12 min read ⭑

Writer, Bible scholar, speaker and avid baker Kendall Vanderslice (yes, as she’ll quickly tell you, that is her real name) feels the closest to God when she has dough stuck on her arms and in between her fingers. Early on in her baking career, she realized her fascination with bread directly connected to her view of God, which guided her rigorous academic studies — from anthropology to gastronomy to a thesis on the theology of bread. Since then, she’s launched a ministry to help people encounter God in the kitchen and at the dining room table and has written three books: “We Will Feast,” “By Bread Alone” and “Bake & Pray,” based on her workshop method by the same name. Today, she’s giving us insight into her Texan background, her struggle between anxiety and rest and the ways she connects with God (that don’t involve bread or baking). You’ll also get a peek at the resources that kick-started her fascination with bread theology and a recent album she got to collaborate on with The Porter’s Gate Worship Project.

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?

There are three foods my family makes sure to eat every time we return to Texas: brisket, Pappasito’s enchiladas and Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla ice cream. I was born in Dallas to a lifelong Texan father and a mother who’d lived there for a decade by the time I came along. My extended family on both sides lived in Texas too — dad’s split between Dallas and a small town called Mineola and mom’s taking root in Houston.

When my dad took a job in St. Louis, Missouri, just as I was entering middle school, these three foods grounded us on each visit back “home.” My grandmother stocked the deep freeze with Blue Bell in anticipation of our visit. Dad chose a different barbecue spot on each trip. But whether we were headed to Dallas or Houston, we always made it to a Pappasito’s to get our fill of their famous salsa and a plate of enchiladas with chili con carne on top. My parents and a few of my siblings have since moved to Boston, while I’m in Durham, North Carolina (where Blue Bell is available at almost every grocery store), and my sister remains in St. Louis (which got Blue Bell this year). Still, whenever one of us makes it down to Texas — with or without our parents — we make sure to get a bite of brisket and a plate of enchiladas.

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activity (or activities) do you love engaging in, which also helps you find essential spiritual renewal?

I’m a baker and a firm believer that there is no activity more spiritually grounding than mixing up a loaf of bread. I first started baking in middle school, turning to the kitchen as the place to work through all of my emotions: excitement, sadness and especially stress. I was a very anxious teen, and that anxiety continued through most of my 20s. Baking was a tangible way to work through my racing thoughts — and I learned early on that sharing the fruits of my baking was a great way to make friends too.

Once I started baking professionally, I found that mixing and shaping yeasted doughs regulated me more than any other food. The miraculous transformation of dry flour into living dough and the rhythmic process of turning and tightening and stretching gluten into shape soothed me and, at the same time, taught me a great deal about the creativity and love of God. I’d rush from my work at the bakery to church each Sunday, receiving Communion with bread dough still stuck to my arms. In time, I began to realize that the bread I spent my morning baking was deeply connected to the bread I received at the Lord’s table — from the bread of the sacrament to our daily bread, God chose this particular element as a means of revealing God’s self to the world. We can know God in our hands, on our tongues and in our bellies through the practice of baking and breaking bread. What a gift to get to know God in this way!

QUESTION #3: CONFESS

Every superhero has a weakness. Every human too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you hide it?

As I mentioned before, I struggled greatly with anxiety as a teen and on through most of my 20s. Baking bread became my means of channeling that anxiety, but over time, it also became my place of healing.

Bread requires a lot of rest in order to develop flavor and strength and to break down the starches and proteins in wheat that are difficult for our bodies to digest. Working in a professional kitchen, I was highly attuned to the needs of my dough, but I struggled to recognize that I possessed many of those same needs as well. I needed to slow down in order to let God transform me.

When I sensed the call to build a ministry around teaching others to meet God in the kitchen and at the table, I knew that I was also being called to trust God deeply to provide for my needs. There was no clear path, which meant there was no financially sustainable path paved for me. I would have to trust God to provide paying work, to meet my physical and emotional needs. The prayer for daily bread became a very immediate prayer — and yet I watched God provide in beautiful and miraculous ways again and again and again. Over time, my anxiety lessened and my willingness to rest grew.

I still face moments where the anxiety comes flaring back up. But when it does, I am grateful to have years and years of evidence of God’s faithfulness to provide. I close my eyes, slow my breathing (oftentimes while mixing up a loaf of dough) and ask God to remind me of all the times I felt this same kind of worry and all the ways the Lord stepped in. Slowly, it’s allowing me to redirect my anxiety into more courageously following God wherever he leads.

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?

I spend most of my days teaching bread baking workshops in churches and schools across North America. I developed the Bake & Pray workshop method over the past eight years, helping others meet God with their hands in dough. I love the look of surprise on a participant’s face when they see their loaf emerge from the oven.

“I made that?” they often exclaim.

When the opportunity arose to turn this workshop into a book, I was thrilled. This is not my first book (I’ve written two others — “We Will Feast” and “By Bread Alone”), but this is the book I am most excited to share with the world. It is a cookbook meets prayer book, walking you slowly through the steps of making bread and the spiritual parallels woven into each one. My goal is not just to teach you how to bake bread or how bread is used in the Bible, though. It is to help you understand how to bake bread as a form of prayer itself. I believe that God will speak to you and heal you and transform you in beautiful ways as you begin digging your own hands in dough.

The book includes prayers for baking for all kinds of occasions, whether you are baking for Communion, for a friend that just had a baby or in a new kitchen for the first time. It also includes recipes from Christian traditions all around the world, a reminder that despite our differences, we are all made one in the bread we share at the Lord’s table.

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Cashiers, CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?

I was a few years into my work as a professional baker when I was struck by the absolute miracle of baking. My shifts were usually about 12 hours long, beginning at 3 or 4 in the morning. By lunchtime, I was loopy with exhaustion. One day, as I was dropping giant blocks of butter into the industrial mixer and weighing out sugar to cream it with, I thought about the many steps required to get these ingredients to me. What human creativity to realize that cream could be beaten until it became butter, to realize that sweetness could be extracted from canes and refined into an ingredient that, when cooked just the right amount of time, caramelizes. What ingenuity to realize that the two creamed together, then incorporated with egg and flour and chemical leavening could become a cookie. How did humans discover all the ways to transform natural resources into ingredients that then became this delicious thing? 

I’m sure my co-workers thought I was crazy, staring into the mixing bowl that was almost as tall as me. They’d all hit that point of loopy exhaustion before too, where they caught themselves just staring off while their mind wandered. I snapped back to work and continued mixing, but the thought has never left me. How did we even think of these things?

There’s a video of a lecture where author Elizabeth Gilbert talks about the creative process. She likens it to an artist channeling an idea that has been given to her, discerning how exactly that idea wants to be expressed. Human creativity does not come from within us; it is somehow outside of us, and we are gifted with the ability to steward it. Though Gilbert, who is not a Christian, does not say so, I would name the experience she describes as the Holy Spirit invigorating our work. The Spirit sparks our creativity and guides us as we foster these ideas into existence.

Each time I watch my dough grow, the protein strands creating a net that captures carbon dioxide released as the yeast eats up the starches in wheat, I imagine the Holy Spirit similarly filling me and bringing me to life so that I can do the fun, creative, generative work I’ve been called to do.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you right now?

One of the joys of my vocation as a baker being so tied to the ways I connect with God is that my work life and spiritual life are deeply integrated. But that also comes with the difficulty of feeling like my work seeps into every part of my life. Bread baking has always been the practice through which I have been most aware of God’s presence. And yet, the very fact that teaching others how to meet God in baking has become my primary form of work now means that I need other ways of connecting with God that disconnect me from work.

Over the last year, I’ve focused on caring for my home as a means of connecting with God. From painting the old trim to clearing the weeds from my driveway to feeding my chickens every morning, I see caring for this 80-year-old house as a way of stewarding God’s gift and bringing beauty into the world. It’s a reminder that God cares about the little details of our lives. With each new project (and there is a long list of projects needed in this old home!), I thank God for the gift of this property. I invite God to be with me in my labor. And I ask God to constantly fill this home with love and joy so that it might be a place marked by hospitality.

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed the game and changed your heart? What radically altered your life? What changed your reality?

When I was fresh out of college and a few weeks into a new job as a pastry cook, I came across a TED Talk by the master bread baker Peter Reinhart. He spoke of the transformations that take place in the process of baking bread — a series of deaths and resurrections. Immediately, I looked up whether he was a Christian; it sounded like he was proclaiming the gospel as he talked about bread. I learned that he had actually found his path as a baker while in seminary, preparing to become an Eastern Orthodox priest. He has since become a friend and conversation partner — I’m so grateful for the ways his wisdom has shaped my own work.

More recently, I read Aundi Kolber’s books “Try Softer” and “Strong Like Water.” I’ve always known on a visceral level and on a theological level that the practice of baking is grounding, but in reading her books, I began to wonder if there was a neurological reason baking was so profound as well. She convinced me that there is! And I’m excited to continue digging deeper into that reality.

Finally, the docuseries “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” and “High on the Hog” have been favorites of mine since their releases. They are visually stunning and excellent methods of sharing how food tells the story of human creativity and resilience. They make me want to tell better stories through and about food as well.

We all have things we cling to to survive (or even thrive) in tough times — times like these! Name one resource you’re savoring and/or finding indispensable in this current season, and tell us what it’s doing for you.

I love the music of The Porter’s Gate Worship Project. Their lyrics are so rich and thoughtfully written. As a collaboration of artists, their albums have also introduced me to so many solo artists that have since become favorites of mine as well. (Extra fun: I got to collaborate with them last fall for an album of table songs, which will be released next year. It was a dream come true to see how their process works behind the scenes and to watch them create new music together!)

QUESTION #8: dream

God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?

I love teaching bread baking to others as a way to connect with God. But I also love hearing the stories that emerge from them as they do. Food is such a powerful way to tell stories — it connects us to family, to the places we no longer live but still call home. It tells stories of creativity and resilience. And at the table with family, friends or strangers, we open up to hearing and understanding others in a way that’s hard in differing contexts.

My dream is to use these stories that emerge in the kitchen and at the table to help facilitate better dialogue in diverse groups: in churches and nonprofits, as well as larger organizations that need support with fostering a more collaborative environment. I want to create food media that shows how the foods we eat shape our perspective of the world. And I want to create experiences with organizational leaders that help their community (their congregation, their donors, their employees, etc.) get to know one another through the food stories they tell.

I’ve begun to collaborate with a film team for the first project in this direction — a docuseries on the religious history of bread, in the style of the two series I mentioned before. We are currently looking for funders and collaborators to help bring this to fruition. It is scary to embark on a project this size and to trust that God will provide all that is needed! But I’ve watched God bring just the right people together so many times before, and I trust that will happen once again.

Deuteronomy 8:3 tells us that God gave the Israelites manna in the desert so “that he might make [them] know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (ESV).

Yes, bread is a gift from God for us to eat and enjoy — but Scripture reveals it’s also so much more than that. It’s a metaphor for God’s very own life-giving properties. It’s no coincidence that Jesus said, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:35, ESV) and, after breaking the bread during the first Communion, “This is my body, which is given for you” (Luke 22:19, ESV).

Next time you eat bread, take the opportunity to remember who Jesus is for you — your life source, your delight and your daily sustenance.

Kendall Vanderslice is a baker and writer whose best thinking occurs when she’s got dough in her hands. She is a graduate of Wheaton College (B.A. Anthropology), Boston University (M.L.A. Gastronomy) and Duke Divinity School (M.T.S.). In 2018, she was named a James Beard National Scholar for her research on food and religion. She’s the author of three books: We Will Feast, By Bread Alone and Bake & Pray. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her big-eared beagle, Strudel; her brood of hens (Judith Jones and the Three Gourmands); and her sourdough starter, Bread Astaire.

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