I think one thing that is really hurting our efforts in this regard, and one I was totally unaware of having never been in anything but a baptist or country methodist church until adulthood is our architecture is all wrong. The anglican architeture is much more appropriate with the table in center and the pulpit to the side. I even like the scripture read in the middle of the people. I would simply replace the baptismal font at the door with a baptismal pool.

Everyone should read a hard to find book “Baptist at the table” I can’t remember the author right now, but it is truly an eye opener and has helped me to reclaim a high view of the table.

Austin

So over all my years as a Southern Baptist, now 35 years as a pastor, I have never observed the Lord’s Supper less frequently than once a month. As you have done, I have studied both the Scriptures and earlier
Baptist and Southern Baptist history, and have been stunned to see the damage we have done to people’s understanding of this great ordinance of the church.

The first meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention included a Communion Service. And, as you mention,
Spurgeon long ago in England was observing the Supper
weekly on the Lord’s Day.

There is no better way to preach the Gospel than the Biblical way of preaching it, baptizing new believers, and observing the Supper. I personally find it a blessing to alternate morning and evening Communion Services with weekly Communion.

I appreciate you and others for raising the issue.

I was in a Catholic wedding about a month ago and had a real hard time sitting through the Eucharist. It wasn’t because I was mad that I couldn’t take it, but that I pretty much agree with transubstantiation (and as a Baptist no less). I know that it seems confusing, but I really boil it down to the simple faith I had as a kid. I was a good little baptist that heard 4 times a year, “The is the body and blood of Christ”. And I just believed it, thinking there was some way to cool supranatural thing going on. It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I really ever thought otherwise about it. I think that the view of the Lords Supper (I call it this because it is the lowest term, I refuse to use the word Eucharist within baptist communion settings) in the current BFM is horrible and I think that these recommendations you have put forth are great. To think that the Holy Spirit is incapable of doing something involved in the elements is just putting God in a box and showing traditional evangelicism’s fear of anything remotely Catholic.

Thanks Mike.

The Bible commands all to be baptized. Yet, if immersion is to be the exclusive method, what about those on life support? Since most Baptists/Anabaptists demand that those who partake of the Lord’s Table be baptized, those who cannot be baptized by immersion are eternally disenfranchised from full fellowship within the church. Though I believe that immersion was the majority view and practice in the early church, I am not convinced that it was the exclusive method.

Thanks for your insights which is so much more than my practical experience of Baptist theology through Baptist ministers and churches – I look forward to reading more.

Tom

Just wanted to echo what some others have said and say thanks for broaching this topic. I go to a Baptisty community church and we have only recently started doing the Lord’s Supper twice a month. Before that it was whenever the pastor felt like it. But I think that we don’t know why we do it. In all honesty, I think it’s because some people wanted to do it more often and the pastor acquiesced.

But our language is the bare language of symbol and remembrance. For something that should be pointing to Jesus and uniting his followers in Him, the introspection we are encouraged to do seems like a bare minimum.

Don’t get me wrong, anything that points to Christ in our gathered worship is a good thing. I just wish we had a fuller expression of it.

Hope I’m not breaking the rules as I don’t meet the qualifications for comment… but I wanted to say how grateful I am, as a Catholic, for this series of posts. Despite growing up surrounded by Baptists, I’ve lived in complete ignorance of Baptist theology, except that which I’ve heard set forth (from both Baptists and Catholics) in purely apologetical terms, which had left me with a sense that Baptist beliefs were theology by negation. I feel like I’m grasping something of the richness of Baptist thinking and tradition now. Thanks for letting us non-Baptists see the tradition “from the inside,” presented as a whole and not merely in contrast to other theologies.

Yeah, so the Lord’s Supper. Do it weekly: alternating between mornings and evenings is my preference. And get the kids in for it, too, regardless of whether you’re a paedocommunionist. And for goodness’ sake, use real wine. Then perhaps, just perhaps, we might see (for the sake of example) students who give as much commitment to church as they do to the CU.