The Lord's Table

Into a microphone in Omaha, Neb. last week, Methodist Bishop Garfield Bromley Oxnam read the ritual of Holy Communion. In 1,500 churches in Nebraska and Iowa, loudspeakers broadcast those words while 50,000 Methodists knelt and partook of the Lord's Supper. Bishop Oxnam explained that this broadcast, first of its kind, would enable Methodists to take Communion in small outlying churches whose pastors, not fully ordained, are not privileged to give it. Thus Bishop Oxnam's broadcast was a logical extension of a modern Protestant idea: that the minister's work may well be widened and simplified by the devices of science. In its ultimate extension, one sound film could become the agency of thousands of Lord's Suppers.

Last week Episcopalians were re-examining the nature of Communion, with special reference to a rubric in the Book of Common Prayer which reads: "There shall be none admitted to the Holy Communion, until such time as he be confirmed, or be ready and desirous to be confirmed." On its face, this rubric would seem to bar non-Episcopalians from taking Communion at Episcopal altars. Last winter the issue arose when churchmen of numerous faiths attended an "open Communion" service in the National Cathedral in Washington (TIME, Jan. 31). Last month, under Anglo-Catholic leadership, about one-fifth of the Episcopal ministry--1,400 priests--signed a statement disapproving open Communion. Last week, the church's Liberal Evangelicals, a group of 450 ministers who represent a much larger number, plumped solidly for giving Communion to baptized Christians "who come as guests to what is not 'Our Table' but the Table of the Lord."

At a two-day Liberal Evangelical conference in Manhattan last week, Dr. Howard Chandler Robbins, well-beloved onetime Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, went into the history of open Communion. Pointing out that the controversial rubric dates back to 1281, when there were no Reformed churches, Dr. Robbins rested the Liberal Evangelical case upon the fact that canon law makes no reference to open Communion, that the rubric was intended to apply only to members of the church.

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