The Welcoming Catholicity of Closed Communion

A man walked out of my church in protest. I didn’t notice it as it was happening, but he told me about it, in a note, a few weeks later. He was angered that he had been excluded. At first, I feared that maybe he hadn’t been spoken to. In a church this size, that’s certainly a possibility. Or maybe, I wondered, had one of our elderly church members looked askance at his wearing jeans or shorts? Turns out, he wanted the Lord’s Supper, and I’d turned him away.

On the Sunday in question, our visitor had observed my congregation take communion. I had explained the elements, and the act as a sign of the kingdom of Christ. I called the church to repentance from sin, forgiveness of one another, and renewed faith in the crucified and resurrected Jesus. Then I’d done what my grandfather’s generation of Baptist preachers called “fencing the table.”

As the bread and the cup were distributed, I announced that, while all were welcome to attend our church, only baptized Christians in good fellowship with a local congregation were invited to commune. Then I defined baptism the way our church does, along with Baptists all over the world, as the immersion of a believer in water as public profession of faith in Christ.

An Ecclesial Segregationist?
That’s what did it. The man told me in the letter that he had seethed in a quiet fury and then picked up his Bible and walked out. He was a member of some non-denominational church in another city, but he’d been baptized in a United Methodist church, as an infant and by sprinkling. My refusal to welcome him to the table indicated that I didn’t really believe in “mere Christianity.”

After all, we share a common belief in all the big things. We could both recite, with full conviction, the Nicene Creed. We both hold the same orthodox commitments about how many persons God is and how many natures Jesus has. And even beyond that, we were both Evangelicals, holding to the same call to sinners as to how to be reconciled to God through the blood of Christ. All we disagree about is something as trivial, he said, as how much water you ought to pool together, and what to do with it, in the act of baptism.

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