Acts 2:46 47—“breaking bread at home [rather, ‘in various worship-rooms’]” (see Com. of Meyer); 20:7—“upon the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread”; 1 Cor. 11:18, 22—“when ye come together in the church ... have ye not houses to eat and to drink in? or despise ye the church of God, and put them to shame that have not?”
(b) The Lord's Supper is a symbol of church fellowship. Excommunication implies nothing, if it does not imply exclusion from the communion. If the Supper is simply communion of the individual with Christ, then the church has no right to exclude any from it.
1 Cor. 10:17—“we, who are many, are one bread, one body: for we all partake of the one bread.” Though the Lord's Supper primarily symbolizes fellowship with Christ, it symbolizes secondarily fellowship with the church of Christ. Not all believers in Christ were present at the first celebration of the Supper, but only those organized into a body—the apostles. I can invite proper persons to my tea-table, but that does not give them the right to come uninvited. Each church, therefore, should invite visiting members of sister churches to partake with it. The Lord's Supper is an ordinance by itself, and should not be celebrated at conventions and associations, simply to lend dignity to something else.
The Panpresbyterian Council at Philadelphia, in 1880, refused to observe the Lord's Supper together, upon the ground that the Supper is a church ordinance, to be observed only by those who are amenable to the discipline of the body, and therefore not to be observed by separate church organizations acting together. Substantially upon this ground, the Old School General Assembly long before, being invited to unite at the Lord's table with the New School body with whom they had dissolved ecclesiastical relations, declined to do so. See Curtis, Progress of Baptist Principles, 304; Arnold, Terms of Communion, 36.
Fourthly,—An orderly walk.
Disorderly walking designates a course of life in a church member which is contrary to the precepts of the gospel. It is a bar to participation in the Lord's Supper, the sign of church fellowship. With Arnold, we may class disorderly walking under four heads:—
(a) Immoral conduct.
1 Cor. 5:1-13—Paul commands the Corinthian church to exclude the incestuous person: “I wrote unto you in my epistle to have no company with fornicators;... but now I write unto you not to keep company, if any man that is named a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or [pg 974]an extortioner; with such a one no, not to eat.... Put away the wicked man from among yourselves.”—Here it is evident that the most serious forms of disorderly walking require exclusion not only from church fellowship but from Christian fellowship as well.
(b) Disobedience to the commands of Christ.