House of Bread

“The average church has so much machinery and so little oil of the Holy Spirit that it squeaks like a threshing machine when you start it up in the fall after it has been out in the field all year.”

Billy Sunday (1862–1935)

The problem with many churches today is the same problem we see in many of our restaurants. The French were the first to coin the word “Restaurant.” In the Dictionnaire de Trevoux, in 1771, defined the word restaurateur, as

“Someone who has the art of preparing true broths, known as ‘restaurants’, and the right to sell all kinds of custards, dishes of rice, vermicelli and macaroni, egg dishes, boiled capons, preserved and stewed fruit and other delicious and healthy-giving foods.”

It wasn’t until 1786 that the word restaurant was used to describe an eating-house. The simplicity of the early eating-houses was nothing like the restaurants of today. They were the local hangouts – places that served comfort food – honest and homemade, at a value that was friendly to the common folk. What started out as a simple house-of-bread suddenly became more complex.

Today, restaurants are big business and we are inundated with them. Like merchant-booths in an ancient marketplace, waiting for the crowds to sample their wares, we have them on every street corner and every inch of space between. These cookie-cutter concepts unfold, pop-up, and spread out across the landscape like settler’s tents across the prairie planes. No longer is the sole-proprietor standing at the door to great you. No longer do you walk into a neighborhood café and have intimacy with the owner and your neighbors as well. It’s all driven by the corporate Big-Buck and the bottom line.

The days of the independent owner who had only one goal in mind, to fill the place with well-nourished, extremely stuffed, and happy consumers is over. It doesn’t matter what you call it… a Café, Bistro, Brasserie, Tavern, Diner, Coffee Shop, or Restaurant, if there’s one on every street corner you can be guaranteed they the menu as well as the experience is carved out of the boardroom and not from the heart of a chef proprietor.

The days of the community restaurant beating with the heart-felt passion of an independent neighborhood owner is gone in most communities. In times past, the independent owner saw their restaurant as a place with purpose…. People would come in; they’d eat and be satisfied beyond their expectations. Their experience so fulfilling, so wonderful, that they leave feeling full and content, and... They want to come back again. Not only do they come back – they become a marketing-champagne unto themselves. They tell their friends, their neighbors, anyone who will listen… what a grand experience they had in your restaurant.

The sad reality is that many independent restaurants today struggle to survive. They strive while going up going up neck to neck with the big boys. They can’t compete with the glitz and glitter of the well-staged cookie-cutter concept of their corporate counterpart. The corporate giants on the other hand have it down pat. They have the educated experience, corporate marketing, project planning, a solid infrastructure of controls and training, with a so-called pulse on the consumer, and the corporate cash to back up their enterprise. They have done their homework, and they know the demographics of the area – where to put their hot branded concept. The problem with these corporate institutional giants is not their expertise and business acumen… the problem is passion.

Without passion, even though you have all the ingredients of success, you will soon become a whitewashed tomb of a restaurant. You will be a colorful balloon – bright and shiny on the outside – but inside – full of hot air serving up dribble to a consumer that has lost their ability to taste real food. They have bought into the picture on the billboard with its thick and juicy representation of a dish that in reality is not even close to the picture. Thank heaven for glitz and glitter… if you spin it right, strong theme, lots of energy and glitzy decorative elements to distract them from the product – maybe the folks won’t notice… and the sad thing is – most don’t.

A while back, Jan (my wife) and I were sitting around trying to decide what to eat for dinner… when, like a moment of marital oneness; we looked at each other and said, “Breakfast.” That was it, nothing like breakfast for dinner. We hopped on my motorcycle and shot over to a nearby chain coffee-shop that had recently opened. The building and design package of the facility was nice. They had all the extra consumer hooks one would anticipate these days, retail merchandising at the entrance, walk-up to-go counter for easy pick-up, counter seating with contemporary table-lamps - positioned appropriately, and a warm comfortable interior broken up with modest a ratio of booths to tables. Decorative pony walls and partitions infused with a few plants breaking up the space to create the right environment without causing you to feel you were eating in a banquet hall.

“So far so good,” I thought to myself, as I reached for the menu to scan the offerings. The menu was, from a corporate standpoint, perfectly engineered. All the items were well placed, descriptors were well written, layout was crisp, and for a café, the offerings sounded appealing. My choice was easy… steak and eggs to feed my craving, and flapjacks – there’s nothing like a pancake supper with a good steak and a side of eggs to fill that void.

Well, so much for fantasy. My food arrived and it was awful… I mean BAD, and I haven’t said that in a long time. Sitting on my plate was the most puny, overcooked, soggy (figure that one out), piece of what they referred to as a steak. Next to that boil-in-the-bag piece of meat, was a small pile of little pail, un-seasoned, cubed potatoes, called home fries, and two pail looking eggs…, at least they were over easy. Now, as I get older, I have grown to focus more on the company than the meal, but this time I couldn’t. I felt like Howard Beale, the acclaimed news anchorman for UBS T.V. in that 1976 movie “Network.” I wanted to stand up and look at rest of the patrons in the restaurant and say, look at your food – look at it will you and …get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore! Ah but alas, I contained myself. With a loss of appetite, I returned my food, and sat there with a cup of old warm coffee. I continued a nice dialog with my wife while waiting to depart.

You see this place with all the components to make a modern day restaurant a success, lacked one serious ingredient. They could not deliver what they had promised – good food. It takes passion to make good food. Someone in the kitchen has to be on his or her knees before a hot stove and find out how and what to cook. Passion is the key that separates real food from a cheap imitation. Passion is the door, the driving force, which brings all the right elements together. Passion will pull you to the consumer’s table to check the pulse of their experience. Passion will drive you into the kitchen causing you to work endlessly on a dish until it is just right, its taste, texture, aroma, layers of flavor, presentation, all of it, are perfect. You will tear it apart and build it back up again – as many times as needed until it’s right.

Passion is contagious. It’s contagious with the staff and the patron. People are drawn to your passion. People want to be around people that believe… people that are truly excited about what they do. They want to brush up against you and get close to you. They want to catch a glimpse of something… they want to glean a new understanding, a new depth of what you’re doing. They want an imparting of something. They want your mantel, so to speak. They want a double dose of the fire that is burning inside of you. They want to draw from the wellspring of your experience. They desire to taste of something grand. They want their cups to overflow.

Now listen…. This is very important. I am NOT talking about restaurants and the consumer…. I am talking about the answer to the greatest mystery of the 21st century. I am talking about the Church. I am talking about the great commission. I am talking about Jesus Christ and His desire to set a table in the community where you live and serve up a meal that is fit for Priests and Kings. I am talking about Passion and the Pulpit. I am talking about the ingredients needed to reach a dying world. I am talking about the difference between a lukewarm or dead church and one that is alive on the inside with the presence and heartbeat of Jesus Christ.

The restaurant, in a real way, is parallel to our church buildings today. We build them on every street corner. We offer up verbal menus from the word of God for all to come and feast upon. We desire to restore man back into fellowship with their loving Father and introduce them to the bread of life. Even the word “Restaurant” has its root meaning “to restore; a food that restores.” Haven’t we been given the great commission to restore mankind and bring them back into fellowship with their creator, to feed them real bread, living bread, the bread of life?

How often have we, the church, bought in to this corporate model. Instead of spending time on our knees before the hot stove of God’s presence, we are in search for the right hook, a good program, a new way to increase the tithe and raise the membership. Our real model is closer to Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, than the hanging gardens of Babylon. We don’t need spin. We need to be spent. Like change in the pocket of an Almighty God, we need to be sold out to Him. We need to seek Him until we sweat, as it were, great drops of blood. Only then will we have a message that is birthed in travail. Only then will we communicate the “Passion of Christ.”

We get caught up in our various programs and events, how well we say the same old message, while forgetting what the fundamental mission was that brought us here to begin with. At times such as this, we have to go back to our first love and receive from Him the passion and simplicity that we knew when we first believed – where the mission was fresh and simplistic – the goals were souls and not much more.

That is not always a simple task. People have a tendency to get comfortable no matter where they are or in what state they are in. They settle into complacency and loose the desire for a deep love relationship. It becomes a forked-road marriage where each partner is headed in opposite directions. Neither a marriage nor the church will be able to survive in such a state. We, the bride of Christ, must be in submissive obedience to His master plan. Our churches need more of Him and less of us.

It’s just like that, cookie-cutter, restaurant Jan and I ate at. It looked good, had all the spin but in the end – there was nothing solid to eat. It had become a “house-of-stale-bread” or a “house-of-bread” serving no bread at all, just old dried crumbs ground into the carpets from patrons long forgotten. When a restaurant runs out of its ability to serve food – people stop coming. The sad thing is that these people are hungry – they are thirsty – they are looking for someone somewhere to open their doors and invite them to come in and feast at the table of abundance.

Tragically, many churches have end up in the same condition. A house-of-bread where the only mandate is to reminisce about the bread of the past – speculating how good it must have tasted. Yet, there are no ovens to bake what people want or need. It becomes a history lesson about bread. People come in hungry for the bread of life. They want to sink their teeth into savory hot loaves of freshly baked bread. They hunger and desire manna from heaven but all they get is a menu they can never order off of.

Oh, there’s talk about how wonderful the bread once was – they even sing about bread – but serve it fresh and hot – no way. All of this brings about a spiritual famine in the land. People go about their day hungry and thirsty for a living vibrant relationship with the bread of life – but are left unfilled and hopeless. The sad thing is that Jesus is more, now than ever before, ready to send fresh hot loves of His presence into their midst – if they would only seek His face and give Him back His church.

So what happens to the communities where we live, our neighborhoods, our cities? What happens to our children? What happens to all the starving people around us desiring to sink their teeth into spiritual food that has substance and life giving power? They go hungry and the famine becomes more rigorous. Our churches become fast food outlets – scattered about on every street corner – but nothing of substance is really served there. What do people do when their spiritual hunger becomes spiritual malnutrition? They flock to anything or anyone that offers something resembling a loaf of bread. They window-shop on the streets of our cities and taste the offerings of the new age movement, Eastern mysticism, or the occult, in search for hot bread. They seek out astrologers and tarot card readers hoping to find living water to quench their dying souls.

People are a lot smarter than we think. If one of  our churches lit the ovens of the Holy Spirit and started cooking hot loaves from heaven – word would travel… it would get around… people would do anything to get real bread – hot freshly baked bread – especially in times of great famine.

Consider the story of Ruth, found in the book of Ruth in the Old Testament.

“Now it came to pass in the days when the judges ruled, that there was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehem Judah went to sojourn in the country of Moab…

…Then she arose with her daughter-in-law that she might return from the country of Moab: for she had heard in the country of Moab how that the LORD had visited his people in giving them bread.”

The King James Version, Ruth 1:1&6

Naomi and her family left home and moved to Moab because there was a famine in Bethlehem. Bethlehem was the city of David; Bethlehem was the birthplace of the Messiah; Bethlehem was the birthplace of the bread of life. Bethlehem was the last place on earth you would think of as a place of famine. Even the literal translation of the word “Bethlehem” in the Hebrew means “the House of Bread.” It should not have been a place of famine, but famine came, and Naomi left because they were hungry. They left because the House of Bread had no bread at all.

Why do people leave or never come into our churches – because there is no bread. Bread is the substance for life. The Jews knew the power of bread – they used its symbol during the Passover (feast of unleavened bread), the showbread was an integral part of the tabernacle and proof of the presence of God in the temple. In the book of Numbers, chapter four, it was called the bread of the Presence. The showbread literally means – show-up bread – the evidence that God has shown up in this place.

Naomi and her family are symbolic of the people that never enter, or leave, many of our churches today. They left Bethlehem and went to Moab trying to find bread. Oh, what lengths people will go through in search of some hot bread in times of famine? We see it all around us – people flock to nightclubs, casinos, and bars, in search for bread that will fill the void in their souls. They become slaves to sin, drugs, mental or physical abuse, and they except it – believing it is their cup in life. Why do they believe this? The answer is simple – we have let them down, we have failed them and not offered them the reality of the living truth and the power of a gospel that will change their lives forever. We have become a franchise of the fast food gospel.

The good news is we do not have to except this state of spiritual melancholy. Jesus is more than ready to rain upon us manna from heaven. He wants His church back and is more than ready to hang a sign outside the “House of Bread” stating – “Welcome… Under New Management!” The turnaround is simple:

“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land”

2 Chronicles 7:14

There is no other way. God wants to bake loaves of hot bread and serve them up to a people hungry for His presence.

This really hit home for me one Sunday morning at church while taking communion. I walked up to the communion table to take communion. I stood there, held the bread in my hand and began to thank the Lord for what He did for me. My heart was set on really digging into the moment. Suddenly, the Lord gave me an incredible vision.

I was standing in a café. The café was full of life, action, and buzzing with excitement. To my right was a large hearth stone oven. Right next to me was a chef with a wooden peel in his hand. He was pulling out of the oven large loaves of hot bread and tossing them into baskets. Waiters were moving about the café handing out loaves of this hot fragrant bread. Everyone was filled with incredible joy. The place was alive with enthusiasm and energy – and they were all smiling.

The counter in front of the oven was an "L" shape that wrapped around to the front of the café. In the corner next to floor-to-ceiling windows were two very large wine barrels – Napa Valley style. The wait staff was pouring wine from the spigots into large beer pitchers. They were running around pouring glasses of wine – smiling all the way. The front to the café was all windows, and the door was open. The street in front of the café was alive with people rushing over to enter the café.... A paperboy was riding his bike had stopped in front of the café with a paper in his hand. He had an incredible smile on his face, almost animated. The paper was the "Good News Journal" and the headline across the front page read, "This Is That," echoing Peter’s famous words from Acts chapter two, in explanation of the out-pouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.

I asked the Lord what was going on, and He said,

"Religion has taken my communion and placed it in a box of lethargy. It lies dormant at the foot of the cross, never moving to the place of resurrection and life. Yet, my kingdom is full of Life, where Mercy flows continuously from the vats of heaven and is waiting to be poured out and served up in Kingdom Café. Heaven is so full of my grace that it comes out of the oven of my presence like loaves of warm bread, eagerly desiring to be served up, and full of life and abundance. When my people embrace the abundance of grace and mercy that I desire to pour out – people will flock in groves to get into my kingdom and Joy will be the hallmark of my wait staff.

The fire has been lit, the ovens are hot, the dough has been prepared for this hour, and the vats are already overflowing with my mercy. The bread and the wine point to the glory of what I have done, what I am doing, and what I will be doing in the days and months ahead. The gift of my atonement did not stop at the cross – it is perpetual – it moves to create a kingdom here on earth... as it is in heaven - full of royalty – a royal priesthood – sons and daughters of God reflecting the Glory of who I AM and what I AM doing... ageless, ceaseless, full of life and abundance.

The Kingdom Café is open – tell them to come – come to my banqueting table... the table has been set, destiny is today, see what I see – behold the beauty and the glory of the Kingdom Café. Oh how I love the life in this place.”

The next time you drive down the restaurant district of your neighborhood pay attention to all the types of restaurants you find there. Look at the ones that have a two-hour wait, in contrast to the restaurants whose parking lots are empty. Count the number of fast food outlets and cookie-cutter chains and see how many cars are lined up in the drive-thru.

Look at the churches in your neighborhood and use the same kind of guidelines you would to find true, hot, passionate food, try to find the one with a two-hour wait – to get in. I tell you, if a great restaurant opened its doors and served hot-out-of-the-oven bread, you would have to fight them off with a stick to stop them from coming in.

I challenge you – if people are willing to stand in line for two-hours to have a burger – how long will they stand in front of a church that is overflowing with the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. The bread-of-life will draw them. The new wine will keep them. No coupon or two-for-ones will bring them in. No early bird specials will cause them to beat down your doors. However, bread, life-giving bread, just out of the oven bread, served hot and fresh for this generation – will.

Humanity has a bread shaped hole in its heart and the only thing that will fill it is Jesus. Let’s get back to the culinary basics and bring forth hot bread to the nations. I look forward to the day when the lines outside our churches go on for blocks. I can’t wait for the sweet aroma of the freshly baked bread of His presence to float through our streets filling the air like incense, drawing all those who are tired and needy. I look forward to the time when restaurant owners have to close down their restaurants because the ovens are turned up at the church down the street – fresh bread is being served and the entire town is eating it up. Let’s get on with the task at hand. Light the fire – kindle the stove – turn up the heat – let Jesus show up and bring to the world the bread of His presence.

“‘I have looked forward to this hour with deep longing, anxious to eat this Passover meal with you....’ Then He took a loaf of bread; And when He had thanked God for it, He broke it apart and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, given for you. Eat it in remembrance of me.’

   “After supper He gave them another glass of wine, saying, ‘This wine is the token of God’s new agreement to save you - an agreement sealed with the blood I shall pour out to purchase back your souls’”

Luke 22: 14-20 Living Bible Translation