Loaf-Type Communion Bread
Dear Shepherdess: Our green Chevy has really traveled many miles this summer as we attended several camp meetings. I have felt especially blessed in visiting with the Shepherdess groups in the different conferences. To see our ministers and their wives in their Christ-honoring labors has been an inspiration. It is thrilling to hear Christ presented by the camp meeting speakers as the only secure foundation in this creaking, tottering old world.
Our lives have been enriched as we make new friends and renew old friend ships with those we have known before. At the Nebraska camp meeting, at the very lovely Platte Valley Academy, we met Miss Ruth Whitfield, who has been a food service director in our schools for many years. We talked of communion bread, as that subject has been on my mind for several months. I had received a letter that raised the question. The writer states, "I have accepted the position of head deaconess at the College church. The students here have asked for communion bread in 'loaves' rather than the tiny wafers usually used in church. I have been asked whether I had a good recipe for such a bread and as yet have not found one I felt I could recommend. Do you have any? Any help you could give me on what ingredients are suitable to use and how to use them would be greatly appreciated."
Another writer asks, "What kind of bread should be used in the communion service? What type of table arrangements?"
There seems to be a modern trend to make the sacred communion service rather commonplace. Our young people seem to want to return to primitive forms in their services. Perhaps this makes some feel more at ease. It would be good to use your influence to help our people to conform to the conventional and convenient type of communion bread the church has found acceptable.
We are not against change or allowing the use of ingenuity or self-expression as long as the service is reverent, the atmosphere sacred, and the symbolism God has given us is not destroyed.
We penitent believers, by partaking in the communion service, find purification and forgiveness in Jesus. Let us come in humility and obedience so we may be ready for His appearance.
Read the chapters in The Desire of Ages entitled "A Servant of Servants" and "In Remembrance of Me." Christ, while "still at the table on which the paschal supper has been spread," was instituting a religious service.
Someone wrote that in one church a checkered red and white oilcloth was used to replace the pure white cloth usu ally used to symbolize the spotless character of our Saviour. The beautiful white, well-laundered cloth seemed, also, to be dignified, as if offering the King of kings our best.
Would you seat such an honored Guest at an oilcloth tablecloth if you had a lovely white one in the linen closet?
The type of emblems we are to serve in this service are explicit. These emblems typify the broken body of our Lord and His spilled blood, but nowhere, apparently, does our prophet tell how these emblems should be served.
"The unleavened cakes [and may we stress the word unleavened] used at the Passover season are before Him. The Passover wine, untouched by fermentation, is on the table. These emblems Christ employs to represent His own unblemished sacrifice. Nothing [bread or wine] corrupted by fermentation, the symbol of sin and death, could represent the 'Lamb without blemish and without spot.'"—The Desire of Ages, p. 653.
The bread the Lord broke and served in the upper room was a round, flat bread, unleavened, with no yeast or leavening agent added. We should not present anything other than this as we partake at the table.
May we, in imagination, join our Saviour at the scene of communion in the upper chamber. It is a real sacrament, sober, holy, happy, dedicated, with no disturbing influence to dilute the spiritual strength God intended us to receive.
Why shouldn't we conform to the standards and procedures that have been adopted by our church, designed to help us become really fulfilled Christians who "[behold] the Saviour's match less love" and who are "elevated in thought, purified in heart, transformed in character"? —Ibid., p. 661.
At my request Miss Whitfield has shared a recipe for loaf-type communion bread which she has perfected. This is the recipe:
1 c. sifted 100% whole-wheat pastry flour 1/2 tsp. salt 1/3 c. cooking oil 3 tbsp. ice water
Place sifted flour and salt in a bowl. Combine oil and water in a blender and blend until mixture is white and creamy. (This process is called emulsifying and makes the product more flaky. One may beat the oil and water with a fork to emulsify if a blender is not avail able.) Then pour the water and oil mixture, all at once, into the flour and salt. Lightly cut the moisture into the flour with the edge of a mixing spoon. Do not stir or handle too much.
Take 1/3 of the dough in the hands and shape it into an oval loaf 5 inches long by 2 1/2 inches wide. Prick the top of the entire length of the loaf. This recipe makes three loaf-like cakes such as baked in Arab countries, and which probably was much like the flat loaf Jesus broke with His disciples in the Upper Room.
To serve these loaves each participant could break off a piece, or the presiding elder might break the loaves into bite-size pieces.
This dough may be rolled thin for the wafer-type communion bread, also, scoring it into squares before baking.
Bake the loaves for 45 minutes at 350 degrees . The thin wafer-like bread takes 10 to 12 minutes to bake.
Please remember that flours differ. I made this bread with regular whole wheat flour, as I could not find the pastry flour, which is a softer spring wheat type of flour. I found I needed to use a temperature of 325 degrees for 30 minutes for the loaves and also 325 degrees for the wafers, baking 10 to 12 minutes.
Another friend and deaconess has been experimenting with making an acceptable bread. This is Mrs. Martha Losey's recipe:
3 c. whole-wheat pastry flour 1 1/4 tsp. salt 3/4 c. oil 1/2 c. ice water
Blend oil and water in blender until creamy and cut gently into the flour and salt mixture. Roll out on a teflon baking sheet, using wax paper on top. Mark into small squares and prick. Bake at 350 for 20 minutes.
This dough may be placed into an eight-inch cake pan. It makes two large loaves. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes.
I would appreciate hearing from those who may have other good recipes.
Let us, as leaders, do our best to help our people accept the conventional communion service adopted by the church, while doing all we can to make it a beautiful, meaningful service of communing with Jesus.
With love, Kay.
SURROUNDED AS we are in this Bicentennial year with reminders of our country's past, I asked myself, "What does being an American really mean to me?"
For some reason my mind went instantly to a Thanksgiving greeting card that my husband, Don, received years ago from a business acquaintance. In stead of picturing the usual harvest feasting, it showed a small group of Pilgrims on a windswept beach, the May flower at anchor in the bay. Some of the new arrivals were kneeling in the snow; others stood, heads bowed in prayer. Water lapped, cold and green, against the rocks. Perhaps the artist would be pleased to know we use the card every Thanksgiving as a table centerpiece.
I believe we need to think now and then of those men and women who first placed their feet on the Massachusetts shore, armed with the courage to face unknown dangers for the sake of freedom. I hope a bit of their blood still tingles in our veins.
Next, I think of a friend who spent many months in a concentration camp during World War II. Life was reduced to fear, dysentery, starvation, and loss of hope. There came that day, however, when American planes filled the skies and jeeps pulled into the compound. Al most too ill to respond, my friend huddled listlessly in a corner of the yard. A shadow fell across the dust at her feet, and she looked up at an American GI towering over like some mythical god in his bronzed good health. He grinned, and she found a small answering smile flickering deep within, struggling to find its way to her parched lips.
When he lifted her in his arms as easily as if she were a child, the tears of her joy fell unchecked upon his green fatigues.
Very softly, his own eyes glistening, he said, "Don't cry, lady. You made it, and we're going home."
"Never had I understood before what it meant to be an American," she told me simply, years later.
Sometimes when I look about our own table, I am reminded of another facet of America. The faces of our assembled family are not all Caucasian. Some of our six sons and daughters have come out of sorrow and war to these friendly shores. Though they bear the beauty of the Orient, they are now American. May the sounds of battle and dying never again be a part of their experience. I'm glad the lady with the torch in the New York harbor has never locked her gates against a troubled world.
I hear individuals chuckling about the clever ideas they have for evading their income tax. I hear other Americans lamenting the fact that we are "suckers" to help foreign nations, when we have grave financial problems of our own.
While I'll readily admit that some areas of government may well be corrupt, that our tax dollars may not al ways be handled wisely, and perhaps we really cannot afford to come to the aid of all the unfortunate around the globe, I'm still glad to pay my taxes as an American. I'd . rather live frugally in this land than luxuriously in any other. I'm proud we move in with clothing, food, and medical supplies wherever disaster strikes, even among our enemies. I'm glad we help countries shattered by war to struggle once more to their feet. I cannot be concerned with their appreciation or lack of it. There is a principle involved, a principle that Jesus Christ lifted to its ultimate clarity.
The day America hugs her riches to herself, closes her doors to the unfortunate, and looks with cool, indifferent eyes upon the problems of her fellow nations, I shall know we have betrayed those men and women kneeling on the cold New England shore. Until then, I shall fly the Stars and Stripes with a grateful heart.
