The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum Grape Juice and Communion

Interesting article, but the "key word" is "widespread" (which was the intent of the second sentence of the original question, however I was addressing "the use of grape juice instead of wine"). Wine substitutes were nothing new as there were substitutes for wine all the way through Church History. If one desires just a recent history then here is a brief history on Baptists ... and wine.

From the beginning of the movement in the 1600s into the 1860s, Baptists used wine and bread, which were usually prepared within the church family, for Communion. In times of short supply, other staples, such as beer, brandy, biscuits, and cake, were also used. With the advent of the American temperance crusade, however, Baptists became suspicious of alcoholic beverages and looked for substitutes. By the 1880s when unfermented grape juice was introduced to the market, a debate was raging among Baptists about what Christ and his disciples used and how the word oinos should be translated. Baptists concluded (with the help of available technology) that grape juice was the only acceptable beverage for the Lord’s Supper. Still today Baptists will refer to “wine” or “fruit of the vine” by which they mean grape juice.

Baptists also commonly distribute the “wine” in individual Communion cups. The use of these came about later in the history of the group. The medical profession in the 1860s came to understand, through the “germ theory,” the origin of disease. Rochester, New York theologians wondered about the implications of this theory for the administration of the ordinance. They designed individual glass cups to be used to avoid “the maladies which are spread by mouth such as cancer, tuberculosis, influenza, and whooping cough,” when the common cup was passed. (Indeed, with the gradual shift from wine to grape juice, there was some plausibility to the concern, from an historical perspective.) The first use of individual glass cups occurred at the North Baptist Church in Rochester, New York, in 1854.

Technology and science thus brought about fundamental changes which theologians then had to account for. The concept of the minister as priest serving the sacrament to people changed to the concept of the priesthood of all believers as deacons served individual members in a democratized Lord’s Supper. And an entirely new school of biblical interpretation grew up around the meaning of “wine” in the Word.

Christian History : The Baptists. electronic ed. Carol Stream IL: Christianity Today, 1985; Published in electronic form by Logos Research Systems, 1996.