Hidden Leaven
When I spoke with Kendall Vanderslice on Created in the Image of God, I was expecting a warm and thoughtful conversation about bread, baking, and spiritual practice.
I got that.
But I also got something more.
What emerged was a theology of hidden transformation and a reminder that bread in scripture is not just a metaphor. Those two themes belong together. In fact, I think they form the theological core of what Kendall is up to.
The first is the image of leaven.
Jesus says the kingdom of God is like leaven that a woman hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened. I have long been struck by that word hid. The kingdom does not always arrive with spectacle. It often works quietly, invisibly, from within. Something small is introduced into something much larger, and over time the whole mass is changed.
Kendall brought that image to life in a fresh way by talking about sourdough culture. A starter is alive. It must be fed. It can be nourished well or neglected badly. Healthy organisms can flourish, or pathogenic ones can take over. It does not take much to alter the culture. And once altered, the effect spreads.
That is true of bread.
It is also true of souls, families, churches, and civilizations.
What we repeatedly feed will eventually shape us.
What we quietly cultivate will not stay small forever.
What is hidden is not therefore unimportant. In many cases, it is decisive.
That is one side of the theological core.
The other is this: bread is not just a metaphor.
Kendall pushed back, gently but firmly, against the modern instinct to turn all biblical references to bread into abstractions. We speak of bread as a symbol of provision, a metaphor for basic needs, an image of sustenance. All of that is true. But if we leave it there, we miss something essential. Bread is not incidental to scripture. It is woven through it.
Manna in the wilderness.
Showbread in the tabernacle.
Passover bread.
The Last Supper.
The bread of life.
The marriage supper of the Lamb.
This is not decorative language. It is part of the narrative structure of revelation. God’s relationship to human beings is not merely conceptual. It is embodied, material, eaten, tasted, handled. Bread is about nourishment, yes, but it is also about presence, provision, memory, community, and promise.
That matters because many of us have inherited a faith that is more disembodied than biblical. We are comfortable with ideas about God, but less comfortable with the possibility that God cares about actual loaves, actual meals, actual bodies, actual tables, and the ordinary labor that sustains life.
Kendall’s work resists that flattening. She reminds us that creation is not spiritually irrelevant scenery. It is the theater of formation.
That brings me to one of the most compelling dimensions of the conversation: her Bake and Pray work.
At first glance, some people may hear that phrase and think it sounds quaint. Nice. Charming. Perhaps even a little precious.
It is not.
Or rather, it is precious in the old sense of the word: valuable.
Kendall is doing something more radical than offering a calming hobby with a spiritual gloss. She is recovering the sacred character of ordinary work. She teaches bread baking not merely as recipe, but as liturgy. That word is important. A recipe aims at replication. A liturgy forms a person through repeated participation. It has rhythm. It makes use of the body. It trains attention. It does not unfold in exactly the same way every time because it is responsive to conditions: weather, humidity, flour, time, touch.
That is already a sermon.
It says we are not machines.
It says formation is rhythmic, not mechanical.
It says faithfulness involves attention, not merely execution.
It says some of the most meaningful acts in life cannot be reduced to efficiency.
I was especially struck by the way Kendall described bread baking as something that can reconnect people to their senses, to presence, and to God in the middle of mundane life. That is no small thing in a world that has turned so much of human labor into speed, fragmentation, and distraction.
We live in a culture that increasingly treats chores as interruptions to “real life,” when in fact much of real life is hidden precisely there. In kitchens. In gardens. In kneading. In washing. In chopping. In feeding others. In repeating the tasks that make shared life possible.
Kendall’s point is not that every domestic action becomes automatically mystical. It is that ordinary work can become a site of communion rather than mere drudgery if it is received differently.
That, too, is leaven.
From there, our conversation widened into another callout that I think matters a great deal right now: the need to put our hands back into creation.
We talked about soil, about gardening, about regenerative farming, about how astonishingly detached modern people have become from the sources of their own nourishment. There was a time when a significant percentage of households grew at least some of their own food. Today, many people are multiple layers removed from the land, the labor, the ingredients, and even the knowledge required to sustain life.
And when that happens, something more than skill is lost.
A whole form of human knowing begins to disappear.
Kendall was careful here, and I appreciated that. She did not simply romanticize “getting back to the land,” as though technological modernity can be reversed by wishful thinking or by a small enclave fantasy. Nor did she baptize technocracy. Instead, she named the tension well: we live in a creation that is still good, but also broken. We need honest ways of inhabiting both truths.
That is a better and more mature vision.
The answer is not escapism.
The answer is not performative outrage.
The answer is not total withdrawal into private purity.
The answer, if I heard her rightly, is deeper engagement with community, embodiment, and creaturely life. It is learning again how to live as human beings who belong to a world we did not make and cannot dominate without consequence.
That is why soil matters.
That is why dough matters.
That is why hands-on practices matter.
They remind us that we are creatures, not just consumers.
And that leads naturally to the conclusion Kendall’s work presses toward: rest must be practiced, not merely admired.
This may be the most timely part of all.
Modern people praise rest in theory and systematically exile it in practice. We admire Sabbath language while structuring our lives around acceleration. We talk about wellness while accepting forms of busyness that hollow us out. We long for peace and then organize our days in ways that make peace almost impossible.
Kendall’s move from Bake and Pray to Bake and Rest is therefore significant. It recognizes that many people, including those outside explicit faith communities, are starving for rhythms that reconnect them to their bodies, their limits, their neighbors, and their own humanity. Rest is not just the cessation of labor. It is retraining desire. It is learning to inhabit time differently. It is recovering the goodness of creaturely limits instead of treating them as obstacles to productivity.
In that sense, baking bread becomes more than baking bread.
It becomes a school of attention.
A rebuke to hurry.
A practice of embodiment.
A way of remembering that not everything good can be rushed.
A way of relearning joy.
And perhaps that is the thread tying all of this together.
Leaven works slowly.
Bread nourishes bodily.
Prayer enters ordinary labor.
Soil reminds us we are creatures.
Rest teaches us to receive life instead of merely drive it.
Kendall Vanderslice is not just teaching people how to make a loaf. She is recovering a way of seeing. A way of living. A way of letting the hidden work of God become visible again in kitchens, communities, and bodies that have forgotten how much they need both nourishment and rest.
That is a worthy project.
And in an age of abstraction, speed, and disembodiment, it may be more prophetic than it first appears.
Sneak Peek
As always, here’s a brief sneak peek at what’s next on Created in the Image of God—with one small note of context. Because these conversations are often pre-recorded and, as they say, already “in the can” before publication, the following episodes contain conversations that already happened. Either way, they remain part of the unfolding conversation.
On Sunday, November 1 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, you’ll see my conversation with Jason Romano—author, speaker, and executive producer of Sports Spectrum—about the intersection of sports and faith, and how calling, purpose, and following Jesus can shape life both on and off the field. From his years at ESPN to a leap of faith into ministry, to the stories of athletes and leaders navigating faith in the world of sports, it was a rich and engaging exchange.
Then on Tuesday, November 3 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I am joined by Justin Giboney—attorney, political strategist, and founder of the AND Campaign—to explore how Christians can engage politics and public life without sacrificing conviction, humility, or commitment to justice. From faith and civic responsibility to imagining a more thoughtful and faithful Christian witness in the public square, it was a timely and important conversation.
