Canadian Mennonite
Volume 12, No. 9
April 28, 2008
Communion
Kids and communion
Towards a more inclusive approach
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Over the last 500 years of western history, our thoughts and practices regarding children have undergone major changes. While the understanding that children become capable of rational thought at about seven years of age has remained fairly constant, 16th century attitudes that the will of the child must be broken for it to learn perfect obedience have been largely replaced by attitudes that seek to discover and support the unique gifts of each child God has entrusted to us.
We have moved from attitudes that assumed corporal punishment was good and essential for shaping a well-disciplined person to serious questioning of—and often rejecting—its validity.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Sunday school movement grew and significantly shaped how and where we nurture the faith of our children. During this period, Mennonites who were living in fairly closed and homogenous rural communities either moved into the cities or adapted to the broader rural culture around them.
That culture quite recently shifted from one in which we expected our public school teachers to read from the Bible and say the Lord’s Prayer with their students to a society that defines itself as being secular and post-Christian.
All this impacts the way we now seek to nurture faith in children as we partner between homes and congregations. It also impacts how children participate in the broader worship and life of the church.
We are shifting from educational and churchly attitudes that expected children to learn from adults to attitudes that expect children to learn along with adults. In the church, we are shifting from the attitude that real faith is only possible once one understands and em-
braces the stories and beliefs about God and God’s people, and then responds to the work of the Holy Spirit in one’s life, to attitudes that affirm the beginning of faith and the intuitive response to the presence of the Holy Spirit long before we are capable of understanding and accepting beliefs.
James Fowler, who wrote the classic on faith development, Stages of Faith (HarperCollins, 1981), and other specialists in children’s spirituality are helping us differentiate between faith, for which humans are programmed from our very beginnings, and belief, which requires cognitive processes that begin to mature at about age seven. In addition to this, the Sunday morning worship hour, in which children are now generally present, has become our main setting for building community, worshipping and celebrating communion.
This is just a partial illustration of how radically our context has changed from that of our Anabaptist ancestors. But it is enough to point out that, given our present context for faithfulness, we need to provide our non-baptized children and youths with strong identity-building messages and experiences of belonging to the family of faith as we worship and celebrate communion on Sunday mornings.
An increasing number of Mennonite congregations are responding to this new context by inviting all who love Jesus to come and participate in the fellowship of the Lord’s table, and they are finding many different ways of doing so. (See “How three churches offer communion,” page 7.)
However, as Arnold Snyder wrote in an essay published in Naming the Sheep: Issues in Church Membership (Conference of Mennonites in Canada, 1997), “If we tug at the strands of the Lord’s Supper, lots of other threads become undone as well.”
Are some of the threads of our core convictions coming undone if we tug at these strands? If so, then this is a topic that deserves broad ecclesial discernment, so that our changing communion practice can nurture the faith of those who are on a journey towards baptism without damaging what is most precious about our past communion practices.
The importance of communion for children and youths
Before we look at actual changes in our communion practices, it is important to consider just why communion participation is such an integral part of worship for those who are not yet baptized members of the church.
First of all, to echo a quote from Eleanor Kreider’s Communion Shapes Character, it seems that God is working among us to renew our communion practice so it helps us “enter into this gift of Christian unity and go out with joy into the task of Christian mission.” As communion becomes more prominent in our Sunday morning worship, its impact on all who have gathered to worship will increase.
Second, communion is where we enact the core of our faith. In our communion practice, we bring together word and deed, symbol and action, the visual and the tactile, and individual and communal spirituality in a holistic form that has great faith-nurturing potential.
Children are active, visual and intuitive. They experience and respond to all of life through their senses. An appropriately integrated communion service may be the church’s best antidote to the lure of the sirens of consumerism and secularism. On the other hand, the message that Jesus’ invitation to the table and a life of faith is only for those who are mature enough to undergo believer’s baptism can be very excluding for children and youths who wonder if they belong—or want to belong—to this family of faith.
In Children Matter (Eerdmans 2005), Catherine Stonehouse advocates for children in the church with this powerful statement: “Wherever we are on the journey of faith, God has a place for us.” This reminds me of our family tables, where all have a place. However, the places for young children are different; they find their places on our laps, or on booster seats, just like the places for frail senior members have cushions or back supports.
One of our distinctive Mennonite emphases about communion is the accountability we accept in radical discipleship as the body of Christ on earth to Jesus and to each other. We believe in a very “real presence” in communion—not the real presence in the bread, as more sacramental Christians do—but in the gathered and united body of believers. We, therefore, prepare for communion by doing what we can to live in peace with God and our brothers and sisters. During communion we renew our baptismal covenants to radical discipleship. At least, these are the three essential prerequisites for communion participation, as described in Article 12 of the 1995 Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective.
How, then, can children and youths who are good at making peace with others—but who are not covenanted members of the body of Christ—find the place God has for them at our communion tables? One way is by agreeing with Menno Simons, who expressed that the children of Christians “are saved, holy and pure, pleasing to God, under the covenant and in his church,” and that they are “already washed and baptized with the blood of Jesus Christ, which saves their souls,” although “the sign of baptism they shall receive at the appointed time, on the confession of their faith” (Complete Works of Menno Simons, Pathway Publishers, 1983).
We can affirm in contextually appropriate ways that, yes, they are children of the covenant unless they choose to leave this faith community, and, yes, there is still a new level of participation and accountability that will follow once they confess their faith through baptism. But how can we come to agreement on this important aspect of incarnational theology in our congregations?
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Other Protestant responses
After commissioning and discussing biblical and developmental psychology research papers during the late 1980s and early ’90s, the Mennonite Brethren Church of Canada arrived at the decision to separate communion participation from baptism and membership.
The United Church of Canada has implemented the widest invitation. Its official policy states: “Communion is a symbolic meal that is open to every-
one. . . . Children aren’t viewed as adults-in-waiting, nor are they on display for the amusement of the adults.”
Similarly, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada’s approach includes an emphasis on helping children understand the doctrines surrounding communion and encourages the integration of children in the liturgy and broader worship life of the church.
MC Canada’s response
Practice is shifting in the direction of inclusion in our congregations. In 1997, several essays in Naming the Sheep addressed the topic. A survey revealed that 23 percent of churches included children at some level of participation, and 48 percent also included non-baptized adults in communion.
In 2002, Vol. 2 of Vision, a Canadian Mennonite University and Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary journal, was dedicated to the topic, as was the June 14, 2004, issue of Canadian Mennonite.
In 2007, at least three of MC Canada’s area churches offered workshops for pastors on the topic of children and communion.
Communion services at the last number of MC Canada national assemblies have demonstrated ways of integrating children into the service without inviting them to partake of the elements, but we have not addressed this issue at the assembly level or moved in the direction of commissioning teaching resources on the topic.
According to John D. Rempel’s comments in the 2002 issue of Vision, our conservative communion practice has served as our incarnational theology for a ritual practice that may not have been sufficiently reflected on—or articulated—for much of Mennonite Church history. The growth of more liberal practices is leading us to a less conservative incarnational theology of communion. (See Rempel’s response to this article on page 8.)
Will our newer practices—of blessing children and youths as part of the communion service, of offering them grapes and crackers or pretzels, of acknowledging them as being on a journey towards their baptisms, or of welcoming them to full participation at the Lord’s Table—continue to lead our denomination’s theology in this matter? Or will we engage in deeper theological reflection on this important topic?
Articulating a Mennonite theology of childhood faith that takes current research on faith development and the impact of our increasingly secular context on our children’s identity formation into account would help lay the foundation for denominational discernment on this topic.
Tips for integrating children in church worship
As we engage in the needed discernment about children’s participation in communion, there is much that we can do—and are, in fact, already doing—to show our children and youths that they are indeed a precious part of the community that gathers for worship on Sunday mornings. Available from the MC Canada Resource Centre, Transforming Worship with the Children’s Story provides guidelines for a “children’s time” that nurtures the faith children have and adds to, rather than detracts from, worship.
Intentionally integrating children and youths as apprentices in all aspects of the worship service, while pacing the service so that it incorporates regular opportunities for appropriate movement and congregational responses, can go a long way in helping children know they belong in worship. So can including anecdotes from the lives of children in sermons or petitions that connect with their concerns in congregational prayers. Beginning worship with singing that is accessible for all ages and musical skill levels is another aspect of worship planning that sends a message of inclusion.
Finally, we can remember that Jesus, our radically inviting and challenging Saviour, made a point of taking children on his lap and blessing them when his followers thought he was too busy with more important matters. As his body on earth we can commit ourselves to doing the same, and make a point of metaphorically and physically holding our children in the hearts and on the laps of our congregations as we worship with the Word and at our Lord’s communion table. When we do, our children, our worship and our witness will all be blessed.
Covenants sealed and renewed
Elkhart Ind.
Having read Elsie Rempel’s master’s thesis, I am impressed with her careful thinking, her respect for tradition and her passion for the inclusion of children in the whole life of the church. I find myself challenged by the reasons she presents for a major shift in our understanding of children and the fact that this shift needs to be taken into account in worship and nurture. As my competence lies in the field of theology, I will concern myself with the nature of the church and the Lord’s Supper.
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Mennonites have historically believed, as she says, that children are included in Christ’s redemptive work until they are capable of an owned faith. Then they choose for or against the gift they have been given.
Our understanding of the church is that it is made up only of those who confess Christ’s grace in their life and enter a covenant with Christ and his body. This covenant is sealed in baptism and renewed in the breaking of bread.
There are many stages of faith. Baptism expresses that stage of faith in which a believer is able to promise to live according to a new allegiance. To be sure, all of us who have been baptized know that we come to it with a trembling and partial faith. Baptism is not a confession that we have achieved spiritual maturity, but that we have surrendered to the gift of grace that makes us members of the body of Christ. Everyone in whom the Spirit works such a response is ready for baptism and its cyclical renewal in the Lord’s Supper, whether they are 12 or 60. We base this understanding on the example and teaching of the New Testament and the aspiration of our Anabaptist spiritual ancestors to reclaim that teaching and example.
All practices “holding our children in the hearts and on the laps of our congregation” that are consistent with this understanding of faith are to be encouraged in relation to communion. The most important of these, in my view, is affirming whatever faith we see in a child as growth “on a journey toward their baptism.” If offering children grapes and crackers during the Lord’s Supper symbolizes that affirmation and anticipation, it fits with a Believer’s Church model, but if doing so blurs the difference between an awakening and a covenanting faith, it goes against the church’s grain.
A final response to her concern about the “excluding” nature of traditional communion practice. Is there not a place for “longing” as a dimension of each stage of life? There needs to be a balance between anticipation and gratification. Not having, but longing for communion with Christ and the church, and then having the promise of its fulfillment are steps along the spiritual journey.
Finally, although she does not espouse a totally open communion herself, I have concerns about where this could lead:
• Evangelism. I fear that one of the motives for unlimited inclusion is to get around the hard but life-giving truth that authentic belonging happens only when I take a chance on Christ and his commu-
nity. We don’t do our children any favours by shielding them from the truth that life in its fullness becomes ours only through choosing Christ above all other loyalties.
• Some advocates of a completely open Lord’s Supper unconsciously borrow the arguments of churches that practise infant baptism. In those churches, open communion is based on two beliefs that we do not share: First, that an infant or child can be a full member of the church; and second, that in the parish model everyone living in a given place belongs and has a “right” to inclusion.
• Separating baptism and communion is the final stage in the privatizing of faith and the dismantling of sacramental reality. If I am the sole actor in the process of coming to faith, and I am free to decide on my own terms which aspects of the church’s life I will be part of, the covenanted community is bypassed as the place where God works salvation. The Spirit awakens faith in many ways, but we mark the gift of covenanting faith with the sign of baptism, in which the Spirit and the church confirm to the believers that they have indeed become members of the body of Christ. Without the objective sign of baptism, all that we have to go on is subjective experience.
How three churches offer communion
Lethbridge (Alta.) Mennonite Church
I told the children at a recent service that communion—the bread and grape juice—are signs of something we can’t see but we know it is real or true, a sign of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The deacons served communion to adults in the pews and I invited the children to receive a blessing from one of them by using sign language (crossing their arms and putting their hands on the opposite shoulders) to let the deacon know they wanted a blessing. Then I gave the children a bag of pretzels that I said are shaped like “hugs,” to remind them of the sign for the blessing. There were two pretzels in each bag, one to eat when they went back to their seats and the other to eat when the adults were served communion. I prayed with the children, thanking God for loving us and for the signs of God’s love—families, Jesus’ death and resurrection, communion, the Bible, nature—and concluded by praying that these children might grow into the children that God would desire them to be.
East Zorra (Ont.) Mennonite Church
We decided to test the inclusion of children in communion. The invitation always notes that “all who are baptized are welcome to partake.” We added grapes and crackers, and the invitation, “All who have not been baptized, but who love Jesus and who look forward to the day when they will be baptized, are welcome to receive a grape and cracker.”
Feedback from the congregation has been overwhelmingly positive in several ways. The inclusion of children and unbaptized youth and adults as already part of the community has been well-received. Several parents have reported that their children, noting the difference between themselves and those who were baptized, asked about this. Parents were glad for the opportunity to explain baptism, adult decisions, and that the children, already part of the community, could look forward to making their own decision to belong fully in the future.
Sherbrooke Mennonite Church, Vancouver, B.C.
Our decision was that we would invite those who are baptized believers. Our past practice was to have communion as a separate evening service approximately five times a year. It was clear to those who came to this special service that these were the expectations. Only when we began offering communion as part of the morning worship did this become an issue. Everyone is at the morning service—children, believers and unbelievers, baptized and unbaptized believers—thank God. We still serve communion five times a year, but now it is served three times in the morning service, while the special evening service happens twice a year.
The desire from those looking for change was to extend a greater gesture of belonging. We decided that, while the invitation would go out to baptized believers, we would offer grapes and crackers to all those anticipating baptism at some time in the future. Many felt that this gesture was compromising the deeper meaning of the bread and the cup, and so I don’t know the future of the grapes and crackers.
It is interesting that the most holy moment of the Christian experience can become the most exclusive event that the church does. Yet at the same time, the Christian faith requires a serious decision to follow Jesus: a calling to “repent and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38).
Faithful unto death
For Anabaptists, baptism and communion were . . . primarily symbolic: baptism was an outward sign of an inward reality, and communion was above all considered a commemorative meal, often deemed “the Lord’s Memorial.”
Conrad Grebel . . . stressed that the supper provides “simply bread, yet if faith and brotherly love precede it, it is to be received with joy, since when it is used in the church it is to show that we are truly one bread and one body. . . .”
The Anabaptists asserted that the table was strictly for devout believers, and advocated and practised separation from the world. This is reflected in Article III of the Schleitheim Confession (1527):
“[A]ll those who desire to break one bread in remembrance of the broken body of Christ and all those who wish to drink of one drink in remembrance of the shed blood of Christ, they must beforehand be united in the one body of Christ . . . by baptism. . . . So it shall and must be, that whoever does not share in the calling of the one God to one faith, to one baptism, to one spirit, to one body
together . . . may not be made one loaf together with them, as must be true if one wishes truly to break bread according to the command of Christ.”
“Since now these ceremonies and signs have to do completely and exclusively with fraternal love,” declared Balthasar Hübmaier in A Form for Christ’s Supper (1527), “who can sit at the supper with a good conscience?” The answer, he wrote, is the one who senses inwardly and sincerely that the love of God, with the assurance of the holy word, “has so moved, softened, and penetrated [one’s] spirit and soul.” However, “to fulfill the law it is not enough to avoid sins and die to them. Yea, one must also do good to the neighbour,” Hübmaier stressed.
As John D. Rempel observes in Vol. II of The Complete Library of Christian Worship: 20 Centuries of Christian Worship, “This is the gist of Hübmaier’s theology of worship and belief about the Lord’s Supper. The fulfilment of the sacrament is to pour out one’s flesh and blood for the other. Without this pledge, it is all hypocrisy.”
“Hübmaier’s community was apocalyptic in that the intensity of faith asked for by Hübmaier knew no limits,” Rempel writes. “Every baptized believer was asked to be faithful unto death. Just as Christ gave up his life for us, so we ought to give up ours for others in suffering love. That is the promise that makes the bread and wine into a true Lord’s Supper, according to Hübmaier.”
For discussion
- How does your congregation include children in worship? Does the children’s time sometimes become “entertainment for adults”? Are children today treated differently than when you were young?
- Do non-baptized children and youths feel excluded if communion is limited to those who are baptized? Does this exclusion discredit their experiences of faith?
- Should we encourage our congregations to have a more open communion so that younger people can be included? Would that discourage young people from making a commitment? Does it take away the incentive for baptism?
- If we encourage children to participate in communion without being baptized, does that weaken the idea of the church as a covenant community? Do you agree with John D. Rempel that it makes our faith more private and less corporate?
- What ideas do you have for including children in worship?