A Lutheran Church Tried To Grow Their Own Communion Bread

A LITTLE OVER a year ago, members of Ann Arbor’s Zion Lutheran Church in Michigan stood on an L-shaped plot bordering their church garden. Those 800 square feet of ordinary lawn were on the cusp of transformation, about to become the source of Zion’s own Communion bread.

While Christians traditionally think of Communion as transforming partakers during the church service, project leader Betsy King-McDonald wanted to explore the life-giving properties of the eucharist at an earlier stage — starting in the soil.

“How can we foster life in all the choices we make to the table?” she asked. This question led King-McDonald, a doctoral student at Western Theological Seminary, to partner with Zion Lutheran in growing heirloom wheat for their Communion bread.

In the slanting October light, members rototilled the church lawn. Youth lugged wheelbarrows of wood chips from the parking lot. Then Joet Reoma, a local master gardener and board member of Project Grow, a local nonprofit that facilitates community gardens, directed participants in a complex ritual that resembled making a dirt lasagna. The “lasagna” was not for humans, but for the microbial life in the recently turned soil.

In a trademark black cap with tag still attached, his name scrawled on the tag in bold black marker, Reoma called out basic permaculture steps: First, spread fresh wood chips, high in nitrogen but slow to decompose. Next, add a layer of vermicompost — worms with their eggs and castings, ready to break down the organic matter. Sprinkle cornmeal on top, energizing the worms and kick-starting mycelial growth in the wood chips. Finally, two more layers; one of decomposed wood chips and one of compost. Now, the soil community was ready to receive the wheat seeds.

This elaborate process of feeding the soil that would nurture the church’s Communion wheat expressed a deep eucharistic truth — the process and the produce hold the power of life.

Rarely do churches interrogate how liturgical elements support life all along the way — from soil to markets to table. As King-McDonald found, tending to the process clears a path for deeper place-based Christian discipleship.

After poking neat rows of holes in the living soil, Zion Lutheran’s team dropped wheat kernels into the darkness, covered them, and spread a layer of straw over it all.

huska2.png

The “work of human hands”?

TODAY, A VAST majority of the Communion bread served in North American churches is factory-made. Eighty percent of the flat, white wafers that many receive as the Eucharist comes from one factory — the Cavanagh Company in Rhode Island. Cavanagh (which declined to comment for this article) describes on its website that its bread meets the Roman Catholic Church’s requirements, containing “only pure wheat flour and water.” It also highlights that “throughout the entire production process the breads remain untouched by human hands.”

This phrase raised questions for King-McDonald. Central to the Roman Catholic eucharistic liturgy is the language that Communion bread is “fruit of the earth and work of human hands.” How had “hands” become so removed from the process?

Paolo Squatriti, a professor of medieval history at the University of Michigan, said that from the fifth century to the 10th century in Europe women made Communion bread in the home from whatever grains were available — barley, rye, or oats, for instance. Over time, male church officials focused increasingly on the “purity” of the Eucharist, establishing rules about the ingredients and whose hands could make it. Women, seen as less pure than men, were eventually disqualified from production. Squatriti remarked that Bishop Theodulf of Orléans in the eight century “attacked female bakers’ physical intimacy mediated through their hands with the matter that would become Jesus’ body.” Unless male clerics were to make it themselves, church leaders thought, bread should be made with as little human input as possible.

In the 16th century, theological reforms brought on by the Protestant Reformation in Europe greatly revised the theologies and practices of Communion. On one end, Roman Catholics continued to believe in the “real presence” of Christ in the bread and wine. On the other, Anabaptists believed communion was a symbolic memorial to Jesus’ suffering and death. In the 20th century, some Protestant churches in the United States shifted from communal practices of Communion to more privatized, spiritual experiences.

Brad Cathey makes the Communion bread at All Souls, the Anglican church I attend near Chicago. Cathey grew up Baptist. He recalls sitting silently in his chair during worship. “You’d get your little cracker and hold it in your sweaty palm until the deacons brought the shot glasses around. My communion with God was just me sitting in the pew and holding these elements.” As an adult Cathey attended his first “liturgical church” with more formal, embodied, and repetitive elements designed to shape communal identity. He witnessed the flow and commotion of people physically coming to the altar to receive the Eucharist. He thought, “That’s Communion!”

Over the years, Cathey developed a recipe for All Souls’ Communion bread that tears easily by hand, doesn’t crumble, looks beautiful, and tastes good. He has shifted from thinking about Communion as an act of penitence to one of celebration. He’s also recovering the practice of congregants making Communion bread themselves — with their own hands. Cathey loves the process and wants the bread to reflect this enjoyment. “It should be delightful,” he said.

Wintering

BACK AT ZION Lutheran, a period of waiting began. Winter wheat, which makes up 70 percent of U.S. wheat production, sprouts shortly after planting. Then the cold comes. Drops in temperature signal the living wheat to pull moisture from its crown and accumulate sugars in its cell membranes to resist freezing. Tender and green, the wheat prepares for spring.

Unfortunately, someone unwittingly drove a vehicle over Zion Lutheran’s wheat patch, irking King-McDonald at first. Then she remembered Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds that describes how hard it is to distinguish between the two (Matthew 13:24-29). She also recalled Jesus’ compassion for those who “know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Like humanity’s role in climate change, King-McDonald said, “We are so unfamiliar with what life looks like. We don’t know the harm we are capable of causing.”

As the wheat wintered, King-McDonald led a baking workshop and two adult education classes for the congregation. Participants reflected on Zion Lutheran’s practice of sharing Communion with all baptized Christians regardless of their denomination and of congregants coming into the chancel area near the altar to receive Communion. What messages did these practices send?

“Only clergy can officiate. That’s a value I don’t share,” one person remarked. Another commented that if their goal was to imitate more closely what Jesus did at the Last Supper, then shouldn’t the bread be unleavened. Another brought up accessibility: “What are the barriers for anyone and everyone to participate in the Eucharist?”

King-McDonald noticed the question of accessibility in her research — particularly the rise in gluten intolerance due in part to modern wheat varieties. Celiac disease, an immune reaction to wheat, barley, and rye, has risen sharply in the U.S., as has nonceliac wheat sensitivity.

“If Thomas Aquinas is here telling us the only valid eucharistic bread is made of wheat and 20 percent of the population can’t eat wheat because it makes them sick, that bears some interrogation,” King-McDonald said.

Many churches now offer gluten-free Communion options, but that disrupts the unifying symbolism of “one bread, one body.” Attempts at gluten-free bread for the entire congregation often result in less-than-tasty outcomes, squashing hopes that we “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8) in Communion.

King-McDonald decided to experiment with a potential solution: heirloom wheat.

huska3.png

Heirlooms, industry, and inheritances

OTHERS HAD TROD this ground before. More than two decades ago, someone told Episcopal priest Elizabeth DeRuff that they were allergic to the Communion bread she was serving. The question lodged in her mind, “What happens if you can’t eat bread?” Ten years later, DeRuff met a farmer growing heirloom grains who said that people with gluten issues could eat them. In 2014, DeRuff founded Honoré Farm and Mill in Petaluma, Calif., growing heirloom wheat varieties such as Sonora, Red Fife, and Seashore Black Rye, with a community-supported agriculture (CSA) model. Four churches made up Honoré’s CSA members.

The model, DeRuff said, is a correction to industrial wheat processes. While industrial agriculture has produced astounding amounts of food, it has also forced a reliance on petrochemicals, harmful tilling practices, and genetically modified seeds. Corporate agriculture has stripped food of nutrients, decimated farming communities, and harmed the environment.

Honoré Farm uses organic, low-till farming practices that require less water than conventional farming, sequester carbon rather than release it, and replenish soil fertility. Studies show that ancient wheat varieties contain higher levels of antioxidants, protein, and other nutrients, which reduces inflammation and protects against heart diseases and diabetes.

King-McDonald settled on an heirloom wheat called Turkey Red that grows well in the Midwest. Though the variety predates industrial farming, it carries a different strain of intolerance. Turkey Red grains were brought to the American Midwest in the mid-19th century as part of a colonization movement by Mennonite settlers who were escaping religious persecution. Wheat is not native to the Americas. Turkey Red, a European import, adapted so well that at one time it covered more than 90 percent of wheat acreage in the Great Plains. As American farmers adopted industrial techniques, wheat and other monocultures
devastated vast native prairies and destabilized native North American ecology.

“How do we try to look at something like Turkey Red and see the complexities of our own identities as Mennonites?” said Tim Nafziger, a member of the Mennonite Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery. Mennonites, a group of Anabaptist Christians, frequently identify with their roots as displaced people, Nafziger noted. But they find it harder to recognize the disruption caused by their agricultural practices or acknowledge how their communities directly benefitted from the forced removal of native tribes, such as the Kaw people in Kansas, from the land Mennonites came to farm. “It’s not about shaming ourselves. It’s an opportunity to go deeper,” Nafziger said.

“It’s not the wheat’s fault,” said Jonathon Schramm, an ecologist at Goshen College, a Mennonite college in Indiana. “The plant’s just trying to do its plantly thing.” Bringing up these histories, said Schramm, is a doorway to discuss legacies of colonization, commoditization, and capitalism, even as we recognize the gifts wheat offers us and how it connects us to people across time and place. Even to our ancient Christian story.

Harvesting

FINALLY, ON A 90-degree day in June, Zion Lutheran’s wheat was ready to harvest.

My 7-year-old and I joined the crew of two others: Betsy King-McDonald and Ron Delph, Zion’s lead gardener. Instead of using a scythe, King-McDonald ran a trimmer along the base of the golden stalks. Delph worked nimbly with a large pair of garden shears. “I’m connecting with my medieval ancestors and fighting the urge to speak in parables,” Delph grinned.

I followed behind Delph, bundling fallen stalks with twine. An 8-inch-wide bundle, King-McDonald showed us, would yield about a cup of grain. A cup of grain would yield about 1.5 cups of milled flour. Later, my son and I wandered through the harvested plot picking up fallen heads. We felt very biblical as we practiced gleaning the edges (Leviticus 19:9-10).

After a few weeks of drying, the stalks and grain were ready to be threshed and milled by the congregants. All told, the project has produced about 5 pounds of flour, which a local baker helped the church bake into several communion loaves.

huska4.png

Deepening

AS WE FACE cataclysmic ecological shifts, faith communities around North America are exploring the meaning of the material goods we use in worship. This is desperately needed, said King-McDonald. “In an era when you can virtually attend any church that you want to, religious practices can start to feel like a product,” she said. “Local churches can try to compete in the marketplace, or they can ask themselves what they offer that can’t be found anywhere else.” One of these offerings, King-McDonald said, could be a connection to the land itself.

At Salal + Cedar, an Anglican community in British Colombia, congregants wildcraft their anointing and baptism oils with foraged plants. They also cut native and invasive tree branches to use in the Palm Sunday procession. But their Communion bread is not local, said priest Laurel Dykstra. Instead, they source from a local immigrant business. “The sanctity isn’t in that we do the perfect right thing,” Dykstra said, “but rather we’ve examined the roots of our practices and thought about how we’re engaging.”

All Saints Episcopal Indian Mission in Minneapolis experimented with making their Communion bread using wild rice flour, a culturally important food for regional Indigenous people. Robert Two Bulls, a member of the Oglala Lakota and canon missioner for the Department of Indian Work for the Episcopal Church in Minnesota, sees deep issues in wheat cultivation, such as “how it’s been introduced and used throughout history, how land was taken so wheat could be grown, how it’s used today by big agribusiness.” Many Indigenous churches, he said, have just begun to reflect on these issues.

Zion Lutheran doesn’t plan to continue growing its own Communion wheat. But King-McDonald hopes the process continues to work changes in the congregation, like seeds planted in fertile soil. By the time you read this, members will have just tasted the work of their own hands in Communion bread form.

The wheat grains that my son and I gleaned from Zion Lutheran’s land eventually became part of a loaf that my husband mixed with store-bought bread flour. (Heirloom wheat, on its own, can be tricky for the inexperienced to transform into a palatable loaf.) Our family gathered on a harried August morning to slather butter on the crusty brown slices. It tasted nutty, layered, and a bit dry. Our hands — some large and bony, some small and grimy — reached for more. All the slices disappeared within minutes.