Open communion

Open communion is the practice of welcoming anyone who comes to the Lord's table in faith, without first requiring membership in the church that sets it, confirmation within it, or examination by its ministers beforehand. The practice rests on a specific claim about ownership: an open table treats the Eucharist as Christ's own meal, offered by him rather than administered as the property of any single denomination, so that no particular church is understood to hold the authority to fence off access to it. This puts open communion in direct contrast with both closed communion, which restricts the table to members of the celebrating church itself, and close communion, a narrower related practice that admits those from other bodies only when their church stands in a formally recognized relationship of fellowship with the one hosting the table. Denominations that practice open communion typically still expect a baptized, professing Christian faith from anyone who comes forward, but they decline to make that expectation into a barrier enforced by the church, treating the invitation itself as sufficiently guarded by the honesty of the person accepting it. The disagreement over open communion is accordingly not a disagreement about who is worthy to receive, but about which body, if any, has the standing to decide that question on Christ's behalf.

Open communion has not always been the default even in churches that practice it today, and its adoption can sometimes be dated precisely rather than traced to unbroken custom. Community of Christ, the Missouri based church that emerged from the same nineteenth century movement as the Utah based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints but developed independently of it, moved to an open table as part of a broader wave of change inside the church during the final decades of the twentieth century, alongside its 1984 decision to open all offices of the priesthood to women. Both changes followed the same internal logic: a church rethinking who has standing to participate fully in its life is likely to rethink communion discipline in the same period, since the two questions, who may serve and who may receive, both turn on the same underlying claim about what the church's sacraments and offices actually belong to. The change was contested within the church at the time, provoking dissent from members who read the shift as a departure from the tradition they had inherited, and some independent branches formed afterward specifically to continue the older, more restricted practice the main body had left behind.