The Challenge of Child Communion

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Introduction

When Christian writers and speakers use the word challenge, it frequently refers to what they are about to do, which is to issue a mildly robust exhortation to “do a little better.” The audience is challenged to step it up a bit. To take it to the next level perhaps. To resolve to be more earnest in whatever the endeavor in question was.

But there is another way the word challenge can be used, as when someone is slapped in the face with a pair of gloves, thereby inviting him to show up at an agreed-upon place at dawn, and to bring his pistol with him.

I will leave it to the interested reader to decide which kind this one is.

The Stakes

The sexual revolution is approaching its zenith which, when you turn the chart right side up, turns out to be its nadir. But wherever you look along the line on the graph, you can see a certain grim commonality which the Scriptures describe by using the word fruitless. “. . . trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots;” (Jude 12). Hook-up culture . . . fruitless. Divorce culture . . . fruitless. Abortion culture . . . fruitless. Lesbianism . . . fruitless. Sodomy . . . fruitless. Tranny-culture . . . fruitless. The secular vision of the good life is by this point a dried out stick on the ground.

This being the case, and because the revolutionaries still need to perpetuate their cause in the world, instead of bearing fruit, a gift they have abandoned, they must therefore recruit. This is how evangelical Christians have allowed themselves to be turned into the breeder farms of the left. We make the babies, and then turn them over to trained professionals in order that the revolution can shape most of them in accordance with the approved governmental standards of indoctrination and grooming. But for the most part, these Christian children are today turned over voluntarily, and not the way they used to be kidnapped by Janissaries.

In the meantime, the leadership class of American evangelicals, instead of teaching their people how to think Christianly, which would mean learning how to object to this kind of thing, have rather been smearing them with the rancid butter of “go-along-get-along.” The result is that winsome Christianity has actually become won-over Christianity.

At the end of the day, it turned out that teaching Christians to be winsome was like teaching hookers how to say things like, “Hello, sailor . . .”

So this means that the task before us—the challenge, if you will—is to figure out how the Church can keep her kids in the faith once delivered. The proposal that I would like to advance here may strike some as a tad radical, but here it is. If we want our covenant children to grow up healthy and strong in the faith, we should consider . . . please prepare yourselves . . . we should consider feeding them.

“Ah,” you say. “Good idea. We should start giving them food after they have memorized the Heidelberg Catechism. Great idea.” Um . . . no.

The Fear and the Reality

It has to be acknowledged that the practice of child communion is a hot topic. Those who oppose it are concerned that the only thing that early communion communicates is how to phone your faith in. They are concerned about formalism, or the inculcation of hypocrisy. This is why they want to withhold communion until they can ascertain whether or not the child “really means it.”

What this amounts to in real life, however, is withholding food from a child so that they might grow up big and strong. Once they have grown up big and strong, then we will be willing to give them the nourishment. This, as I am sure you recognize, makes no sense at all. And of course, if they then fade away and die, we are sorrowful for the loss, but at the same time we are grateful that we didn’t waste any food on that one—since he was going to die anyhow.

Of course there is an alternative view out there, which is that if you had fed them, they might not have died.

The fear is that child communion will result in an inauthentic Christianity. It will lead to us not keeping our kids. But please think about this for a minute . . . the Reformed are not keeping our kids now. Being afraid that child communion will lead to loss of genuine faith in the next generation is like someone in a swimming pool refusing to swim to the other end because he might get wet.

If this were actually a genuine concern, you would think the natural thing to do would be to look around for any group of Christians that is actually doing a decent job when it comes to keeping their kids. And, as it turns out, there is such a group . . . but the challenge (and implied rebuke) is that they are committed among other things to child communion.

Because this is not a superstition thing, but rather a covenant commitment thing, it is connected to other convictions as well. It is not as though water and wine and bread do anything all by themselves. The groups that I know of that practice child communion are also groups that are dedicated to Christian education for their kids, for example, growing them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

A Brief Description of What We Do

In our church services, the children worship together with us. We do not have a separate children’s church. The whole congregation worships together. Sound is piped outside the sanctuary for nursing mothers, or for attitude corrections for toddlers, but in the main, all the children are in the service with us.

We do not commune babies conked out in car seats, or babies asleep in their mothers’ arms, or little ones incapable of taking in solid food. This is normal and routine, and not a matter of “excommunicating” anybody. In the Old Testament, there were three festivals of obligation, where the head of the house needed to go up to the Jerusalem to worship, and whether or not his family accompanied him was optional, and a practical matter (Dt. 16:16). Women and children were certainly welcome, but it was recognized that it might not be practical. So when the head of the household went, he was representing his family, not excluding them. In the same way, infants in the womb and newborns are not excluded from our covenant body because of any practical limitations. If a member of our congregation was in a car wreck and in a coma for a few months, there would be no need to grind up the elements of the Supper in order to put them in his IV feed. We are a covenanted people, not a superstitious people.

But as the children are in the worship service with us, they start to track with the service. They start saying amen when we do. They start lifting their hands in the doxology. They sing along, after their fashion. And when the communion tray comes by, they notice that everyone else in their family is partaking, and they want to partake also. Now at this point, because they are paying attention, whatever we do will of necessity teach them something. That lesson will either be “yes, you are part of this with us,” or “no, you are still out.” We believe that Christian parents have an obligation to teach their children to trust, which means something very different than sowing doubts. We are supposed to teach them that they belong with us. We are their people.

Now because we do not believe that heads of households “hold the keys,” we ask our fathers to notify an elder that their child is now wanting to partake, and we say “go for it.”

The objection is that such a child does not yet know what the Supper means. The reply is that this is quite correct, but that we have begun teaching the child what it means. But we are not teaching them through exercises on a white board in a classroom, we are teaching them through participation. When your child came home from the hospital as a newborn, did you speak to him in English? Why? He doesn’t know English. But you weren’t giving him “English lessons” either—you were instead incorporating him into an English-speaking people. In a similar way, as we commune our children, we are teaching them and instructing them in the sacrament of Christ’s body, week after week. Your daughter takes a piece of bread, and mom leans over and says, “This is the body of Christ, who died for you.”

If someone asks why we don’t require a profession of faith first, our reply is that partaking of the Supper is a profession of faith.

When they have come to adulthood, they have been woven into the covenant community, and it is a tight weave, administered over the course of years. Returning to the example of learning a language, they are native speakers, and don’t remember a time when they didn’t know. It is true that most of them will not be able to recall a moment of crisis conversion. We do thank the Lord for those instances where people meet the Lord on a Damascus road, but for those growing up in the church, such ought not be the norm.

You don’t need to know the exact moment the sun rose to know that it is up.

And returning to the earlier point about keeping our kids, our retention rates are remarkably high.

The 2 Cor. 13:5 Obstacle

For those who are still adamantly opposed to child communion, the passage that seems to them to be a slam dunk is the following:

And the argument is that a two-year-old simply cannot examine himself rightly. He does not have the capacity, or the discernment, or the wisdom, to determine whether or not Jesus Christ is “in him.” This does seem like a really compelling argument, at least at first glance. But when we take it in context, not only does it not make the point desired, it actually cuts the other way. Allow me . . .

The central problem at Corinth was a failure to recognize the body of Christ—not in the bread or wine, but in one another. The result of this was prideful factions (1 Cor. 1:12), private buffets at the Table (1 Cor. 11:22), lawsuits between brothers in pagan courts (1 Cor. 6: 1), and all sorts of feuds and battles (2 Cor. 12:20). The central problem was that they were not seeing Christ in one another, and the problem was not that they had a deficient metaphysical theology of how the Real Presence intersected with the bread and wine.

And so take close notice of what Paul says here:

In sum, to partake of the blood of Christ, and to partake of the body of Christ, is to partake of the one body. That one body is the one loaf, the one bread. We—the body of Christ—are that one loaf. And the word for communion in this passage is koinonia, or fellowship.

The Corinthians who were puffed up as followers of Apollos were not recognizing the one loaf. The Corinthians who let others go hungry when they had an abundance of food at the Supper were not recognizing the one loaf. The Christians who were arguing in front of pagan judges were not recognizing the one loaf. The Corinthians who were at each other’s throats in various disputes were not recognizing the one loaf. One part of the loaf has no business excluding any other part of the loaf.

But this presents a real problem to almost all paedobaptist Reformed denominations. They formally grant that covenant children are part of the loaf, and they baptize them accordingly. They do so with many high and lofty words—and then they refuse them the bread and wine. In some extreme cases, they refuse the bread and wine for almost two decades. When this exclusion happens, the only ones violating Paul’s teaching in Corinthians about recognizing the loaf are the elders. They are the ones refusing to recognize the body. They are the ones denying bread to children that they (in a different context) acknowledge as part of the loaf. But all who are bread should get bread.

Once we realize the nature of this problem, this sets us up for a real kick in the teeth. Let’s pick on somebody in an actual Reformed denomination—say a pastor in the URC who is on the strict side of things. He has all the kids in his congregation memorize the following:

Now when a child has successfully memorized this (as required), we have only two options before us. That statement, in the mouth of that child, is either true or false. With me? It is either the case that the blood of Christ has “fully satisfied” for all that child’s sins, or it is not the case. Now if it is the case, why can he not come to the Supper? And if it is not the case, why is the minister making him say it as though it were?

Caught on the horns of this dilemma, all such churches should insert a new question for #2.

This whole approach—making kids memorize as truth what the denomination’s sacramental practices denounce as a lie—reminds me of that painful scene in Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress. The Steward or minister is catechizing John, and they get to an awkward question. The Steward pops out from behind his ecclesiastical mask and says . . .

And You Baptists . . .

I can begin with some very modest praise for the Baptists. They at least know that the sacraments go together. To be baptized is to admitted to the Table. Having placed this feather in their cap, somewhat magnanimously, let me take it out again.

Those Presbyterians who baptize infants, but who will not commune them, are those who bring their children into the covenant household, but will not feed them. The kids can sit on the sofa in the living room during dinner and listen to the happy clinking of the silverware coming from the dining room. But Reformed Baptists know that admission to the house is tantamount to admission to the Table—and so they remove all the inconsistency by making all their kids sleep in the yard.

But Reformed credo-communionists and Reformed Baptists alike believe that the Christian faith is like a ride at Disneyland, where you have to be a certain height to participate. They have fallen into the same trap that the Lord’s first disciples fell into—that of believing that the Lord Jesus was far too important and far too busy to deal with the likes of children.

And this is one of the places in the gospels where we are told that Jesus got angry (“much displeased,” aganakteo—angry).

Jesus taught that we need to become like little children to enter the kingdom. We, because self-important disciples tend to live in opposite land, have turned this into a requirement that little children need to become like adults to enter the kingdom. “Grown ups need to become more like children,” the Lord says. “Yes, Lord,” we reply. “Got it. Children need to become more like grown ups.” We are obeying the Lord in at least one respect. We are like children. Stupid children, but children.

Notice that infants (brephos) are being carried to Him, and He describes this as them coming to Him. Being carried to Christ counts as coming to Him.

It is often objected that there is no water in this passage, which is true enough. It is also the case that there is no bread and there is no wine. It is not a sacramental passage. That is also quite true. But there is Jesus, and there are children. Compare the way Jesus treats children here and the way many of the Reformed treat them. Same planet, different worlds. This is not a sacramental passage, that is true. That is no reason to shape your sacramental practices in such a way as to flatly contradict what this passage teaches about children of the covenant.

I was talking to a (strict) Reformed Baptist friend one time, and I asked him if his (unconverted) kids ever prayed on their own. They were little, very young. He acknowledged that, “yes, they did,” and then, unbending just a little, he said “we don’t discipline them for it.” Thank God for small mercies. These children weren’t spanked for the sin of approaching God hypocritically.

There are actual places in the Christian world where the kids, instead of partaking of the bread and wine, are allowed to go through the motions of eating and drinking. Which is about the saddest thing ever.

And so then imagine another scenario, just as atrocious, also on the paedobaptist side. A young girl in a Dutch Reformed church somewhere, twelve or thirteen, has repeatedly expressed her love for Christ, and “can she please come to the Table?” She is manifestly and plainly a genuine Christian—the sweetest one in that church actually. “No,” the elders growl. “We need to protect the Table.” But you weren’t told to protect the Table. That’s like tying to protect the Ark of the Covenant from Uzzah.

The actual charge was to protect the sheep, men. And this means you were not to invent a human tradition that defined lambs as being outside the flock.

Or so it would seem.

Giveaways are an Indication That You Need to be Reading More

As you should know by now,there are two places you must go in order to get the available giveaways.

The first is the page that Canon has set up to process all of their giveaways, and those titles can be found here. Their offers will change with each post throughout the month, but for these Canon titles, they will always be found in the same place. You should have bookmarked the page by now.

Today’s freebies are . . . European Brain Snakes, Church Music, Decluttering Your Marriage, Neglected Qualification, Pomosexuality, Seven Deadlies, and The Other Side of the Coyne. All of these are available for the low, low price of free at noquarternovember.com. 

The second place you should want to go would be to my Mablog Shoppe. The list of free titles will grow throughout the month, and is almost done growing. The current list of free titles there is as follows:

Concise and to the Point
Virgins and Volcanoes
Blue Sky Vision
The Pink Spiders of Empathy
Letters to a Rootless White Kid
Jokes I Like to Tell
Chestertonian Calvinism
21 Prayers for Pastors
Letters of Marital Counsel
No Artificial Tweetners
N.T. Wright Rides a Pale Horse
Letters on Homosexual Desire
Letters to a Broken Girl
Some Adventures of Fun Dad
A Parliament of Pots
Song of Shulamith
The Doors of the Sea
All the Condemnation in the World
Calvinism 4.0

Remember that we can’t make you take them home. That’s your job.