Celebrating the sacrament of Holy Communion during COVID-19: A Methodist perspective
Abstract
This article forms part of the change agents special collection. It investigates the way the Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA) has engaged the question of practicing Holy Communion in the context of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown. Mainly using communiques by the Office of the Presiding Bishop and contributions made by clergy and laity on the practice of online worship services, and Holy Communion in particular, the article not only describes points of contention but also matters for consideration in balancing church polity whilst being contextually present and relevant. The article then celebrates the work of the Doctrine, Ethics and Worship Commission (DEWCOM) of the MCSA in potentially providing a way forward for the denomination that holds polity and relevance together in meaningful tension.
Contribution: This research contributes to the ongoing dialogue within the Methodist Church of Southern Africa on how the sacrament of Holy Communion should be practiced in the context of a social lockdown as precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
