In Person Training for Bread Starters
Learn how to be a “Bread Starter” to help make Bread Day happen at your local meeting and build intergenerational relationships through baking bread!
Bread Day is back for round 2 this year on March 4th, and we want to know who is feeling the nudge to step into Bread Day leadership in their local meetings. This training might be right for you if:
You are listening to what yeasts are bubbling in your meeting around fostering intergenerational relationships
You're hungry for more hands-on spiritual learning
You carry a concern for centering youth and deeper spiritual connection in your meeting
You are excited about sharing bread-baking as a spiritual practice with others
You'd like to dive in deep and learn by doing all of this with others in person to prepare for Bread Day
Additionally, there will be an info session hosted online on Monday, February 6th from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., the details for which can be found here.
What’s up with all the bread metaphors?
When you bake any kind of bread, you need to add something alive to the dough to get it to rise and transform the mass of flour and water into something delicious and nutritious. With lots of kinds of bread, you add yeast. A spoonful of yeast contains thousands of microscopic live organisms that eat up the sugars from the flour in your dough and release gas that makes the dough grow bigger and rise up in the bowl. When you make sourdough bread, instead of adding yeast, you add a bit of something called a starter, which is a gloopy stinky mixture of flour and water and little organisms that make it alive, and turn the rest of the dough alive and make it grow once it’s mixed in. At this training, and with Bread Day, we’re inviting each person who participates to imagine that the yeast, or the starter, is like the Seed of God and the dough is like us. If the starter doesn’t get fed into the dough, it would wither and die. But when it has a purpose, and it’s fed and nurtured, it starts to grow and spread all over the dough and teaches the dough to come alive. When we listen to the little voice within us that is connected to Spirit, when we give it purpose and offer it to the community, it can grow and transform the whole and help us be a community more deeply rooted in Spirit.
Watch this video about what Bread Day is all about
What do you mean by “Bread Starters”?
By holding a training especially for these people who we’re calling “Bread Starters”, we’re offering a way to name those who are hearing a call from Spirit to help their local meetings become more alive and more connected across generations. This training is for fostering a form of leadership that shares a vision or a Way to connect with one another through bread baking, and then steps back and trusts that Spirit will guide us there. This is not about leading Friends in your local meeting to some specific outcome or goal. You are simply, faithfully, starting something amongst them that we trust will take on a life of its own and grow into something we can’t predict.
But what will we DO at this training?
Bake bread from scratch, in teams, and reflect on the spiritual lessons of this process
Connect to the central spiritual purpose of Bread Day and imagine on how this might resonate in each of our local meetings
Practice building intergenerational community by playing, connecting with one another, and sharing best practices
Receive resources to help with the logistics of community-building and baking bread with a group, especially with kids
Answer your questions about how to be Bread Starters in your meetings!
Covid Safety Precautions for this event:
All participants are required to be fully vaccinated for Covid-19, including a booster within the last 6 months.
All participants are required to take an antigen (at-home) Covid test the day of the event, either before they leave home, or by using one that we provide upon arrival. Those who test positive will be sent home.
All participants will be screened for symptoms upon arrival and should stay home if they are feeling sick.
Masking protocols will be decided for this event closer to the date and will be based upon current CDC guidelines, transmission rates, and our sense of the needs of the group of registered participants.
Lunch and possibly a light dinner will be provided. Those traveling from far away may let us know upon registering if they will need hospitality the night before the event, which will likely be staying over at Providence Friends Meeting on Friday night.
Participants may pay as much as they are led for this event, including $0. We encourage those who need gas money or other support attending to reach out to their local Quaker meeting for funds. A carpool list will be sent out the week of the event.