A number of people physically meeting at church whilst another group of people stay home and live streaming. Most the people who are staying home want to meet with us but they aren’t able due to age, illness or some other impediment to their coming. Given that we are having communion for those people who are in the room, can those who are not part of the physical gathering join in with communion at home? In short, the answer is no.

I have already addressed the question of online communion here. Garry Williams has also answered that same question here. Whilst we were meeting exclusively online, the question of whether we could take communion together – even though we weren’t meeting – warranted an answer. The answer I gave (similarly the answer given by Garry Williams) was that gathering, physically meeting, is essential to the act of communion. So, whilst we were online only, we determined there could be no communion.

But since then, we have started having hybrid services. That is, a number of people physically meeting at church whilst another group of people stay home and live streaming. Most the people who are staying home want to meet with us but they aren’t able due to age, illness or some other impediment to their coming. Given that we are having communion for those people who are in the room, can those who are not part of the physical gathering join in with communion at home?

In short, the answer is no.

The reality of communion is that you cannot have it without physically gathering. It is ontologically impossible to have communion apart from the physical gathering of the local church. Of course, you can have a piece of bread and a thimble full of wine at home if you like while you watch along. But doing that is no more having communion than my kicking a ball between two jumpers in the local park is me scoring in the World Cup Final. It might look and feel like the same basic elements, but the reality is that certain essential ingredients are missing to make it whatever we are claiming.

Bobby Jamieson puts it this way:

The Lord’s Supper can’t be carried out when the church is scattered. That’s because the physical act of gathering is essential, not incidental, to the ordinance. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul refers five times to the fact that they celebrate the Lord’s Supper when they all come together as a church, as one assembly meeting in one place at one time (e.g., “For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you,” 1 Cor. 11:18; cf. vv. 17, 20, 33, 34).

He goes on:

Consider 1 Corinthians 10:17: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” The Lord’s Supper enacts the church’s unity. It consummates the church’s oneness. It gathers up the many who partake of the same elements together, in the same place, and makes them one. (So if baptism binds the one to the many, the Lord’s Supper makes the many one.) So to make the Lord’s Supper into something other than a meal of the whole church, sitting down together in the same room, is to make it something other than the Lord’s Supper. So, it’s not the case that a virtually mediated, physically dispersed Lord’s Supper is less than optimal: it’s simply not the Lord’s Supper.

Similarly, communion is an act of the church affirming that those who partake are still walking with the Lord and in right standing with his people. But if many people are simply ‘having communion’ at home, how can the church affirm or deny anything about what they are doing? The church can neither give nor withhold communion from the one partaking at home in private. Nothing stops anybody affirming at home what the church would deny if they were in the room. This has an absolutely devastating effect on church discipline. We call the action of putting people out of the church excommunication because they are no longer invited to commune with us in communion. But those who merely take communion in the privacy of their own homes, unaffirmed by the church, can never be excommunicated. They are simply affirming themselves to be believers, in right standing, without any reference to the church at all. The church may know nothing about what they are doing and can do nothing to stop it. And if we affirm that private communion exists, we have no ground to do anything about it.

The Lord’s Supper, by its very nature, is supposed to be a family meal. By eating privately at home, we are divorcing it from its proper context. Paul insists to the Corinthians that they are to ‘wait for one another’ before they eat and drink. That instruction is entirely unnecessary if we are able to partake privately

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