Why I Prefer Liturgies Instead of Recipes

When I was in college, I attended a church that cared deeply about the emotional experience of worship. Each service included lots of tears and shouts of joy; congregants were encouraged to give themselves over to the Holy Spirit, and to express whatever emerged.

During this time, I was navigating friendship with a woman that had a complex illness. I was drawn to this church because I needed a community that believed with all their heart that God could heal.

But as time wore on and healing never came, this emotional experience of worship exhausted me. I was told that if I learned the right way to pray—the right intonations and combination of words, in full submission to the Holy Spirit—then God would transform my friend. 

Deep down, I knew God didn't work like that. God's healing doesn't function like a recipe…it's mysterious, and sometimes it doesn't come in the way we desire.

Eventually, my faith burned out.

I longed for a quieter, gentler, more tangible sense of God's presence—one that didn't rely on my emotions, one that I could cling to whether or not I witnessed the healing for which I prayed. I was encouraged to attend a different church down the road, one that served Communion every week and that followed a formal liturgy for each service.

It was my first introduction to the concept of liturgy. Over time, the repetition of words and movements that had been shared by Christians across centuries healed me—along with the practice of receiving bread at the altar every week. I could hold to the truth of these words and of God's loving presence whether or not I felt them. 

Learning to bake bread requires an approach more akin to liturgy than to recipe.

Simply mixing up the right combination of ingredients does not ensure the desired result. To bake bread requires learning the smell, the feel, the texture, and the taste of a properly fermented, shaped, and baked dough. It requires repetition and reflection. It requires formation, over time. 

In the Bake & Pray method, I teach bread baking in the form of a liturgy: a series of prayers and Scripture readings to incorporate into the bread baking process. The goal of this liturgy is to allow the process of making bread to form the baker, both in their understanding of the bread they are making as well as the Bread of Life that nourishes them along the way.

In recent years, these Bake & Pray liturgies saved my faith once again.

In a season of intense grief, I struggled to hear God or sense God's nearness. Each time I taught a workshop, I proclaimed the words I'd been teaching for years…even though, in the moment, they didn't feel true. I knew in my bones that what I said was grounded in theology that had been shared by Christians for centuries.

The practice of repeating this message over and over again, and watching others resonate with its truth, allowed me to cling to the promise of God's presence even in what felt like absence.

If the concept of liturgy is new to you, I hope you'll remain open and curious to learn more about it! I write about the ways liturgy formed my faith in both of my books, By Bread Alone and Bake & Pray.

By Bread Alone: a baker's reflections on hunger, longing, and the goodness of God shares the story of how God saved me through bread—both the bread that I baked as well as the bread I received at the Communion table. If you're interested in theology and church history taught through narrative, you'll love this book.

I call Bake & Pray: liturgies and recipes for baking bread as a spiritual practice a cookbook meets prayer book. It gives more practical background on the form and function of liturgy, as well as the science of baking bread, while also providing a series of liturgies for bread baking. It's also filled with theology and church history, but taught more through practice than through story. 

Check them out today!