David McIinnis paused his shoveling to stare at the half-dug gash in the floor.
Blisters pulsed at the base of his thumb. Around him lay the detritus of a business that was supposed to open all too soon. Fragrant, untreated cedar trim huddled in orphaned little bundles. The vast mouth of a woodfire oven yawned. Piles of hand-cut slate waited, salvaged from chalkboards in the classroom David was determined to turn into a bakery. Twenty-two days from now.
It was midnight. Opening day marched nearer.
Why on earth had he insisted on doing this by hand?
When David dreamed up Nightingale Bread, a Colorado Springs bakery that uses organic, locally grown, hand-milled flour and traditional fermentation processes, he had an idealistic theology of bread behind it, one he’d shared with me at a friend’s wedding a decade ago.
I wanted to see how his theology had held up to reality, so I interviewed him.
Lean and long, David looks like a Dostoevsky protagonist. His beard is dark, his brows heavy, and his spectacles wire-rimmed. He dresses simply, in dark blue jeans and tees, or button-downs rolled to the elbow. During our chat he speaks in a low, amused monologue, then interrupts himself for monopolizing what is, after all, his interview.
Thousands of loaves, pizzas, doughnuts, and scones later, reality has honed but not diminished his vision. The dream hasn’t changed. But David has. Bread, with its living parable of baptism, death, and resurrection, its rituals of repetition, and its ancient, global orthodoxy, has changed David in ways he never expected.
When David and I first met, the American renaissance of traditionally fermented bread was rising but not yet widespread. We were decades away from the “pandemic-fueled sourdough frenzy” that cleared grocery store shelves of flour. Despite the increasing popularity of whole-grain bread evangelists like Peter Reinhart and Greg Wade, by and large the nation was eating the pre-sliced, cellophane-wrapped, industrially-produced, and shelf-stabilized loaves we had been since the 1940’s.
American Christianity leaned toward mass production as well. A version of denominationally agnostic, mega-church evangelicalism had established itself as the national average. Churches were big. Weighty with political as well as spiritual clout, American evangelicalism tended to be as wide-spread and as white as our sandwich slices.
David and I were both prototypical evangelicals (before that term was a political landmine.) These were the norms of our context, norms David would come to question.
We met at a smallish Presbyterian university. It was the kind of place where 18-year olds debated the five points of Calvinism over brunch. Valedictorians, homeschoolers, and high-school class presidents, we had big goals and a soul-deep dread of breaking rules. We tended to intellectualize faith, and everything else.
Ironically, it was in college that David began exploring Anglicanism.
At first the liturgy drove him nuts. “The repeated prayers, every week the same thing!” David recalls. “It felt Catholic — ritualistic — dead.”
Over time, though, what repelled him began to renew him.
“The form is the thing that allows you to be free,” David says, referencing Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm. “I started thinking in this direction. Every time I repeated one of the prayers, I was a different self than the one who’d said it last week. I was able to go — how shall I say it? Farther? Higher? To sink more deeply into it.”
It was so different from what he’d grown up with. When I ask what denomination he was raised in, David answers with a laugh, “American.” He assumed nondenominational church worship was as normal as Wonderbread.
Neither assumption would survive.
We’d both come from a subculture in which full-time ministry, like being a pastor or a missionary, marked the height of holiness. David was wondering if the work of our hands could be just as holy. Up to my elbows with the manual work of early parenting, I was asking the same question.
*
There was much sweetness to those baby days. There was also much sweeping, rocking, nursing, diaper changing, washing, folding, cooking, cleaning, and doing it over again the next day.
Ever the nonprofit, ministry type, I’d come from teaching refugee kids to read, leading Bible studies, writing worship music, and helping immigrant families buy homes. It felt significant. My mothering work could feel, by contrast, mundane, even rote. Where were the epiphanies I’d learned to associate with spiritual progress?
While I was incredibly honored to be a mother, I also felt starved, spiritually and intellectually.
I wasn’t waking up early for an hour-long quiet time anymore, I was stumbling out of bed five times a night to nurse an infant who wouldn’t settle. My recipe for intimacy with God had always been quiet time plus extra study plus communal worship plus long, journaled prayers. It was mental work. Now I could barely stay awake.
Steeped in dualist theology and Enlightenment culture — both of which tend to magnify mind over matter — I experienced “merely” physical work as a waste of time.
The faith and work movement, bless ’em, did little to help. It was all very well for Dorothy Sayers to tell carpenters to “build a good table.” Or for Andy Crouch to urge artists to create culture. Or for Tim Keller to imagine a plumber reading his seminal book on faith at work, Every Good Endeavor. At the end of the day, everyone shaping my thoughts on work was a writer or pastor or artist or thinker.
I wasn’t reading books by bakers.
But I was on the verge, and David had beat me there. As we talked that evening at our friend’s wedding, David quoted Michael Pollan, Peter Reinhart, and Robert Capon, with his mystical onion and relish for fats. Wendell Berry would come into it too, declaring the holiness of farming. In a few more years, Tish Harrison Warren would connect spiritual goodness to making sandwiches and brushing teeth with her Liturgy of the Ordinary.
There were plenty of authors joining Paul’s call to “live quietly … mind your own affairs, and work with your hands.” I hadn’t read them yet. I just remember David saying that working with our hands was innately good.
I desperately needed that sacramental paradigm.
*
Matter matters. This is the sacramental worldview. Because God made physical reality and declared it good, because Jesus came as God-in-flesh, and because we are here on earth as God-in-action, matter matters.
David neared college graduation. It seemed everything he encountered conspired to push him toward the sacramental view of life. The books he was reading, his experiment with Anglicanism, and his growing instinct to do as well as think Christianly, converged in one moment on a bike ride through the Pennsylvania countryside.
“I stopped and looked around me,” David says, “And I don’t know what it was about this moment but I just got this sense that the whole creation was Christian. It was inescapably infused with the Spirit of God. God is all around and in it all. Not pantheistically! But somehow, all Creation is not just dead matter, it is participating in eternity.”
He would graduate with a history degree and zero interest in pursuing academics. He wanted to make real things.
Drawn to the beauty and ritual of vineyards, David apprenticed under a vintner. But the snobbery around wine bothered him.
Enter bread.
“I found in bread much of what I’d found in wine,” David says, “the repletion, the ritual, the goodness of shop work. But while wine has this weird, silly, snobbishness about it in our culture, and I can’t stand that stuff – the super nice cars, the fanciness – a three year old can eat bread. There’s no initiation, no sommelier classes or notes about the bouquet. It’s one of the most basic foods, historic foods you can imagine. And it nourishes. I just really … fell for bread.”
Which is why, four years after “falling for bread,” David found himself building a bakery, one brick at a time.
“I was green, I was cheap, and I just wanted to see if I could do it,” David says, explaining why he built Nightingale with his hands, his friends, and a few rented power-tools. “There’s certainly some ego in there too,” he confesses. “I worked like … like a donkey. I had no idea what I was doing.”
But he didn’t want to cede carpentry to contractors who couldn’t care about the whole as much he did. “To not see that carpentry is deeply Christian work is to forfeit it to the dualistic framework and secular regime.” (This is how David talks and lives, between the esoteric and the earthy. He is an intellectual dusted in flour, wry and funny by turns. You should read his bakery Substack.)
The room he would remake wasn’t anything remarkable at first, just another builder-grade, mass-produced classroom. The walls were covered with whiteboards, the floor with this twelve-inch linoleum flooring, and there was a coat closet in the back. “But I thought the chalkboards underneath were so beautiful!” David would end up cutting the chalkboards into tiles for Nightingale’s signature slate design.
Doggedly, with neither information nor experience, in service of a slowly evolving vision, David built something beautiful and functional from that which was old and discarded.
“The place started to open up organically into the image of what I wanted it to be.” Nightingale glorifies God, David says, simply because it was built by “a human with a soul, trying to make something beautiful.”
Other entrepreneurs worked around him in other classrooms. The whole building is a redemption story. Once a defunct elementary school, the space has become a communal gathering place, with businesses like Nightingale, a gym, a café, and various breweries. Lincoln Center, as it’s been rechristened, bustles with life, its halls fragrant with the scents of just-roasted coffee, tangy micro-brews, and of course, yeast and wheat, while the happy shrieks of kids and chatter of friends echo throughout.
David finished digging in time to rebuild the floor, finish it with red quarry tile off Craigslist, treat the trim with linseed oil, and install an old wooden French kneading trough. He built a red brick wall, interjecting it with a diagonal line of big rocks he’d retrieved from the dratted ditch, and hung a sloping wooden shelf across it to display his loaves.
With the help of a ragtag team of family members, church friends, and a couple necessary specialists like an electrician and a plumber, Nightingale passed inspection, earning one contractor’s grudging praise, “Pretty good … for a baker.” David opened Nightingale Bread eight years ago this April. He just held an anniversary party to celebrate, complete with a chalk-drawing contest, raffle prizes, and a string quartet.
Looking around today, David is deeply satisfied with the work of his hands. He suspects the shop’s visual beauty today might be his most poignant witness. “Modern buildings in America seems to reflect a shattered image. Churches look like malls. Everything is modeled after consumption. But a lot of people come in and say Nightingale reminds them of some bakery they saw in Lithuania sometime. That’s the best compliment to me.”
*
In baking, as I would come to experience in parenting, the physical and the spiritual meet. With exactly the earnest enthusiasm of ten years before, David tells me again bread’s metaphor for life with Christ.
The grain of wheat falls and is crushed, the flour baptized with water and kneaded. The leaven like the Spirit raises the dough, enlivening it, making it useful and fragrant. In the wise baker’s perfect timing, the fires of the oven bring another death and a final transformation for the loaf that will nourish the world.
Bread, David says, is intrinsically Christian. Just like he saw the innate spiritual meaning in a gorgeous fall day, many bike rides ago, he sees Christ’s work unfolding in the life of his bakery.
Beyond his work kneading, mixing, and baking, David is learning to operate Christianly as an employer. He doesn’t particularly relish business operations, or see himself as an authority figure. “Somebody’s always leaving for vacation. Somebody’s always sick. Sometimes I can’t get people to sweep the floors or organize the dishes … I am having to learn to be direct with people.”
Some days, David confesses, he’d rather “bake a bunch of baguettes and sell them from the back of his truck” than run a wildly successful bakery with 15 staff and an hour-long line of customers out the door.
Nevertheless, running a business brings extra opportunities to love people. “There is a joy to employing people. They’re able to pay rent, they’re meeting friends here, they’re learning something new. They’re a great team.” David strives to create the kind of workplace he describes in a recent call for job applicants as, “A positive work environment with good camaraderie, a shared commitment to high quality efforts and products, and a complete absence of fluorescent lights.”
Nightingale pays well above minimum wage, and offers retirement plans, annual bonuses, and generous vacation. “Furthermore, we offer an alternative to the often mind-numbing, phoney-baloney work that has lamentably come to characterize our age, with the honest and good work of a traditional skilled practice and historic trade, work you can be proud of.”
Every day brings its repetition. David shies away from labelling his bread “artisan” or anything else that connotes elitism. He makes normal bread. Real bread. It’s very, very good, with a dark, crackling crust and a sturdy, caramelized crumb, not tangy like San Francisco sourdough but more wheaty, sweet, and complex. Even customers who can’t eat other gluten can eat David’s bread, perhaps a function of the flour’s freshness, or of grains which have not been sprayed with pesticides, or stomachs adapted to local strains of wild yeast. Whatever the case, the bread David calls real is extraordinary.
His life, like ours, is ordinary. Regularly, David drives to San Luis Valley in Central Colorado to buy wheat, rye, and spelt from farmers he knows by name. He mills it in the shop, trains his staff, records the bakery’s history and beauty on its Instagram page, chats with customers, and pens the day’s offerings onto a plain, taped-up sheet of brown butcher’s paper.
There is a rhythm to the ordinary work, a liturgy of bread and business.
The fluffy, store-bought white stuff today seems to David a “sci-fi simulacrum of bread-like product,” not normal. Nondenominational Christianity no longer seems normal, either. David joined the Orthodox church ten years ago, drawn to a faith that would not tamely cater to his own preferences.
He believes in a historical faith, and a historical bread, with some resistance to it.
“I want to make bread that isn’t cute, bread that is truly beautiful. Like the one who meets you face to face and challenges you, threatens you, even changes you.” David wants a force that pushes back against his sensibilities and demands he conform to reality, not the other way around. Yearning for a Christ who would challenge him, threaten him, even change him, David found him in the Orthodox church.
*
As for me, I am still up to my elbows in parenting. It’s different work now. My children are bigger, 8 and 10. They read chapter books and invent puns and play the interesting kind of board games. They grasp God, inasmuch as anyone can. They ask startling questions about faith. Together we devour ideas and hash out new ones.
I neither miss nor dismiss the glut of physical work I did when they were younger. In retrospect I see how my rocking, sweeping, and nursing was a new medium for intimacy with God, a living out of Christ’s love. Truly, “my body is both for me and for everyone around me and … an act of worship,” as Abby Perry writes.
I look at my earlier self and know that my hands, sore arms, hips, and sleepy eyes worshiped God. I prayed a liturgy, back then, of diapers and wipes and car-naps, burp cloths and breasts. My work was as much “participating in eternity” as the Bible studies and bedtime chats we share.
There’s still some manual, repetitive labor to my days. I fry eggs for school breakfasts, scrape plates, and load the dishwasher. I lug library books to and fro and lay cool washcloths on fevered foreheads. It’s glory work, holy as hallelujahs.
Holy as baking bread.
“I don’t shove icons in people’s faces or name the rolls after St. John,” David says near the end of our interview. “I don’t call this a Christian bakery. But if you make anything real, it will be Christian. Walk into the woods: God didn’t stamp the trees with crosses. They glorify God just by doing what he created them for. I make real bread. That’s Christian. That’s all I have to do.”
