Do This in Rememberance For Those Who Do Not Remember: A Study of the Distribution of the Lord's Supper to Lutherans with Dementia

Abstract

For members of the Lutheran church, participation in the Lord’s Supper is the pinnacle of fellowship between communicant, God, and fellow believers. Every time the body and blood of Christ are distributed from Lutheran altars, celebrants repeat Jesus’ words “Do this in remembrance of me.” But what about Lutherans who have a form of dementia that keeps them from remembering? This paper will address the question, “Are Lutherans with dementia able to properly partake in the Lord’s Supper?” This study views the matter of communing Lutherans with dementia through the lens of the Person-Centered care model and encourages orthodoxy and orthopraxy in distributing the Lord’s Supper based on Jesus’ words of institution in the Gospels and Paul’s description of examination in his Epistle to the Corinthians. After comparing the different stages of Alzheimer’s disease with the qualifications for a proper reception of the Lord’s Supper, this study has determined that an appropriate Person-Centered pastoral perspective when discerning whether to commune a Lutheran with dementia is that a pastor should be forced to withhold the Lord’s Supper from Lutherans with dementia instead of looking for a reason to withhold the Sacrament from Lutherans with dementia.