| dc.description.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. | en_US |
