Children's evening meal
Among children Supper means the admission of children to participate in the celebration of the Eucharist .
In the Protestant regional churches , children have been admitted to the Lord's Supper since the 1970s. It is still controversial today and is handled differently within the regional churches . Often one speaks of the “Lord's Supper for all baptized” in order to avoid the misunderstanding that the Lord's Supper is given separately to children.
development
Since around 1970 there has been a lively discussion about the regaining of the Lord's Supper in the Protestant churches in Germany. It is closely related to the celebration of the Lord's Supper on church days .
Before that, the celebration of the Lord's Supper was very closely linked in Protestant theology with the idea of penance and atonement. In many congregations, therefore, the Lord's Supper was only celebrated twice a year, on Good Friday and on the Day of Penance and Prayer , after confession .
In the course of the discussion about the Lord's Supper, other aspects regained importance: the celebration of fellowship, the invitation of God to all Christians , praise of creation , and the memorial meal . In this context, the question of the justification for excluding children from the Lord's Supper was raised. Similar arguments play a role as in the discussion about infant baptism . In many Protestant churches, the invitation was issued that children may also take part in the Lord's Supper.
Theological discussion
An important argument against the children's evening meal has always been that children did not understand the meaning of the evening meal. They are only sufficiently informed with the confirmation to be admitted to the Lord's Supper. This is countered by the fact that, on the one hand, the Lord's Supper can never be fully understood with the mind, but always remains a secret. Second, children might very well understand in a way appropriate to them that the Lord's Supper is different from an ordinary meal. Furthermore, an insistence on the reasoning argument would mean that e.g. B. also the mentally handicapped or dementia patients are not allowed to take part in the Lord's Supper.
If God's invitation to the Lord's Supper applies to all Christians, then this means that the exclusion of a Christian calls into question his or her full Christianity. Wherever churches practice infant baptism, this is usually accompanied by the view that these children are whole Christians at the time of baptism. Their exclusion from the Lord's Supper is therefore unjustifiable.
Also the fear that the decoupling of the admission to the Lord's Supper from the confirmation could invalidate it, does not seem to have come true. On the one hand, the confirmation remains important insofar as the confirmed person takes part in the Lord's Supper for the first time on his own responsibility; on the other hand, it gains more weight again as a confirmation of baptism.
The participation of children in the sacrament assumes that the children are introduced to the understanding of the sacrament in an age-appropriate manner by their parents or other persons. In practice, the admission of children to the Lord's Supper is usually associated with the use of grape juice instead of wine at the celebration of the Lord's Supper. The discussion receives new nourishment from the ecumenical dialogue, since the Eastern Churches even allow infants to receive the Eucharist under both forms, the Catholics at least somewhat older children, see First Communion .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Cf. Eberhard Kennner: Last Supper with Children. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 1980, ISBN 3-579-00210-4 , pp. 70f.
- ↑ Last Supper with Children. A handout. (PDF) (No longer available online.) Evangelical Lutheran Church of Saxony , October 20, 2011, p. 22 , formerly in the original ; Retrieved May 29, 2017 . ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
