ABSTRACT
THE QUESTION OF HOW REDEMPTION IS PARTICIPATED in communally requires,in Christian understanding, some reference to the concept ‘church’. ‘Church’ is the subject of the next chapter. Rather unusually I am opting to consider two of the central rituals of church practice – baptism and Holy Communion – before that. This is for two reasons. First, these two practices go beyond what the church can adequately describe, contain or prescribe.This is so despite the important responsibility the church carries to ‘police’ the practices of baptism and communion through necessary authority structures in the life of church and society (lest their range of meanings and varied form of practice be obscured or distorted). Second, the practices of baptism and Holy Communion touch on aspects of human conduct which cut across a wide variety of practices, religious and not. In investigating meanings of symbolic washing and communal eating, explorations of baptism and communion both get to the heart of church practice and show how such practice in turn enables people to interpret daily life.
