Children and the Lord’s Supper

Short blog posts following our Sunday afternoon services

Throughout the last year our Sunday afternoon sermon series has been titled Teaching the Christian Faith. It’s a series that aims to outline what we understand the Bible to teach about key Christian beliefs (“doctrine”), and we’ve been using one of the Reformed confessions – the Heidelberg Catechism, published in 1563AD – to shape our syllabus.

After the service we have a designated time for questions and answers, which has often been helpful when it comes to unpacking and applying the doctrine we are focusing on.

These short blog posts are an attempt to offer more clarity on what this church understands the Bible to teach and what therefore we should believe and practice as Christians.

Thinking through our children’s participation at the Lord’s Supper

Most recently, we have been working through the Bible’s teaching on baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which is outlined in Heidelberg 65-82.

One of the questions that was helpfully asked in one of our Q&A slots during this time was in relation to children and the Lord’s Supper. A few weeks prior to this we had considered why we believe that the infant children of professing Christians should be baptised. A natural question to then ask is, when should children be admitted to the Lord’s Supper? When should our children begin to eat the bread and drink the cup?

There is plenty that could be said in answer to this question, and we will aim to say more in future posts. For now, it might be worth highlighting a summary of a recently debated issue in Reformed churches surrounding a practice referred to as paedocommunion or infant communion.

This practice involves giving infant children the bread and wine at the Lord’s Supper before they make their own credible profession of faith and before they are able to meet the requirements laid out by the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 11 (self-examination and discernment of “the body”).

Now, this isn’t a hot-topic in many circles, and you might think it all sounds exceptionally strange! To be clear, this church is not one that practices infant communion. The reason for outlining the debate is simply to begin gathering thoughts as to what might be an appropriate age for children to be brought to the Lord’s Supper, and what we might seek to discern beforehand.

“Paedocommunion”: arguments for and (significantly) against

Dr. Scott R. Swain,[1] a systematic theology professor, helpfully summarises the key arguments for and against the practice of paedocommunion. The main arguments put forward in favour of the practice are as follows:

1. The Reformers didn’t think too deeply on the subject, which is why we don’t find arguments for paedocommunion in the Reformation writings, it is suggested.

2. If infants should be baptised, it is argued, then they should also be fed with the Lord’s Supper.

3. There is a precedent we can observe in the OT Passover in which children of God’s people participate in the Passover meal. This precedent, it is argued, paves the way for children of God’s people from the NT onwards to partake of the Lord’s Supper meal.

4. It is inconsistent to consider children of professing Christians to be part of the church and yet to deny them the fellowship meal of the church, the Lord’s Supper. Those who do so are effectively “excommunicating” the children of the church, it is argued.

In response, Swain contends that the following arguments against paedocommunion are stronger than the arguments in favour (note that the below four arguments are in response to the four arguments above):

1. The Reformers and the key Reformed texts that were subsequently published did not necessarily need to address the practice directly because the structure of the covenant of grace itself speaks to it. This is a somewhat technical point (and so feel free to skip it and jump further down the page!), but it’s essentially to highlight this: in bringing us into covenant relationship with Himself, God acts alone, without our active participation. This is why when we are baptised, baptism being the sign of initiation into the church, we are passive. We are baptised; we do not baptise ourselves! Yet God’s purpose in bringing us into covenant relationship with Himself is not that we remain passive, but that we might “actively engage with Him.”

   The Lord’s Supper is different than baptism in that rather than being passive, we are called to be active in participating at the Lord’s Supper. Just think of the commands given to us regarding the Lord’s Supper: “Take, eat…” “Do this in remembrance of me.” “Let a person examine himself…” And the implicit instruction to “[discern] the body.”

   If you’ve got a thirst for more technical language: these commands to be active reflect the fact that the covenant of grace is “bilateral in destination,” whilst baptism reflects the fact that it is “unilateral in initiation.”

2. The structure of the covenant of grace (sorry, somewhat technical again!) then highlights why it is in fact consistent to baptise our infant children yet delay giving them the Lord’s Supper, because the Lord’s Supper requires the active participation of faith (outlined above).

3. If the Passover precedent could be considered the strongest argument in favour of paedocommunion, we should note that the evidence is somewhat ambiguous. In Luke 2:42, Luke appears to state that Jesus first partook of the Passover when he was twelve years old. So, whilst elements of the Passover were designed with children in view (Exodus 13:14), there was apparently no problem for Jesus to be “excluded” from the meal until he was twelve. We should no doubt understand that he had been prepared for this first Passover in the years prior.

4. In affirming that our children are a part of the church, we are not effectively “excommunicating” them by excluding them from the Lord’s Supper because we need to take account of covenant nurture, as Swain puts it. “We baptise our children with a view to nurturing them towards participation at the Table.” Consider again how baptism and the Lord’s Supper relate to the covenant – baptism as the sign of initiation and the Supper as the sign of communion. And consider historically how the church has made disciples in light of what we are commanded in Matthew 28:18-20: baptism is followed by teaching. That teaching includes teaching our children what it means to come to the Lord’s Supper.

A summary

Again, there is plenty more that could be said on this subject. But this summary may be a helpful starter in getting oriented, or a helpful bookmark should the issue ever come up in future!

“When my young children ask me, “Why can’t I have it?” I answer, “You can, but not today.” And we then talk about what it means and how all these things are theirs by faith. The difference is that I don’t want to say, “You can’t have it.” But what we’re doing as a church, what mummy and daddy are trying to do at home, is to teach you, to disciple you, to nurture you on the path to enjoy this blessing which is yours by virtue of the covenant of grace.”[2]

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[1] Dr. Scott R. Swain is President and James Woodrow Hassell Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida.

[2] Reformed Theological Seminary generously makes available many of its course lectures for free. Dr. Swain’s Ecclesiology and Sacraments course can be accessed here.