Is there a precedent from early Christian church writings for withholding communion? This is an important one for withholding communion from Christian visitors to your fellowship who don't believe and practice exactly the same as you do. Yeah. And I wanted to address that because I thought that was a really timely question because that's how in among the Anabaptists, yeah, they don't share communion. A lot of churches don't.
It seems like when you get serious about being obedient to all of Christ's commandments, then we tend to want to be very careful with our communion, which makes perfect sense. But it also starts, we have all these divisions in the body then. I can't have communion with you and this sort of thing. So your question was about the early church, okay?
What their practice was, when you went to some other congregation where people didn't know you, you had to bring with you what were called letters of communion from your bishop saying that you were in good standing and were admitted into communion in the church where you came from. And if you brought those with you, I guess you could have forged them, but you brought those with you, then you were admitted into communion any church in the world. There was only one church.
If you were a Christian, then you were admitted to communion in any other church. But they had to have the evidence that, yes, you were in good standing. Otherwise, you could be put out of one church and just go somewhere else and start taking communion there, which would be a different kind of division in the body of not honoring each other's church discipline, or maybe you were even a Gnostic or had never been baptized. So that's why you had to bring proof with you of that.
Now, I'm not saying that we should necessarily institute that same practice today. It's a little easier with phone calls and, you know, we generally know a little bit more about people. But I do believe if somebody is honoring the basic teachings of the New Testament, and I guess every church could decide you know where they want to draw the line on that, they should be admitted into communion in another church. Communion should not be a sectarian thing. You mentioned Clark about baptism shouldn't be that way.
Communion shouldn't be that way. I mean, that's the one meal that unites us as Christians. And to use it as a sectarian thing, you know, you don't hold to all of the articles of our specific church. Therefore, we will not break bread with you, I think is very wrong. Now, it's equally wrong to have an open communion where it's lax that anyone who walks into your church, you're going to let them participate in communion. I think that's very wrong too. Tertullian makes a comment. We have a closely guarded communion.
And I've always liked that. Not a closed communion, but closely guarded. We want to make sure you're baptized. We want to make sure that you're in good standing, either in our church or in some other church that's part of the body of Christ. Yeah, I appreciate that. A place for the sojourner that's passing through or visiting. Yeah, I really appreciate that. Thank you for that.
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