Communion Bread at Lord of Grace
Where does our communion bread come from?
The recipe came from Luther Seminary via the internet way back in 2007 or 2008. It uses whole wheat flour, white flour, water, olive oil, honey, molasses, salt, and baking powder.
Lord of Grace has a bread baking team – Paulette Claver, coordinator; Carol Buuck; Catie Witten; Jamie Chapman; and Patty Clymer – who rotate the responsibility of baking our bread for each Sunday.
What is the symbolism on our bread?
Typically, one will find a cross on communion bread, but not always. Ours has an eight-spoke wheel that divides the loaves into wedges. But the wheel is not just for the convenience of dividing the bread into wedges.
Most Christians are familiar with the fish being a very early symbol of the Christian church, when it was not safe to be Christian. The Greek word for fish is ichthys, an acrostic from Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter, Jesus Christ God’s Son Savior. It’s also the source of our wheel.
Before coming to Lord of Grace Jack and I did a trip to the eastern Mediterranean. One place we visited was a tiny ancient church in the ruins of Kaunos, Turkey, which is up the Dalyhn River Delta on the mainland opposite the northeast tip of Rhodes, just up the coast from Ephesus. There, inscribed into the stone of the entry to the church, we saw an eight-spoke wheel. We had also seen this on some doorjambs in Ephesus. They were never large, 2” to 3” diameter. So, I asked our guide about this.
The wheel is formed from the letters that spell ichthys – Ι Χ Θ Υ Σ, the first letters in the Greek phase above. Now, if you superimpose these letters one on top of the other, you get an eight-spoke wheel. This was code to identify themselves as believers. (We never saw a fish symbol used.)
When we bakers make the communion bread, we impress each loaf with ‘Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.’