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.
That’s the issue I take up in a new article, “Table Manners: The Welcoming Catholicity of Closed Communion” in the 25th anniversary issue of Touchstone Magazine: A Journal of Mere Christianity. The issue is always a hard one, because it’s so personal. Would I really turn C. S. Lewis away from the Lord’s Table just because he was sprinkled instead of immersed?
You can read the article here, and you can subscribe to the magazine here.
