A Message from the Pastor
Dear Good People,
Two sessions of training have been held for members who volunteered to serve in the Eucharistic Ministry that will officially begin after volunteers are consecrated in worship on Sunday, October 7th at 11 o’clock worship. The volunteers carrying the bread and wine to our homebound and those receiving the communion will both be blessed.
When I was a young child and my mother was homebound, I vividly remember how Pastor Whyppich brought communion to my mother along with a brief sermon that he had preached that morning. We were all blessed. (Your pastor/s will continue to visit and commune the homebound.)
Then, whenever we visited my sisterin- law Betts who was a victim of MS in Orange, CA, I vividly remember how a lay person would bring communion to Betts every Sunday immediately after their Episcopalian worship ended. We were all blessed.
Communion taken to the homes is a Ministry of Hospitality from God and from the congregation, an extension of all of us at CTK who gathered as the people of God on a given Sunday and now shared with those absent--the ill, the infirm, the disabled. Taking Communion directly from the consecrated bread and wine on the altar to the homebound draws us who worship in the holy church to those of us unable to come among us.
Taking bread and wine to our brothers and sisters unites us as community of God. Even by the middle of the 2nd C., it was common for the faithful to carry bread from the assembly’s table to share as we will do now—a historical practice. The practice dropped off but was again encouraged and adopted in 1978, when the Statement on Communion Practices was adopted jointly by the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church in America, and also then in 1997, when the ELCA adopted The Use of the Means of Grace.
Pray for those unable to worship among us but who will now, in a spiritual sense, be able to join us in the bread and the wine that becomes Christ’s body and blood within us, as we are God’s people together in our God-created and God-given world.
Thanks be to God.
“…But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” John 6.58.