Gluten free bread and nonalcoholic wine for communion
Anglican Brat
Shipmate
I'm confused, does the CofE allow either gluten free bread and/or nonalcoholic wine for communion?
Comments
https://www.churchofengland.org/media/press-releases/no-were-not-banning-gluten-free-bread-or-non-alcoholic-communion-wine
Since the same providers also serve the Roman Catholic constituency the gluten free wafers are wheat starch with a minimal level of gluten - approved by Coeliac UK.
I don’t know about the wine.
I grew up in a non-sacramrntal tradition that saw it as a remembrance.
For me it doesn't matter what is used or who leads it.
I used to be in a house church that didn't have this. FD gave me advice on to run it. I found there were lots of bible passages to give it context. I encouraged other members to lead it, but none took it up.
A choice was given of wine or grape juice each time. The breads used varied.
No outside institutional rules were the focus there.
Many churches or denominations do have rules about what must be used or can’t be used. If one thinks those rules are wrong, either because they are more limiting than God or because they exclude some worshipers (as with gluten or alcohol), then it seems to me the route to take is to try and loosen or change the rules, not to simply choose to ignore them. That’s particularly the case if one has committed to abide by the rules.
Given the vast diversity of cultural situations* I think guidelines are the better approach to meeting objectives for communions.
*Such as the scarcity of ordained persons in some areas.
My daughter's father in law can only eat gluten free. He attend a C of E church. I will have to find out how he gets on.
Many C of E churches do offer gluten-free bread these days. I'm not sure about non-alcoholic wine, but we were reminded (especially during the pandemic) that receiving the Sacrament in one form only was perfectly OK.
In which case, if there is any uncertainty about the wine on offer, reception of the wafer only is the best solution.
Some Anglican churches do offer non-alcoholic wine - the *A Church Near You* website, which Our Place employs, has the facility to advertise this, although AFAIK we don't actually use/offer it...
I'll get me coat.
That's OK if you have a memorialist view of the sacrament. Anglican tradition (whatever end of the candle you are looking from) is that it is more than that. My guess is that God isn't particularly fussed about details, but if we are aiming to obey the Lord's command we need to take bread which is recognisable as such (ie. baked from wheat, even if the gluten has been largely removed and even if it doesn't really look like Tesco's Finest loaf) and wine, defined as the fermented juice of the grape.
I doubt if failure to do that leads to being kicked out of the queue for the Pearly Gates though.
Well played!!!
That's a bit of a movable feast though isn't it? I mean, what looks more like bread - a loaf made from buckwheat and rye or a Flying Saucer with no sherbert in it communion wafer?
I have a bit of an issue with wafers; always have had. Quite apart from the boring version of a favoured childhood sweet aspect, there is the unedifying task of trying to dislodge Jesus from the roof of your mouth if he gets stuck there.
A memorialist can be just as concerned about aiming to obey the Lord’s command as someone who isn’t a memorialist. But people all along the Eucharistic-view spectrum can have different opinions on when food is or isn’t “bread which is recognizable as such.” (I’ve regularly questioned whether Communion wafers are recognizably bread; they don’t resemble the bread we encounter anywhere else.)
I've always found the texture of those wafers very off putting.
Many PC(USA) places now use only gluten-free bread for Communion
Where do you draw that line though? The extreme end of Anglo Catholicism, for much the same reason, would say (I have worshipped in those places) that you are not to bite or chew Jesus, but must wait until He is dissolved enough to be swallowed whole. On a related note, they also teach that you are not to have eaten that day before receiving Him.
There are those, of course, who go about telling everyone how pious and reverent they themselves are, unlike that publican over there etc. etc....
I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
In sacramental traditions, including Anglican, we believe it is more than a remembrance.
It’s symbolic of the Ascension!
This gets into a lot of ecclesiology, and the sacramental churches are not generally sola scriptura.
The Lutheran and the Reformed churches would likely beg to differ there.
Are Lutheran churches sola scriptura in the way that the Evangelicals in the US have traditionally been, though? (I’m thinking like, say, the US Southern Baptists, etc.)
I was not aware of Reformed having sacraments in which they believe something supernatural is happening—but I don’t know much about them. Up until extremely recently I kind of thought they were more US evangelical than anything else, like the Southern Baptists or such. Apparently they’re not, but I’m not sure what that makes them…
(As a side note, I’m not saying any of this to be snarky – this is genuinely new information to me.)
(BTW please don't suggest that Nonconformists such as myself are nothing more than mere memorialists. Many, if not most, of us would believe in some kind of "special" presence of God as Communion is taken. But that's for a separate thread, I think).
Isn’t this in danger of getting a bit circular though?
Presumably that’s one of the reasons you’re Baptist?
Meanwhile the CofE, Roman Catholics etc teach (and therefore presumably at least some of them believe) that yes they really do make a difference to tbat “something”
That’s probably why there isn’t one Christian church!
Assuming your church was happy with open communion, I’d receive from your church as an act of fellowship - and I have in the past when the chaplain on the ship I was serving in was baptist - but I wouldn’t *believe* what I believe is happening at a CofE Eucharist. I mean, I’m quite happy to let God sort all that out (hopefully much) later, but it would remain the case nonetheless that I just wouldn’t be confident the same things were happening!
I think that reaches the boundaries of ecumenism for me. YMMV.
And thanks for your honest post.
Simplistically, it would seem that an actual bread of some kind (flat or otherwise) is closer to the intention of the original that something specifically manufactured for the ceremony.
And that would apply regardless of how memorialist or sacramental one is.
So far as my experience goes, yes. I'm a little surprised this seems to be an issue, to be honest. Gluten-free wafers have been on offer since Noah was a boy. And some CofE churches certainly include an alternative cup for non-alcoholic wine. However, it probably does come down to the personal decision of the Priest in Charge/Vicar. You might get some hardline priests resisting these options, I suppose, because of the canons about 'fermented wine'. But the canon on bread isn't that prescriptive, if I recall. Just 'the finest bread' that can be obtained, something like that?
The wine is probably less of an issue. As the Sacrament is considered 'sufficient' in one kind only, those who don't want the alcoholic wine - or who can't receive from the cup for some reason - may just miss out the cup altogether, with no 'spiritual' or 'doctrinal' damage incurred.
What can make a difference is whether or not the parish has these things as a matter of course, or because someone in the regular congregation has requested it.
We're Scottish Episcopal, not CofE, of course. But it only really occurred to me to include gluten-free when I became aware of a congregation member who couldn't take gluten. He had, nevertheless, done so for many years. But it seemed to make sense to have a little store of consecrated gluten-free on hand, and to post their availability on the pew sheet prior to the service. I feel a little ashamed I hadn't thought of it before.
Post-Covid I notice a handful of people who don't want to receive from a common cup. But as we went through the process of not making the cup available during periods of Covid, it wasn't a huge thing, re-introducing it. And as flu's and colds rip through the congregation at a regular rate, it's not unusual for people to skip the cup.
The Reformed are the second-oldest group of churches stemming from the Reformation; they are the churches that came out of the Genevan/Swiss (and parts of Germany that went Protestant but not Lutheran) Reformation. In continental Europe, they include (or included, as in some places they’ve merged with Lutherans) the French Reformed (Huguenots), Dutch Reformed, German Reformed and Hungarian Reformed (who have bishops).
Reformed churches with roots in Britain tended to be called Presbyterian or Congregationalist (as opposed to Episcopal, like the Church of England), with the reference being to how they’re governed. After all, the XXXIX Articles of the Church of England reflect Reformed theology. There, the Reformed include the Church of Scotland, the United Reformed Church (a merger of the Presbyterian Church in England and the Congregationalists) and the Presbyterian Church of Ireland.
In the U.S., the Reformed include all the Presbyterian bodies, the Reformed Church in America, the Christian Reformed Church and the United Church of Christ (which resulted from the merger of the Congregationalists, also Reformed, and the German Reformed).
/tangent
I think in this case the Wikipedia summary isn't too far removed from reality, in terms of summarising the views of the Magisterial Reformers (which then gets picked up by various branches of the Reformed church).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord's_Supper_in_Reformed_theology#Reformation
My observation is that views like that of Calvin have fairly subtle nuances and tend not survive unless explicitly taught, and in practice and at the level of the pew they decay into various crosses between the Lutheran and RCism or - more commonly in the US - views that are functionally memorialism and not dissimilar to that held by most evangelicals.
Thank you!
(I think that the matter of "properly understood" sola scriptura would be a bone of contention between the US Evangelicals and the Lutherans, of course.)
Yes, that's fair enough, my own experience was largely in bigger church contexts, so admittedly the percentage of the congregation involved in things like Sunday School and catechism classes was probably correspondingly lower than the average PCA church.
I've observed the same drift elsewhere though, so I suspect it's down to the level of teaching involved.
Well, I think the honest answer is that we don't know. That's how many of the church practices work - it's not a case of "we know that this doesn't work" - it's a case of "Jesus used "bread" and "wine". We believe that the "mystical something" occurs if we use bread and wine. We don't know that it will occur if we use other things, so we use bread and wine.
Hence the develolopment in medieval Russia of the use of very small loaves for Communion. White flour was an expensive luxury.
Point taken. I was responding to Baptist Trainfan's comment 'does God really care what is used, so long as he is being reverently remembered?' BT himself has clarified his own position as not being a strict memorialist.
It does matter what you count as 'bread', and admittedly wafers are at one end of the spectrum. But they are practically convenient, and the gluten-free variety are probably the simplest way of ensuring that gluten-intolerant people can receive safely. Though one church where I occasionally preside uses gluten-free rolls baked by a coeliac member of the congregation but shared by all. I can hardly think that Jesus is very tolerant of pharisaical nit-picking about this and similar issues.