On Children and Communion

Our diocese has recently decided to allow children to take Communion before Confirmation, and at a considerably younger age, as long as they are properly prepared and the congregation is in agreement. Our PCC at Horfield has voted to go ahead with this, and to consult the congregation now, with a view to children being prepared during Lent and receiving their first communion at Easter. Therefore, in two weeks’ time, we shall be holding three consultation meetings, each at a different time of day, to allow everyone to consider the subject and to express their view. I hope that everyone will do their best to take part in one of these.

But why? It’s been our tradition for centuries that people don’t receive communion till they’ve been confirmed, till they are old enough to understand what is happening, and to make a grown-up commitment at their confirmation. Only once they have been properly prepared for confirmation are they qualified to receive communion. So why undermine all this? why yet another new way of doing things?

The first thing to say is that it isn’t new at all. In fact the Anglican church is the only church in the world which doesn’t give people communion until they have been confirmed – and not all the Anglican communion at that. The Roman Catholic church admits children to communion around the age of 7, several years before they are confirmed; the Methodists offer communion to “all who love the Lord”; in the Orthodox church people are admitted to communion from infancy, as soon as they are baptised. And this indeed seems to have been what the early church did: there was no separation between baptism, confirmation, and communion, and to the best of our knowledge this included young children. So what we are proposing is hardly new.

Still, is it right? Let me give some reasons for thinking so:
It is often said that people should understand what communion is before they are allowed to receive. But who actually can understand the mysteries of God? And the Holy Communion is fundamentally a mystery, whose truth can never be fathomed, into which we receive only glimpses. And very likely young children get some profound glimpses all of their own.

In the west, we are also keen on the idea of having to “qualify” for the gifts of God. But we know from the teaching and example of Jesus, and from the theology of St Paul, that God’s gifts, God’s grace, are free: you can’t earn them either by being good or by being clever. This applies above all to communion: the desire to love is all we need.

Then there is the idea that people need to be grown up before they can receive. But this sounds like saying, “unless you receive the Kingdom of God like big adults, you can never enter it”. Which, as you know, is not what Jesus said. Indeed, if we take him seriously, maybe it is we adults and not the children who should need special permission to receive communion.

Finally, it depends on how you think about Communion, what you think it is. If it’s just a solemn meal (or even a jolly meal) to commemorate the Last Supper, then you would indeed need to know the story and understand what it means before you could take a meaningful part in it. But the Eucharist is not a commemoration of the Last Supper; at Communion we do not just “share bread and wine in memory of Jesus”: the Eucharist is a celebration of Christ’s presence, and at Communion we receive not bread and wine but Jesus himself. And who is to say that children, even very young children, shouldn’t receive Jesus? certainly not Jesus!

Our present proposal is more or less to do what the Roman Catholic church does, to admit children to communion once they are of an age to know what’s going on and to have received appropriate instruction. But even this smacks a little bit of having to “qualify”, and in fact our Bishop has now said that there is to be no lower age limit: parishes can admit children at any age, so long as the policy has been properly thought through. So we could in fact do as the Orthodox Church does and admit children from Baptism: but that will need more discussion and thought, so for the time being we hope to begin with the original idea of admitting children from 6 upwards.

I want to end with my own story about why I personally feel so strongly about this. I used not to: until quite recently I was mildly in favour of the idea, but really wasn’t too bothered. Then we had a child. We took her to mass on Sundays, and she was blessed at the communion rail. Then, after a few months, she was duly baptised: and the next Sunday we took her to church again, and, again, she received a blessing. I was suddenly and quite unexpectedly outraged: it was as if nothing at all had happened; as if all those words, about being a member of the Body of Christ and being welcomed into his fellowship, didn’t really mean anything. She was still excommunicated! Whereas in Greek the word for “fellowship” (or community) and the word for “communion” are the same (koinonia). So how could she be admitted into community and not into communion? into the Body of Christ, and not receive the Body of Christ? it didn’t make sense, and it felt profoundly wrong.

So I hope that, by next year, we shall be in a position to take at least the first step towards making it right.

John Hadley
October 2006