What does your communion bread look like? Some churches use wafers and some use pieces of actual bread. What colour is your communion bread?
I’m a Baptist and generally we have used little squares of bread. I don’t exactly know what brand we have used, but it looks like white Wonder Bread. I have generally taken that for granted. Even my time in the Anglican church included white wafers.
But at my current church I was both surprised and pleased that some of our communion preparers have used darker bread. Why is this a good thing?
The bread is meant to represent the body of Christ. As a Baptist, I don’t believe the bread becomes the body of Christ, but there is some identification.
The body of Christ means two different things in the New Testament. It is both the physical form of Jesus, the human body that the Son of God was incarnated in, and also the church, the body of all believers.
While white has traditionally been seen as a colour of purity, how appropriate is it in the case of communion?
Jesus of Nazareth would not have been white in the way we think of norther Europeans. He would have had darker skin as typical in the middle east. When I see the communion bread made from darker bread, it seems appropriate.
The church as the body of Christ is also not strictly white. On any given Sunday, the congregation at our church is anything from a third to a half non-white. When I see darker communion bread, I see the body of Christ the way it is in our church, and the way it should be.
I need to make a few things clear. I’m not saying that we have rule that communion bread can’t be white. It sometimes is. I’m also not saying that churches should never use white bread as if that was racist in some way.
The only thing I would say is, what does the colour of your communion bread say about how you view the body of Christ? Would people be surprised by a different colour? Do we see either Jesus or the church as being primarily white?
Something to think about.
