Caistor St Edmund

Like all parents of teenagers, I am a consistent source of weary amusement in our house, but recently I have been particularly laughable because of my attempts to make some sourdough bread. Before I get into this too much, I’d like to offer in my defence that I’m fairly sure Cathryn was the one who suggested first that we give this a try.

The main thing you are confronted with is that it takes ages. If you make the starter (which is what you use instead of yeast to make it rise) it takes days at least, but I was anxiously tending to mine for weeks before it seemed to grow in any significant way. Once there is enough yeast from the air in the jar to get it going, you have to remove some of the mixture and feed the rest regularly with more flour and water to keep it active. If you aren’t using the stuff you discard to make bread, you could give it to your friend as a present (this is genuinely Jamie Oliver’s suggestion), or I have found it makes nice pancakes.

Only after this can you start to make bread. This takes about 18 hours, from the point that you mix a load of your starter with more bread and water, to when you add the rest of the flour, leave it overnight in the fridge to prove, and then bake it in the morning. I have got to the stage where my family will happily eat it, but I do recognise that there are people in the village and in our church community who bake it for a living, and need to be clear that the stuff I have made definitely isn’t anywhere near as nice as the ones in the shops.

Am I just writing a baking column this month, you ask? Well, possibly. But the many hours I have spent not so much fiddling with this bread, as worrying about whether it will turn out ok, have given me some space to think about the process. I have got thinking about what Jesus says about how the kingdom of God is like yeast that a woman kneads into about sixty pounds (!) of dough. Now apart from what that says about her impressive kneading muscles, for the first time I have thought about how she wouldn’t have had superfast supermarket yeast, but something perhaps a bit more like sourdough, which needed time to work slowly and grow through the whole of the bread. It says to me that being transformed by God, so that you become more and more like Jesus, and can do more and more of the things Jesus does, will take time.

This is an important lesson if you are like me, and you feel that you would prefer to do something you see the impact of tomorrow, or not bother. And when I look around our churches, I see things happening now which look like the result of a very long process of kneading with (in my case) very feeble muscles over a long period of time. So if you are just at the point of making a first decision to follow Jesus, please celebrate if you feel you are growing really quickly, but equally please persevere if it feels like working a little yeast through a very big batch of dough. The growth and the change will happen, and the results will be amazing.

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