Why Can't the LCMS Close the Gap on Closed Communion?

The LCMS has a problem with novel developments at the communion rail that must be purged from the Synod at any price.

The LCMS officially upholds "closed communion" based on Scripture, the Lutheran Confessions, and historical church tradition.¹ “Closed” (alternately referred to as “close”, but meaning precisely the same thing²) requires the Lord's Supper to be administered³ only to individuals who are in complete unity of faith and doctrine (agreement in EVERY article of Christian doctrine) with the congregating church.⁴ However, all you have to do is visit a few LCMS congregations in any major city in the US to discover an unbridgeable chasm between official Synodical orthodoxy and parish praxis. It reflects fundamental disagreements, if not full rebellion in some quarters, about the nature of the Lord's Supper, the essence of true church fellowship, and the responsibilities of pastors.

Source

The issue came to the fore again a few weeks ago when I spoke with a pastor at a district convention who said he was unsure he could receive the Lord’s Supper in good conscience with some of the people in the room. He wasn’t being dramatic because some of the doctrinal obstacles in that ballroom, camouflaged by the default Synodical impulse to comity in all things, were insurmountable.

So, it was helpful to have pastors Koontz and Scamman's perspectives follow not long after with, ‘What is Closed Communion? What is Open Communion?’ and ‘Strangers at the Rail’, respectively.

There is actually more unity of the church present where Christians of differing confession honorably determine that they do not have the same understanding of the Gospel, than where the painful fact of confessional splintering is hidden behind a pious lie.
Dr. Hermann Sasse, "Union and Confession," The Lonely Way, Vol. 1, Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, Missouri, 2002, p. 265.

Despite the high regard in which we supposedly hold Holy Communion, including as a display of unity, the recently interred “pandemic” revealed the inverse of Johann Gerhardt’s assertions about it being a divine mystery requiring faith and reverence.⁵ Our outward marketing spiel about the Lord’s Supper is framed by Luke 14:16-24, the parable of the great banquet where we wretches dine with the gracious master. However, many of our churches readily swapped the King’s feast for a tropical roadside butchery festering with bottle flies and maggots, thanks to remote consecration and other abominations. Indeed, the pious reverence for pandemic hygiene will be the perfect and enduring symbol of too many of our pastors and churches willing to make profane what is holy.⁶

That slide into apostasy was not isolated, situational, or incidental. It was deeply rooted in several problems of doctrine and praxis accumulated over many years by the Synod because of faulty instruction at the seminaries and selective discipline and management by LCMS, Inc.

The purpose of closed communion

The primary reason for closed communion is not to build higher walls and stronger doors for our exclusive club but to ensure accountability, mutual Christian love among the parishioners, and a functioning church. Thereby, we maintain and preserve spiritual unity among those who have agreed to gather to receive the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ "in, with, and under" the bread and wine in the Supper.⁷

“Those who receive the body and the blood of the Lord do so, therefore, in terms of their relationship with God as well as with their fellow-communicants.”

However, we have short-handed “LCMS” to be the passing grade for admittance to the Lord’s Supper, just as we have become accustomed to treating an apprehension of true faith as the ability to deliver a formulaic recitation of the doctrine of justification paired with deprecating the law and elevating the gospel above Scripture itself. Consequently, we have become less serious about our responsibility to history and tradition: The Lord’s Supper in an LCMS church is not a Synodical invention, but the continuation of an eternal unity in Christian faith and confession founded on pure doctrine delivered to us in Scripture. That said, we “fence” the altar to ensure that what we believe, teach, and confess is not rendered impure by the weeds and thorns of life (the Galesburg Rule - Lutheran pulpits for Lutheran pastors only, and Lutheran altars for Lutheran communicants only⁸).

Through a combination of bad manners on the part of would-be communicants arriving late for services and not engaging meaningfully with pastors, and pastors preferring to avoid conflict, we have resorted to a simple default: “Say LCMS, and enter!” However, everyone knows that the Synod’s bonds of fellowship are so tenuous that you can no longer trust that everyone professing membership of an LCMS congregation shares the required complete unity of faith and doctrine. Nevertheless, you can even use the LCMS skeleton key to open doors in other church bodies, and vice versa, with which we are supposedly in fellowship.

“It isn't even strictly speaking about the doctrine of the Lord's Supper”, says Pr. Koontz in his podcast, adding, “It's about whether membership means anything or whether you don't really have to believe a whole lot. You'll notice that open communion always goes along with a decline in the concept of membership.”…

“Closed communion ensures that the pastor is forgiving the sins of repentant sinners and withholding forgiveness, including the forgiveness offered in and through the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the Lord's supper: withholding forgiveness from the unrepentant as long as they [remain so]⁹

Are you good enough to eat and drink?

According to 1 Corinthians 11:28, Christians who do not discern or recognize the Body and Blood of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist ("sacramentarianism") cannot properly examine themselves. So, they drink to their judgment, but that can only happen if the pastor communing them is faithless and refuses to keep them from harm.¹⁰ This includes Lutherans who think sincere repentance and a willingness to amend one's life to the teaching and exhortations of Scripture are the sort of law jettisoned upon baptism,¹¹ and that “the most holy obedience and complete merit of Christ” can be married to a dissolute life.

When a pastor, as both an administrator and steward of the mysteries of God, opens the Lord’s Supper to everyone, he is damning himself and the unworthy recipient. This is a consequence of our obsession with “hospitality to strangers” and deference to radical personal autonomy; ”no mere pastor will tell me what to do!”¹² Like it or not, a pastor’s discretion in supervising the rail is necessarily heavily tilted toward the negative - he must be more alert to exclusionary rather than inclusionary factors.

His instinct should be that not knowing at all or knowing insufficiently about someone’s confession automatically precludes them from receiving Holy Communion. If the pastor is wrong about exclusion, no eternal harm is done, and hurt feelings can be rectified almost instantly. Conversely, it could be impossible to correct if the pastor is wrong for favoring inclusion.

Pastors should not wait to ask awkwardly at the rail if the stranger, whose name you don’t know, is in complete doctrinal agreement and expect anything except “uhm, yes?” Rely on the precautionary principle, decline to commune, and invite the person to speak with you afterward.

After all, the pastor is personally and directly accountable to God for supervising the Lord’s Supper; inviting some, forbidding others, judging doctrine, and excluding manifest and impenitent sinners. Reciprocally, laymen are also responsible for policing their pastors when they encounter unworthy reception.

Historically, the church dismissed non-members before the second half of the service, which encompasses the Eucharist (i.e., visitors or attendees whom the pastor had not examined for worthy reception).¹³ Only those with a tested common confession were welcome in the missa fidelium.¹⁴

“The reason we fence the table is not just because we believe in a certain doctrine of the Lord's supper…[we are] guarding against communion that is unrepentant and disconnected from any Christian congregation.

“So to say closed communion is to say functioning church, accountable church, mutually loving church.

“Open communion puts the Christian and his pastor and any given congregation in a much different relationship to each other because everything is up to you and everything is up to what you think and what you personally believe and what you want to do and what your daughter who's not really a Christian anymore but is here because of social pressure what she wants to do when it comes time to take communion.

“None of that has to do with the word of God, repentance, or faith which is what churches should have to do with.”¹⁵

Are you welcome enough to eat and drink?

Welcoming members of the ELCA and even non-Lutherans as if there are no serious heresies among them is delusional. Their errors are imported like communicable diseases. Proper altar fellowship functions like an immune system or a medical quarantine. ACELC

Open communion manufactures a counterfeit unity based on the ungodly appeal of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It always displaces or drives out the authentic thing.¹⁶ That inevitably erodes doctrinal fidelity and confessional subscription, lulling the church into being comfortable around and with heterodoxy, which will metastasize into full-blown false doctrine, infecting more members of the body.¹⁷

Despite the massive threat of adulterated communion that is visible among us, the Synod’s members and parishioners can be seen indulging in inconsequential things for the life and health of the church militant. It is most apparent in the fact that when LCMS, Inc.’s magisterium, the CTCR, said pastors were practicing literal witchcraft with virtual communion, nobody was brought up on charges or even ushered to more suitable jobs that had nothing to do with the things of God. Compare that lassitude with the number of overtures and resolutions at recent district conventions, and the attendant time and effort expended, to chase this ism into the church and that ism out of the church.

As the LCMS examines what has caused weekly attendance to crash 50% in just 25 years, might one significant clue be faithlessness regarding the Lord’s Supper, rather than whatever each cycle’s required bogeyman is? We have a duty to define the ultimate rather than the proximate causes of our church body’s collapse. The ultimate causes are always doctrinal and confessional, which means the road to restoration is paved by separating the leaven immediately.

☩TW☩

1. It also happens to be the position of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.

2. Rev. Dr. Norman Nagel once wrote that “close” was unhelpful because it implied “degrees of closeness”. He may have a point, considering the LCMS has confused the laity and outsiders by pursuing “degrees of fellowship” in its external relations. Likewise, Rev. Dr. David Scaer wrote, “The word "close" has a chumminess about it which conjures up the picture of the communicants holding hands during the reception of the sacrament while singing "Let Us Break Bread Together on Our Knees," a Protestant hymn which has been strangely showing up in Roman Catholic "missalettes.”
David P. Scaer, “Closed Communion: Saying it Better”, Concordia Theological Quarterly, Vol 55, October 1991, p. 304. https://ctsfw.net/media/pdfs/TheoObserver55-4.pdf

3. Administer is a profoundly perfect word in this usage: the pastor is responsible for the administrative responsibility of assessing who may and may not receive the Lord’s body and blood and for administering the medicine of forgiveness of sins and eternal life.

4. There are three framing conditions for being admitted to the Lord’s Supper:

1. Being baptized.

2. Having the ability and capacity to examine oneself (1 Corinthians 11:28).

3. Confessing the real presence (Christ’s actual body and blood are present - 1 Corinthians 10:16).

5. “Gerhard on "The Saving Communion"“, Substack, Substack.com. The Lutheran Chronicles. June 8, 2024. https://substack.com/home/post/p-145453433.‌

6. Has American Lutheranism Failed?

7. Commission on Theology and Church Relations (CTCR), Admission to the Lord’s Supper: Basics of Biblical and Confessional Teaching (St. Louis: The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, November 1999), p. 7, https://files.lcms.org/file/preview/DB7388F5-2793-46A8-9CE7-863E63B1E5FD?_gl=1.

8. John Stephenson, “Admission to the Lutheran Altar: Reflections on Open versus Close Communion”, Concordia Theological Quarterly, Vol 53, January-April 1989, p. 40, https://ctsfw.net/media/pdfs/stephensonadmissiontothealtar.pdf

9. Adam Koontz, “Brief#21 What is Closed Communion? What is Open Communion?,” June 16, 2025, in Brief History of Power, podcast, MP3, 24:05. https://abriefhistoryofpower.com/brief21-what-is-closed-communion-what-is-open-communion/.

10. Evan Scamman, “Strangers at the Rail”, June 20, 2025, Gottesdienst, https://www.gottesdienst.org/gottesblog/2025/6/20/strangers-at-the-rail

11. “We must, therefore, make a distinction here among men. For those who are wanton and dissolute must be told to stay away; for they are not prepared to receive forgiveness of sin, since they do not desire it and do not wish to be godly. (Source: https://bookofconcord.org/large-catechism/#lc-v-0058 )

12. Association of Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Congregations, “Holy Communion”, If Not Now, When?, p. 2, https://s3.amazonaws.com/mychurchwebsite/c2001/lesson_4_holy_communion.pdf

13. “Holy Communion is the act of a group of people who share a oneness in Jesus Christ. This oneness embraces their faith in Christ and their convictions concerning the Sacrament. It is disturbed by the presence of an outsider who does not share th p. at faith. This is why the Ancient Church dismissed all non­ members before the celebration of the Eucharist.”
Lowell C. Green, “God's People in Fellowship at the Communion Table”, Concordia Theological Quarterly, Vol 41, July 1977, p. 9, https://www.ctsfw.net/media/pdfs/greengodspeople.pdf

14. Scaer, op. cit.

15. Koontz, op. cit.

16. Scaer, op. cit.

17. CTCR, op. cit. p. 44.