Communion vs The Lord's Supper

(The following is taken from a personal communication to a brother and sister in Christ, with personal references removed. If you belong to or are in leadership of almost any 'church' in the land, just pretend that it is written to you personally.)

In the beginning, when the Ekklesia of God was a founded by the Lord Jesus, and guided by the apostles of the Lord through the Holy Spirit, the Lord's Supper was the very centerpiece of meetings of the Lord's people, the Ekklesia. Though they might have met together more often that this, at a minimum the tradition established by the Lord was for His people to come together on the Lord's Day (the first day of the week, Sunday) in the evening, specifically to eat the Lord's Supper. This was not a token fragment of a meal like 'communion', but was a full meal as the central focus of their coming together every week. It was the very centerpiece of Christian fellowship and association throughout the apostolic age; it was what their meetings were ALL about. Everything revolved around the Lord's Supper. You can particularly see this in 1Cor 11:17-34 and also in Acts 20:7-12.

Now we are repeatedly told in the Bible that we are to adhere to apostolic teaching and to continue to observe these apostolic traditions as the commandments of our Lord Jesus Christ: In 1Cor 11: 2 Paul says, "Now I praise you brethren that you remember me in all things and keep the traditions just as I delivered them to you." In 1Cor 14: 37 he says, "If anyone thinks himself to be a prophet or spiritual let him acknowledge that the things which I write to you are the commandments of the Lord." In 2Thess 3: 6 he says, "But we command you brethren in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you withdraw from every brother who walks disorderly and not according to the tradition which he received from us." And in 1Thess 2:15 Paul says, "Therefore brethren, stand fast and hold the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle."

We today are not of those who were taught these traditions by word, since we have never seen Paul, but we are those who have received the traditions through the epistles (the writings of the New Testament) and it is our duty to search them out and to do them to the best of our ability from what was written to us. Paul is not talking about the traditions of men that we have wrongly received from outside the Bible – whether Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or Holiness Pentecostal – but the original traditions which are there in the scriptures for us to read and learn and do. Regarding the difference between human traditions and God's traditions the scriptures say in Jer 2:13, "My People have committed two evils: The have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water." and again in Hosea 5:11 "Ephraim is oppressed and broken in judgment, because he willingly walked by human precept." This is the sad state of the 'church' today, and how sad that, "...he willingly walked by human precept." Yet how true. Point out to a churchman some difference between the traditions given of God in the New Testament and their current 'church' traditions, and the traditions will win out every time even if they are only a few years old.

People – even the Lord's people – love their human traditions and don't want to let go of them for anything.

But we fully believe that 'God's will for our lives is in the Bible itself' and that if we want to know His will for our lives, our families, and for the Ekklesia of God, it is found right there in the Bible. So many 'churches' that we have seen have been so close, but unwilling to step over the threshold to true Bible fellowship. So many 'pastors' just won't let go.

But today, and for well over a thousand years, the 'churches' have replaced the Lord's Supper with 'Communion'. Communion does not come from the Bible, but from the Catholic Church, which replaced the God-ordained Lord's Supper with a magical rite called 'The Mass'; unfortunately, when the reformers like Martin Luther, John Calvin and John Knox broke from the Catholic Church they still retained the form of the Mass, stripped of its magical doctrine, and called it 'communion', but they never obeyed the Scriptures in actually returning to the Lord's Supper.

In your particular case, you not only do communion in opposition to the Lord's Supper, but you are actually doing it in a way that is in direct opposition to Paul's entire point in 1Cor 11, for 'each one takes his cracker crumb ahead of others'. The Lord's Supper is supposed to depict and produce unity in the body, but leaving it lying around for everyone to have or not have whenever they want to is depicting and producing disunity. The only saving grace is that it is only 'Baptist Wine', so at least no one can get drunk. But if you read through this section of scripture as a whole, the dreadful things which Paul pronounces against the believers in Corinth are not so much because they come to the Lord's Table with some secret sin, but because they don't take the form of the Lord's Supper seriously, and thus are chastened by the Lord.

You asked me with surprising earnestness why it was so important to observe the Lord's Supper literally. I couldn't  help but think of a quote from Steve Atkerson of the New Testament Restoration Foundation that said, "The question is not 'Why do we have to do things as they did in the New Testament?', the real question is, 'Why would we want to do things any other way?' " And I think that alone goes a long way to answering your question. Try asking yourselves in earnest, "Why exactly would I want to do things some other way than what they did in the New Testament?" Try going to the Lord in prayer and asking Him that very question. "Lord Jesus, why would I want to do things some other way than what they did in the New Testament?"

Well for one thing, if you can believe that baptism should be done as they did in the New Testament – if you can agree that baptism is only for genuine believers, not infants, upon conversion, by full immersion – then you really ought to be able to understand why the Lord's Supper should be done as they did it then. It's really one and the same issue. Baptism is one issue that Baptists and Pentecostals and Charismatics are pretty well in agreement on; but when the first Baptists started insisting on it the established denominations thought they were a bunch of reckless upstarts stirring up trouble over nothing. But guess what? Those Baptists were right, they were just some folks that believed the Bible, just saying what was actually in the Bible, and we today are the beneficiaries of the persecution they faced. Even today many denominations refuse to accept the truth about Baptism, and they are still just as wrong as their forerunners. In fact, they are even more wrong because they have had a few hundred years to think it over now and they still choose to love and cling to their human traditions instead of simply submitting themselves to the Word of God.

And that is all we are saying, that the Lord's Supper is simply an issue on which we should bow the knee and submit ourselves to the Word of God: why would we want to do any differently? What would be the reason for that? What would be in us that would bristle and get defensive at the idea of doing the Lord's Supper the way the Apostles established at the beginning instead of doing it like some smart guys that came along a couple of thousand years later? Could we suppose that Jesus didn't get it quite right? Or that we have thought up some useful improvements that He simply hadn't thought of?

There are other reasons than this but this is really the beginning point.