Can families do their own communion service with the sacrament being valid as a means of grace?

Upvote:3

Different Protestant denominations will have different views on this, and it is relatively easy to tell which view applies.

At the risk of oversimplification the two main camps are:

  1. Communion is a sacrament that is in some sense a means of grace.
  2. Communion is a memorial that of itself conveys no benefits other than the beliefs and state of mind it engenders in the participants.

Denominations that fall into camp 1 usually restrict performance of communion to priests or other appointed ministers. For those denominations a home communion would be at best a violation of church rules and at worst sacrilege. This would include Lutherans, Anglicans and Episcopalians.

Denominations that fall into camp 2 would see your communion as entirely valid, as long as you weren't trying to set yourself up as an alternative to church. However some would frown on the practice for church discipline reasons. you should check with your church leadership. However it would not be "a sacrament that becomes the same means of grace" because they don't believe that the ceremony conveys grace of itself at all. This would include Baptists, Anabaptists and most independent evangelical churches.

Upvote:4

Different denominations within Protestantism would have different answers to this. The Church of England (especially Anglo-Catholic) would have a very different idea to an Open Brethren Assembly, for example.

The objection of potential 'schism' or 'disunity' cannot apply when circumstances prevail in which the separation (of households) is due, solely, to a definite requirement that cannot be overcome.

Of course, views differ as to the concept of a 'memorial' or a 'sacrament' and as to whether the process is one of the 'remembrance' of Christ by the congregation or the administering of a 'sacrament of grace' to the congregation.

There is no prescription in scripture that any particular individual is required to administer the elements, bread and wine, or the blessings and prayers associated with those elements. In the generality of Protestantism, an elder would normally do so. Or a minister or pastor if one were presiding.

Paul states 'when ye come together', so it is a gathering of the whole church in that particular locality and the partaking represents one body, that is to say His body broken that One Body may be joined, in Him, to God.

Similarly, of the cup, Jesus says 'drink ye all of it' the 'all' being all that is of Christ's body in that particular locality.

But in such a time as circumstances enforce households to be separated, surely Protestantism should, in its being based on scripture rather than tradition and on faith rather than sacraments, allow of household memorials of the sufferings and death of Christ.

For if, in the present state of the Church, a household finds itself in the situation where no local gathering sufficiently answers to the Body of Christ or to the true preaching and teaching of the gospel, should not such an individual household in a particular locality remember the Lord in his death (in the way which he prescribed) until he come ?

For Jesus said 'where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst'.

And if only two or three, due to circumstances, are the sum total of the body of Christ in one place at one time, shall they not remember Him who is in their midst, with bread and wine, as He, himself, exampled ?

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