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RECEIVING HOLY COMMUNION IS APPROPRIATE FOR ALL BAPTIZED CHRISTIANS. All baptized people regardless of denomination are welcome at the Lord's Supper in the Episcopal Church. In cases where a serious sin is impairing a persons relationship with God, they should seek the sacramental rite of Reconciliation. Children can receive the Lord's supper when they are baptized. THE DECISION of when children begin receiving Holy Communion is a parental decision. Parents are the God given caretakers and stewards of their children. When parents present children for baptism, they promise to "be responsible for seeing that the child you present is brought up in the Christian faith and life?" Due late developments in the Western Church confirmation and baptism were separated. Western bishops in the 7 and 800's, (unlike their Eastern counterparts), stopped delegating confirmation to their clergy. For over 700 years all Christian Churches baptized and confirmed people all at the same time. And during the service all of the baptized, confirmed participants, from babies to adults were given Holy Communion that same day. However by the 7th century, both in England and the Continent, a practice begins to develop of not allowing the unconfirmed to receive the Eucharist. By the 12th Century most laity were barred from receiving the wine and in reality very few lay people received any form of communion on any kind of regular basis. Thus in the Protestant Reformation, a new emphasis on lay people being allowed to receive communion, and to be allowed to receive both the bread and the wine, was actually a return to the practices of the early church. However, communion was not returned to the baptized, but only to those who had been baptized and later confirmed. Further reforms to this practice occurred in the Roman Catholic Church in 1910 when Pope Pius X lowered the age for reception of communion to 7 years of age. While not a return to infant communion, it was a step back toward early Christian practice. In the Eastern (Orthodox) churches, children were never barred from receiving the Lord's supper after baptism. However, they were, (and are still), expected to begin fasting before communion and participating in confession once they reach the age of 8. Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist are all part of the same rite in the Eastern Churches. The Episcopal Church began to examine it's theology of baptism in the 1970's and 1980's and concluded that baptism is full initiation into the Christian community, and as such should include access to the Lord's table and the sacrament of Holy Communion. However, because many Episcopalians were raised to not receive the Lord's Supper until after confirmation, the church decided that the decision of when a child should receive the sacrament is best left in the hands of parents. This means that in our denomination, some children receive at a very early age, some receive after a First Communion Class, and others receive after being confirmed. COMMUNION CLASSES ARE STILL HELPFUL. Children who do receive at an early age, do at some point in their Christian development need to re-affirm that they too wish to continue receiving. So sometime after the age of 4 they should participate in a Children's communion class, either to understand and affirm what they are already doing, or to be prepared for a First Communion.
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