I was interested last week to see a little storm blowing up on the Facebook horizon. As I looked at my Facebook feed it was obvious that friends in the Episcopal Church in the USA were getting themselves into a bit of a fankle about something which is apparently going to be raised at their General Convention in the summer.
It seems that the Diocese of Eastern Oregon is putting forward a motion which would change the Constitution and Canons and the [USA] Prayer Book to ” invite all to Holy Communion, ‘regardless of age, denomination or baptism.’
Now their canons are different to ours in that they explicitly say, “No unbaptized person shall be eligible to receive Holy Communion in this church.” Our canon law in Scotland doesn’t say quite that although there are those who believe that it does. Instead, ours says something along the lines that baptism offers full sacramental initiation in our church. (I’m quoting from memory, but perhaps someone could post the exact text in the comments).
It was obvious from what I saw on facebook that this was very controversial in the USA. I’m not sure whether this is because they have emphasised something they call the Baptismal Covenant in a strong way, something that most of our folk here would be entirely unaware of.
I’m thus aware of the horror that people feel towards the idea that communion might come before baptism.
Here I have to declare an interest. Communion came before baptism for me, though neither came for me initially in any of the Anglican Churches. I grew up without access to either sacrament (there’s no baptism or eucharist in the Salvation Army) and consequently, when I did discover them the idea that one sacrament was a gateway to another did not really occur to me and doesn’t make much sense now.
Furthermore, I think that I’ve found in my ministry that God is capable of using any of the sacraments (and the liturgies associated with them) as means of initiation into divine grace and love. Not merely eucharist and baptism but also penance, confirmation, marriage, ordination, unction and yes, all the rest.
I’ve preached about this in the past. You can read what I said here.
All of which makes me very interested in the post that Anne Tomlinson has put up on her ministry development blog this morning. And in particular the extract that she quotes from Rick Fabian.
The time will come when Christians stop obsessing about which sacrament comes first and let God roam free and the Holy Spirit blow where God wills.
Thanks for this – it’s a discussion we should be having more frequently! When we were negotiating the Reuilly Agreement with the French Reformed and Lutheran churches, there was great consternation in the C of E that the ERF had just passed a decision at synod to allow admission to communion before baptism in recognition of the fact that this was the way most adults without a Christian background came to be part of a eucharistic community. There was the assumption that this would in time lead to baptism and a recognition of the need for ongoing teaching, but I welcomed the generous spirit of the decision. Needless to say, the SEC was rather more relaxed than the C of E in this part of the negotiation!
CANON TWENTY-FIVE
OF ADMITTING TO HOLY COMMUNION
1. The Sacrament of Baptism is the full rite of initiation into the Church, and no further sacramental rite shall be required of any person seeking admission to Holy Communion. Â Subject to any Regulations issued by the College of Bishops concerning the preparation of candidates, the admission of any baptised person to Holy Communion shall be at the discretion of the cleric having charge of the congregation of which that person is a member, always providing that a person who has been admitted to Holy Communion in one congregation shall be accepted as a communicant in any other congregation of this Church.
2. The Scottish Episcopal Church recognises as eligible to receive Holy Communion any baptized person who is a communicant of any Trinitarian Church.
3. Any person baptised and duly admitted as a communicant in another Trinitarian Church wishing to become a member of the Scottish Episcopal Church shall be accepted upon receipt of evidence of that baptism and admission in the said Church as a communicant-member of this Church.
June 1995. Â Revised June 2005
Interesting – certainly wide open to other roads to communion than baptism.
Where I was dunked, it was held that the *normal* route was baptism then communion, but that exceptions were understandable. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not something I’d get my knickers in a twist over. 🙂
Fail to see how canon 25 can be interpreted as allowing anything other than baptism before communion Tim. All 3 clauses refer explicitly to baptism. It’s hardly “wide open”.
It is, however, one thing to say that those who are baptised are welcome to communion and quite another to say that the unbaptized may not receive communion.
The real issue that was under debate when this was discussed at the General Synod which was held in Glasgow *shivers at the memory* was whether confirmation was required in order to receive communion. I think that the current wording was compromise which lacked any elegance or finesse but which allowed the synod to agree something in the face of both the people who wanted an open table and the other people who wanted to say something about confirmation being part of the deal.
I think that the fact that we have confirmations is the only thing that we can say with much certainty about confirmation.
Curiously, I wasn’t asked for evidence of my status as a communicant member of a Trinitarian Church (the one in the Vatican, seeing as you asked) when I started attending the SEC or the CoE before that. I knew that a law of that sort existed, but I’ve never known it to be applied in practice. I wonder if it has been.
Well, I did the same as you from an unbaptised presbyterian direction. But “The time will come when Christians stop obsessing about which sacrament comes first and let God roam free and the Holy Spirit blow where God wills.”??? When? The parousia? We are an obsessive people woth a need for shibboleths!
This latest post has explained a lot for me.
I was always fascinated by how often you assumed that I would know that you were well informed about rather fundamental evangelical beliefs re substitution etc.
It also surprised me how often you assumed I would understand and indeed share such views.
Your ‘outing’ [for me at least!] of your Salvation Army background gives me the explanation.
Every blessing on you Kelvin, in your new world with ‘another gospel’.
And, whilst we are on the topic, the whole business of how the Scottish Episcopal Church defines or decides who are members of the Scottish Episcopal Church is A Vale of Tears And No Mistake.
It does seem a bit incongruous that “Baptism is the full rite of initiation into the Church” but we need to be confirmed to be a member of General Synod. (Canon 52 refers).
That definitely doesn’t make any sense to me. Anyone know why it’s like that?
You still need to be confirmed if you want to test a vocation for the priesthood, even if you’ve been chrismated when being baptised. And that doesn’t make a huge amount of sense either.
I’ll keep waiting for that other time coming. Though I thought about quitting church when I came back to the United States because of this. (Tennessee is a long way from San Francisco.)
In quite a few of the service leaflets we find the statement – “All baptized Christians are welcome to receive.” I always took that to mean the unbaptized were not welcome, but it will help me to think that maybe it doesn’t mean that.
A young friend sings in the choir for a large Episcopal Church. They have a several months long educational program called the ‘catechumenate’ especially designed to turn people into Episcopalians in time to be baptized at the Easter Vigil. I hear tell of a student, having gone through the catechumenate and having come to be Episcopalian, feeling now qualified to voice her indignation about an Asian student who takes communion without having been baptized.
I think there is poison there.
The baptismal covenant does have something to do with it. Funny thing is one of the best parts(bits) of the baptismal covenant is the promise to ‘respect the dignity of every human being’, but the ‘only the baptized welcome to the Eucharist’ would seem at odds with the covenant that qualifies you for the Eucharist in the first place.
The priests/seminarians I have heard talk about this say communion for the unbaptized makes baptism unimportant. I have wondered if the fear is more that it will make the priest less important as gate-keepers since they are the ones that do the baptizing. I tell them the priests we knew in Scotland were plenty important despite the Eucharistic table being thrown wide open.
Of course in practice, however, it mostly seems to me a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ sort of thing.
I do note that the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Church of England put Elizabeth Fry on the church calendar though as a Quaker I doubt she was baptized with water; so is she in or out of the church according to those who stick most closely to the formulas?
That’s a good point, ERP. It would be rather odd to have a saint with whom we were not in communion.
The Church of England also commemorates William and Catherine Booth, if memory serves me correctly. They probably were baptised, but as founders of a denomination that doesn’t, there are some issues there, I think.
And thanks Melissa – I think those statements that appear on service sheets have a lot of theology packed into them. Not all good theology either.
I’m a step more radical – I do not really believe in ordination as the-only-gateway either. I believe in good order. I believe that in any church community the privilege of celebrating belongs with the leaders. I believe it can be better to have no leader than the wrong leader. I believe in the highest standard of education and behaviour for the leaders. I believe that doing that job will change you radically – but I don’t believe in ordination as anything else.
I think this apparently minuscule difference is important not because it has led to ordination of some but because it has let others off the hook; ‘I am not ordained, so I can …’
I believe that much much as I love friends and respect leaders, having somebody to call mother and father always tends to infantalise the person doing the looking-up.
I believe we are all called to Christian adulthood.