‘If you do not wish to receive, you are welcome to come forward for a blessing.’
This invitation, commonly heard in Anglican churches today is not found in Prayer Book. In fact, though it may come as a surprise now, it isn’t the historic custom of any church, Anglican or otherwise. It is unknown before the mid-20th century.
The Prayer Book doesn’t envision non-communicants coming to the table at all. Indeed, until the 1662 Prayer Book is clear that non-communicants (the un-baptized, unconfirmed, the excommunicated, and anyone who had not prepared in advance to receive the sacrament on that Sunday) should depart from the church after the Prayer for the Church. That is because all those remaining in the room after that point would hear the Divine Words, ‘Take, eat… do this…’ To do otherwise would be disobedience, but to take and eat without self-examination and prayerful preparation, was sacrilege warned against in the exhortation (for more on the invitation, ‘draw near with faith’ see here).
When did this change?
The real sea change here came after the early 20th-century Parish Communion Movement, which advanced the (new) expectation that everyone eligible to receive communion should do so every time it was celebrated, discouraging the practice of departing after Ante-Communion. This created two new problems. The departure after Ante-Communion of those communicants who hadn’t planned and prepared to receive on that occasion also meant that those not eligible for communion (because unbaptized or unconfirmed) didn’t have a convenient moment to leave the church either. And, then there were the children. With no one not communing in whose care they could be left, parents began to bring them to the communion rail.
Ruth Meyers has shown that the practice of bringing unconfirmed children to the altar rail with their parents to be blessed while their parents partake of the sacrament began to appear in the 1950s as part of the ‘family service’ and ‘parish communion’ trends. The response from bishops was almost wholly negative, and bishops continued to object in print down through the sixties. In the 1960s promotion of that practice began to transform into the promotion of paedocommunion.1Ruth Meyers, Continuing the Reformation: Re-Visioning Baptism in the Episcopal Church (Church Publishing, 1997), 95-97. This is, thus far, the only investigation of the origins of this practice.
The same practice began to emerge among American Lutherans as well and caused the same heated debate. A 1978 article observes, ‘The exact purpose of laying hands on the non-communicant children during the distribution of the sacrament is somewhat elusive’. It cautions,
Consideration of the place of children at the altar rail should not get muddled up with a discussion of who will sit with the infants while the parents attend Communion. The obvious answer is that each parent may go separately, or a nearby adult may serve as a five-minute babysitter. The Holy Communion is the celebration of union with Christ and not of marital and familial solidarity.
Cutting to the heart of the issue, it argues, ‘Lurking behind the custom of inviting unconfirmed children to the altar rail there seems to be some fuzzy thinking about the sacrament. Those who observe this practice could easily come to the conclusion that proximity to the sacrament assures a certain advantage’.2Concordia Theological Review 42(2) 1978, 169–171.
The Roman Catholic story is similar. While the practice is not uncommon among American Catholics, the practice is of very recent provenance and, according to a 2008 statement of the Congregation for Divine Worship (Protocol No. 930/08/L), it is probably illicit. The CDW advised that the liturgical blessing in the mass comes at the dismissal, and is given ‘given to each and to all’ present. Providing a blessing during the distribution of Holy Communion confuses the purpose of that part of the liturgy. They further noted that lay eucharistic ministers (assisting with the distribution of communion) ‘are unable to confer blessings. These blessings, rather, are the competence of the priest’, that ‘the laying on of a hand or hands — which has its own sacramental significance, inappropriate here — by those distributing Holy Communion, in substitution for its reception, is to be explicitly discouraged’. Roman Canon Law is already clear that non-communicants should not come forward with communicants when the invitation to Communion is given, as the invitation does not apply to them.
The same is, of course, true of the invitation to Communion in the Prayer Book:
Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbours, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God, and walking from henceforth in his holy ways: Draw near with faith, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort.
Nevertheless, adding an invitation to non-communicants to come forward for a blessing is now virtually ubiquitous and unquestioned. The liturgical and theological concerns noted about the practice in the mid-twentieth century haven’t been answered so much as they have simply been forgotten. They remain good questions for those committed to the Prayer Book. Should celebrants add an invitation for non-communicants to come to the communion rail for a blessing?