How to Start Praying With Your Hands | An Interview with Kendall Vanderslice

What if prayer can come in many forms?

I first encountered Kendall Vanderslice’s work and writing on Instagram. In 2021, when my first son was a baby, I joined her online baking community as a gift to myself and we baked through Advent and Lent as a spiritual practice. The way she combines theology and food science with tangible spiritual practices is an example of beautiful discipleship I am delighted to champion. Enjoy my conversation with Kendall below!

Tell us about the last thing you baked? What prompted the bake? What did you pray for as you baked? Who was it for?

I’ve been on the road for the last few weeks promoting my new book,¹ which means unfortunately I haven’t been able to bake for awhile! This is very unusual for me. Before I left town, though, my last bake was for my neighbors. Every Friday that I’m in town, I bake two kinds of bread plus a specialty item that neighbors are welcome to come pick up from the Bread Shed—a shed in my driveway set up for neighbors to meet and mingle over their loaves. That week, I made my classic sourdough loaf, along with apple cheddar loaves and my bourbon brown butter pecan pumpkin bread.

When I bake for my neighbors each Friday, I pray for my neighborhood. I love this community that I live in, but we’ve also had a tough summer. Our park has been closed due to some soil contamination, but most residents believe the closure is an overreaction. The lack of greenspace to gather has raised tensions between neighbors as many of the opportunities for gathering have been lost. At the same time, we’ve seen a rise in violent crime in the neighborhood—while the two aren’t correlated, this shift means we are longing for places to connect more than ever.

My little driveway shed is not going to solve these problems, but it at least provides a spot for community connection. I pray with each loaf that the ripple effects of that are a gift to all of my neighbors.

What a beautiful example of practicing what you teach in your new book. Bake & Pray has been a long time coming. How did the seed of this idea begin to germinate?

I began teaching a workshop on bread baking as a spiritual practice back in 2016 while working for a church. This church ran a bread bakery to sustain itself and to get to know the community through the farmer’s market—it was a small church in a small town in New England, a highly unchurched area. I was hired to help streamline and grow the bakery. The pastor asked me to develop a workshop on bread baking so that we could help the community understand more fully why it is that we as a church focused on bread.

The workshop was a hit, and I began to get requests to teach in other churches too. 

I was first asked to write a book like this back in 2017, but I just wasn’t ready. In the years since, this workshop has grown and my method of teaching has developed significantly. I’m much more aware of the questions and concerns new bakers have, so I’ve done my best to teach in a way that addresses these concerns.

By the time I wrote Bake & Pray, it didn’t even feel like I was writing a book. The words and rhythms within it have been so ingrained in me from teaching, that the process didn’t even feel like work.

Photo credit: KC Hysmith

You talk a bit in the book about baking as an embodied spiritual practice. Why is having a practice like this so important? What do you think we can recover by incorporating a tactile activity like baking, gardening, or making art into our relationship with Jesus?

It’s very tempting to understand our faith as something that happens predominantly in our minds: it’s about the words we think and say to God, and the words we read from Scripture. But we were created with bodies that have the senses of taste, touch, sound, sight, and smell. It’s only through these senses that we are able to understand the created world around us—and so it’s through these senses that we get to know our Creator as well.

We need to recover the delight of communing with God through tactile, material practices because that is how God chose to create us to glean knowledge about the world.

We all have moments in our lives when faith is really hard. Prayer is hard. Making sense in our minds of the grief or pain we experience, or witness others experiencing, feels impossible—but in the bread and cup extended to us at the Communion table, we have a tangible promise of God’s presence. In the same way, the practice of baking bread and breaking it with others can serve as a tangible reminder of God’s nearness and love for us even when we don’t know how to believe it’s true.

Bake & Pray is certainly not less than a cookbook, but it is also so much more. Tell us about the more!

I like to say that it’s a cookbook meets prayer book. It’s designed in four different parts: first, an overview of what it means to bake as a form of prayer. Second, six lessons on baking bread, designed to help you understand the dough more with each bake. The third section is a series of recipes for each season of the liturgical year, drawn from different Christian traditions all around the world. And the final section is a collection of prayers for different baking occasions—a prayer for making Communion bread, a prayer for baking with children, a prayer when baking bread for a new neighbor, etc. 

The goal is to help you live into a deeper understanding of the Christian faith and a more robust connection to the worldwide and historical community of Chrisians with each bake.

Who is Bake & Pray for? What if the only thing I’ve ever baked in my life is a boxed cake mix? Will I be out of my depth?

Bake & Pray is for beginners and experienced bakers alike. I regularly teach workshops for people who have never baked a thing in their life. My goal is to make bread baking as un-intimidating as possible, so I take into account the worries that most new bakers bring into the process. 

At the same time, the spiritual parallels unfolded through the bread baking process continue to reveal themselves to me as an experienced baker. Those who are quite confident in their bread baking skills will find the theological reflections only deepen their love of bread. 

The recipes in the book require the use of wheat flour and commercial yeast, so they won’t work for someone who is gluten free and they’ll require some adjustment for those who want to bake with wild yeast (sourdough). But even so, the reflections, prayers, and liturgies are rich even if the recipes aren’t within your scope.

The book really does have something for everyone—you just need to love (or be curious about) bread.

Okay, this question might just be for me, but does your sourdough starter have a name, and if so, what is it?

My sourdough starter is named Bread Astaire. I got a new oven at the beginning of the year, and I put together a bracket on Instagram of potential oven names submitted by followers. Bread Astaire and St. Breadgid of Kildare were the top two.

The oven just felt like a St. Breadgid to me, but I loved Bread Astaire as well. I’d just started a new sourdough starter at the time and decided that it deserved the title of Bread Astaire.

Next month I will be flying out to North Carolina for a few days to learn from Kendall how to teach her signature Bake & Pray workshop. If this idea of praying with your hands sounds like it would bless your church, small group, women’s Bible study, or another group, I would love to chat with you about hosting a workshop in 2025. Just reply to this email!

And if you don’t yet have a community to bake and pray with you, you can get started with Kendall’s book right away!

Bake & Pray

In pursuit of Beauty,

1. This post contains affiliate links, which just means that if you choose to purchase something through one of these links, I get a few pennies.