Reflection for November 17

As online worship becomes more common in some churches, leaders within the United Methodist Church are debating whether the denomination should condone online communion…. The majority of the leaders agreed with the statement that communion “entails the actual tactile sharing of bread and wine in a service that involves people corporeally together in the same place.” Not everyone, however, agreed that congregants must be in the same place. The debate raises fundamental questions at the heart of the church experience: the definition of community, individual participation, the role of tradition and basic theological understandings of the meaning of communion (Christian Century, November 13, 2013).