Japan’s largest Protestant denomination has dismissed one of its pastors for continuing to allow unbaptised people to receive Holy Communion at his local church.

The sacked minister, the Rev. Jiro Kitamura of the United Church of Christ in Japan, is appealing the decision because he says he cannot accept it. The pastor has campaigned for some time to give Holy Communion to those who have not been baptized.

“It [the decision to dismiss him] is unfair and wrong,” Kitamura told Ecumenical News International. “The one-sided punishment is strongly exclusive in its logic.”

The dismissed pastor does not believe that in order to receive Holy Communion people need to undergo baptism. Kitamura has appealed against his dismissal to the denomination’s moderator, the Rev. Nobuhisa Yamakita. On 15 February, the UCCJ elected five adjudicators to rule finally on the issue.

Kitamura showed a written notice dated 26 January and signed by the Rev. Mutsumi Matsui, chairperson of a church commission that oversees admission criteria for UCCJ ministers. The note explained the decision to give Kitamura a “disciplinary punishment to dismiss”. The denomination’s bi-weekly newspaper, Kyodan Shinpo, reproduced the notice on 13 February.

Kitamura said Matsui and another church official who investigated his case handed him the notice at his local church in Yokohama, near Tokyo, on 27 January, following the circulation of a petition critical of the pastor and about which he says he had not been consulted.

The notice said, “The commission accepted this [petition] and set up an investigators’ group [in September] to implement an investigation on the facts regarding the content of the petition. As a result, because the church’s by-laws stipulate that unbaptised persons cannot receive Holy Communion, we came to the conclusion that the Holy Communion that is provided by the Minister Kitamura to unbaptised persons violates Article 1 of the Church Constitution.”

Yamakita commented in his church’s newspaper, “I feel pain that things have come this far. The development of circumstances arising from this is beyond my imagination, but I think that I will respond to them faithfully, trusting the Lord’s guidance.”