There is a heresy that permeates evangelical churches. It is connected to fellow heresies; legalism and works-righteousness. It is ugly, and disturbs me whenever I see it occurring in our church. It is the heresy of not taking the Lord’s Supper. (Dum dum duummmmmm.)
I have seen this heresy in all of the churches I have been a regular attendee. People (evidently) think that because they are sinners they cannot take the bread and wine. Continue reading
© LWF/J. Latva-Hakuni , under the Creative Commons License.
I grew up in the Anglican tradition, and one thing I miss about it is the way in which my family’s church did the Lord’s Supper. We’d all get up the front, and stand in a semi-circle. The minister and some of the elders would walk around with the bread and the wine, and serve them to the individual members of the congregation. More often than not, you were standing next to your family, but then you were also standing next to the mid-30′s single guy, and on the other side, the 83 year old saint who could barely stand. Across the circle, you could look your brothers and sisters in the eye. It was communion in more ways than one. It was not just communion with Christ, but it was a communion with the body. Continue reading
Posted in Church
Tagged Church, communion, fellowship, lord's supper, ordinances, sacraments
A couple of months ago, Pastor Martin administered the ordinance of baptism on a member of the Hills Bible Church Congregation. Baptism is one of the instituted ordinances of the Christian faith. The Lord’s Supper is the other. In Reformed theology, ordinances are described as ‘means of grace.’ The means of grace are things by which God communicates his grace to us. He tells us about himself and his relationship to us by the means of grace. A common conception of this is that the gospel is communicated through Word (the Bible) and Ordinance (baptism, Lord’s Supper).
Augustine says an ordinance is “a visible form of an invisible grace.” He also calls it a “visible word.” John Calvin’s definition is as follows:
Tagged augustine, Baptism, communion, john calvin, lord's supper, means of grace, ordinances, sacraments
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Hills Bible Church
HBC is a reformed Baptist Church serving the suburbs along the Eastlink corridor of Melbourne, Australia.
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