Friends,

There a million big and little things I would like to try while I am with you, and sometimes, my mental to-do list is overwhelming. Focusing on my priorities rather than following every little idea and thread I come upon has been a big learning in my ministry these past ten years. One thing that I feel strongly about, but remains fairly low on my priority list is communion wafers.

During Lent I taught the make-up class on Wednesdays in the library, and one Wednesday someone asked why we used those wafers for communion, and I get the sense they expected some sort of big theological and meaningful answer. Before I could stop myself, I blurted out, “You mean the Jeez-its?” “Jeez-its” is of course, an appropriately irreverent combination of “Jesus” and “Cheez-its” and somehow perfectly describes the plastic wrapped wafers the vast majority of Episcopalians use for Holy Eucharist on Sunday morning.

There is nothing special about the wafers that make them different than other bread. The whole point of blessing, breaking and giving the bread to people on Sunday morning is to make it special. The wafers themselves are just wafers, and they are wafers with a dubious history.

Here is a dated, but informative article about brutal business of Jeez-Its and how they came to dominate a market by undercutting nuns: VICE . If you don’t want to read through it, you’ll just have to trust me that there is a better way of providing bread suitable for communion on Sunday morning.

So, why haven’t we made this switch already? Well, the thing is, those little Jeez-its are super convenient, and it is the system that we already had in place. Plus, it is what people are used to, and we know they won’t break apart when dipped into the wine. When it came getting through the pandemic, reopening the Church, and rediscovering our mission at St. Luke’s making the switch to real bread always got put on the back burner, and that is where that stayed until the question got asked in the make-up confirmation class.

Immediately after I gave my rant about the various evils of Jeez-its, Angela Miller volunteered to start baking bread for communion, and she has since recruited one more volunteer. Communion bread goes a long way, and my thought is that can make this very simple. A baker will sign up for a month and put enough loaves in the freezer in the kitchen for that month in a labeled bag. So our gluten free brothers and sisters in Christ don’t feel singled out, I feel strongly that we only bake gluten free loaves, so we are all eating of the same bread during communion. Once we have a critical mass of about five bakers we can get the ministry going.

In the coming couple of weeks we will do a test run with our recipe at 10:00 and try to get a better idea of how many loaves we will need, and it will give the congregation an opportunity to try the recipe.

One of the things Jeez-its took away from local congregations is that the people had the opportunity to put their skill and labor into making the bread that would become a sacrament for their community. I don’t think it’s going to get anyone a better seat in heaven, but it feels like a sacred task within itself regardless of the reward. You can let Angela know that you interested in learning more by emailing her at Angela.vidulich@gmail.com

-Nick