address the question of people other than members of or apostles to the local congregation participating in the Supper. What it DOES contain in spades are careful instructions regarding the participation of local church members in the Lord's Supper. The congregation is to "celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth," (1 Corinthians 5:8) by maintaining redemptive church discipline that removes from the table those Christian believers caught in unrepentant profligate sin (1 Corinthians 5:1-13). Clearly the New Testament presumes that the Lord's Supper will take place (at least) predominantly among a group of people who have voluntarily subjected themselves to the judgment of "those who are within the church" (1 Corinthians 5:12).

The loss of redemptive church discipline and regenerate church membership therefore corrupts a church's observance of the Lord's Supper, regardless of whether that church practices open, close, closed, strict, or whatever they wish to label their policy regarding non-members who attend. The local church has an obligation to remove grossly errant members from the table before observing the Lord's Supper.

The Bible commands that every believer is to "examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup" (1 Corinthians 11:28). Clearly, the danger of "[eating] the bread and [drinking] the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner" (1 Corinthians 11:27) is one that threatens members of the local church to whom Paul's warning was delivered.

Let us who are preachers beware the miscommunication to our members that, so long as they are members of this congregation, they may consume with wanton abandon. Each of us has been charged by our Lord to come to His table in circumspection, contrition, and confession. Apart from that, we are in peril of sickness and death (1 Corinthians 11:30). And now that we have passed a resolution about regenerate church membership, let us press on all the more to recover it and thereby to redeem our celebrations of the Lord's Supper.