Baker, theologian Kendall Vanderslice to lead March 24-25 Cummings Conversations at Maryville College
March 12, 2025
When Jesus declares himself “the bread of life” in the Biblical passage of John 6:35, there’s a reason he didn’t choose another form of food, Kendall Vanderslice believes.
Bread, after all, sits at the crossroads of faith and community, a topic the theology scholar, writer and baker will bring to Maryville College in March for the annual Cummings Conversations. Vanderslice, a James Beard Foundation national scholar who’s written three books examining the connections between food and faith, will include bread preparation with members of the Maryville College community, and her talks to the wider community will examine the intersectionality of sustenance and the sacred. The two-day event takes place March 24 and 25, when she’ll speak at both the Maryville College Downtown Center and during Chapel in the MC Center for Campus Ministry. Working within the theme of “Worship at the Table,” Vanderslice said she’s looking forward to helping students, faculty, staff and members of the public understand the ways in which the act of preparing and consuming food brings people closer to one another and to God.
“I’ll be talking about both bread and the table, about how God meets us as individuals in the process of making bread and in the process of breaking bread together around the table,” Vanderslice said. “During the hands-on time (with students and members of the MC Board of Church Visitors), we’ll be looking at how the actual practice of making bread teaches us about God and a life of faith, and at the lecture at the Downtown Center, we’ll talk about how food and the table are at play in the Christian tradition in ways they maybe haven’t seen before.”
The ties that bind faith to food
Known as the Margaret M. Cummings Conversations on Faith, Learning and Service, the annual event is an opportunity for the College community to explore the intersections of faith and service, stemming from the charge by the institution’s founder, the Rev. Isaac Anderson, to “do good on the largest possible scale.” Formerly known as the February Meetings, the series was renamed in 2019 and gives an opportunity for guest lecturers from all corners of theology and academia to offer their perspectives via free lectures open to the public and the MC community.
A graduate of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, Vanderslice began her studies as a pastry chef, and it was during the preparation of food, she said, that she began to ponder questions of faith and spirituality. She studied food at Boston University, where she earned a master of liberal arts in gastronomy, writing her thesis on church meals and propelling herself to Duke University, where she obtained a master of theological studies. Her time in higher education, she said, makes opportunities like traveling to Maryville College for the Cummings Conversations all the more rewarding.
“I am personally the fruit of a Christian liberal arts education, and I’ve been trained academically to think about how my faith informs my academic work, and how my academic work informs my faith,” she said. “Seeing how communion, or the eucharist, is essential to all of this has helped shape my faith practice, and what I have studied now about food has inherently shaped how God is meeting me in my daily baking of bread.”
Her exploration of food and faith led to the development of the Bake & Pray™ Method, which also happens to be the title of one of her books. The idea, she writes on her website, “focuses on learning breadmaking in terms of liturgy rather than recipe, allowing the rhythms of rest and repetition to shape the baker as the baker shapes their bread.” In the realization of how essential bread has been to Christian tradition, the method trains bakers of all skill levels to meditate and ruminate during the process, and in bringing it to Maryville College, she added, she hopes to open the eyes of those in attendance to new ways of approaching pastry.
“As students engage this work, they will see how God engages with them in something as practical and tangible as the act of eating, but they’ll also see God’s work in their own academic studies and how it shapes their own fields of study as well,” she said. “So often, food is something we treat as just fuel, something we have to have to get through the day, and while that is true, it’s important to keep in mind: God could have created us in a way to meet our nutritional needs in other manners.
“He could have made us like plants, where we get our nutrients from the soil or the water, but instead we were given tongues that can taste food, and we were given the ability to find joy and delight in the process of eating and sharing food with others around the table. So often these days, due to the rushed nature of our lives, we overlook what a gift food is, and how important this need to eat together in community is.”
Conversations open to the public
Vanderslice’s invitation to serve as the 2025 Cummings Conversation speaker comes by way of the Rev. Jessica Kitchens Lewis ’07, who was introduced to the former’s work during a seminary course examining fresh expressions of church as community through acts such as hospitality, peacemaking, care and relationship-building. Vanderslice’s 2019 book, “We Will Feast: Rethinking Dinner, Worship and the Community of God,” came to Lewis at “the perfect moment,” she said, and had a profound effect on how she views her pastoral calling.
“My favorite part of leading worship is inviting people to the table,” Lewis said. “It is a place where we all arrive as equals: we are all invited, there is room for us all, there is enough for us all, and we are communally reminded of our belovedness, our connection to God, and our calling to be in community with one another. Kendall’s work has had a profound impact on my love for gathering people around a table as a fundamental act of worship, hospitality and community.”
The Cummings Conversations, Lewis added, includes a component of service alongside faith and learning, and what better way to be of service, she asked, than to discuss the spiritual rewards of serving a meal? The act of preparing food and sharing it with others is revisited time and time again in Biblical stories, and bringing in a speaker who can discuss hospitality and service through a lens of vocational aptitude and theology, she said, seemed like a perfect ingredient for a successful lecture series this year.
“I hope that guests will be encouraged by her joyful presence, engaged by her thoughtful discussion, and inspired by her intentional work of hospitality,” Lewis said. “For many, talks of faith can seem unwanted when so much of the Christian story has been co-opted into something harmful. Kendall’s work is a call for us to remember that faith and our expression of it are meant to help us further live into our calling to love one another, and she is gracious enough to give us a guide for how we can do that in our everyday lives: meet with people for a meal, bake with intention, give of your heart, and be in community.”
Doing so, Vanderslice added, is essential — for nurturing relationships with God, but also with one another, especially in a modern age that seems to prioritize efficiency and speed over thoughtfulness and intention.
“The process of slowing down and sharing a long and delicious meal with others is treated as a luxury, and when life gets busy, that’s the first thing to go,” Vanderslice said. “My message is that this is a necessity. It’s delightful and pleasurable, but it’s also necessary for families and communities and personal well-being, to have this need for connection met at the same time as the need for community and food. We have severely underestimated just how much shared meals shape and heal and impact us as community.”
Vanderslice will present the program “Worship at the Table” at 7 p.m. Monday, March 24, at the MC Downtown Center, 118 E. Church Ave., Maryville. Admission is free, and the program is open to the public, but an RSVP is required to plan for space accommodations. At 1:15 p.m. Tuesday, March 25, Vanderslice will speak as part of Chapel services in the Center for Campus Ministry at Maryville College; that, too, is free and open to the public but requires an RSVP due to limited space.