Bread of Hope

The Christian practice of breaking bread together gives us a vision of the feast to come.

This gives us resurrection HOPE, which we help Christians to communicate.

Welcome to Bread of Hope –

feeding body, soul, and city

We envision a world where FAITH is characterised by humility, mitigating inequality and meeting needs.

So we support local charities tackling poverty.

This is a world where LOVE blesses society by adding worth.

So we help workers to invite worthiness through forgiveness.

FAITH

HOPE

LOVE

We ourselves are the comets. We are the moon and the stars. We are the fireworks in a darkened universe. To be in the presence of even the meanest, lowest, most repulsive specimen of humanity is still to be closer to God than when looking up into a starry sky or at a beautiful sunset.

MIKE MASON

Practicing The Presence of People
(Colorado Springs: WaterBrook Press, 1999), 15.

(Imagine) a church that is a dynamic set of relationships, friendships, and acquaintances … a medium of living relationships through which the gospel can travel.

MICHAEL FROST AND ALAN HIRSCH

The Shaping of Things to Come:
Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church
(Peabody: Hendrickson, 2003), 42.

(But) according to the economics story … churches are to focus on efficiency, effectiveness, and organizational growth.

F.S. MICHAELS

Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything
(Canada: Red Clover Press, 2011), 80.

WHAT ARE THE HEADLINES?

Bread of Hope has been working with a few current and former church leaders, both lay and ordained.
Bread of Hope has run training in a City Law Firm and in the Civil Service.
Bread of Hope has been making grants to Westbourne Park and Emmanuel – Harrow Road food pantries.
Jon has spoken at All Souls, Langham Place and a Chichester pan-church men’s breakfast on grief, as well as at Westminster City Council on resurrection and Easter.

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER

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WHAT DO WE DO?

Bread of Hope is a space to practise what we learn at the Lord’s Table. So Bread of Hope provides physical food by supporting local food pantries (click here). Bread of Hope also provides spiritual food by helping people to:

approach their work as worship (Worship@Work);
forgive others as God forgives them (Forgiveness@Work); and
witness to those around them (Witness@Work).

We also offer a Stress@Work course, which explores how even so-called negative emotions can be a blessing to others.

Breaking Bread

WHERE DO WE DO IT?

Some of our work is done with other organisations. So we often go where they are.

But we also host small meetings from 7.00 to 8.30 pm on alternate Mondays (all age) and from 7.45 pm on monthly Saturdays (20s–30s). Please email contact@breadofhope.org.uk if you would like to join us via Zoom. These fortnightly discussions are sometimes interspersed with elements from our @Work courses.

You can also find us on Meetup by clicking here.

We’ll structure our time as follows:

For the first 15 minutes we’ll catch up, then pray for one another’s work. (There’s no obligation to pray out loud.)
For the next hour, we will use a short video to launch us into a time of discussion and reflection.
We sometimes close with a time of lectio divina: https://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/253799/1-What-is-Lectio-Divina.pdf.

SATURDAY NIGHTS 2025

20s–30s

8 March: Check-in and prayer
5 April: Fitch #1: Faithful Presence
17 May: Check-in and prayer
21 June: Fitch #2: The Lord’s Table

2023–2025

Explored Timothy Gombis’ book The Drama of Ephesians.

2019–2023

Slowly trawled through the Godspeed course.

MONDAY NIGHTS 2024–2025

20s–70s

C.S. LEWIS

14 April: C.S. Lewis #1: A Grief Observed
12 May: C.S. Lewis #2: The Perfect Penitent

ATONEMENT AND MISSION

Breaking Bread

Image of Vincent Donovan: enhanced by Topaz and Photoshop

2 June: #1: Ched Myers: The Atonement
16 June: #2: Bread of Hope: A Life Worth Living
30 June: #3: Bread of Hope: No Place Like Home
14 July: #4: Bread of Hope: The Ministry of Justice
28 July: #5: Bread of Hope: St Anger
25 August: #6: Farris and Hamilton: Christus Odium
8 September: #7: Donovan: Christianity Rediscovered I
22 September: #8: Donovan: Christianity Rediscovered II
6 October: #9: Stroope: Transcending Mission
20 October: #10: Illich: To Hell with Good Intentions
3 November: #11 Spufford: Unapologetic
17 November: #12 Bread of Hope: The Gospel According to Job

2024–2025

We were preoccupied by Faith and Psychoanalytic Thought. We looked at the way in which Deborah Hunsinger integrates Theology and Counselling, taking in contemporary Jungians (Jordan Peterson, Walter Wink), Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and trauma theologian Karen O’Donnell along the way.

2023–2024

We riffed off of David Fitch‘s book Faithful Presence, before diving into a series of texts on gender and sexuality. These included: Brett Provance (on Romans 1); John Perry (on Acts 15); Judith Gundry (on 1 Corinthians 11); Cynthia Long Westfall (on 1 Corinthians 11); Judith Butler; Kathleen Stock; and Louise Perry.

2022–2023

We discussed Emails from Hotel Babylon, and a bespoke series on Sacraments and Secularity, which included: Charles Taylor; Alexander Schmemann; William Cavanaugh; Gisela Kreglinger; and James K.A. Smith.

2021–2022

Our theme was the Powers, diversity (men and women, ethnicity), and breaking breading together. Thinkers and texts included: Richard Beck; Ched Myers; Walter Wink; 1 Corinthians 11; Esau McCaulley; and Nathan Cartagena.

2020–2021

A Walter Brueggemann bonanza of three courses/series: Embracing the Prophets; Breaking Ground’s Conversations with Walter Brueggemann; and Materiality as Resistance.

2020

Hosted the Godspeed course.

Click here to find out more; and please email contact@breadofhope.org.uk if you would like to join us via Zoom.

WHY DO WE DO IT?

We believe that breaking bread together gives us a picture of the Christian life. The bread and the wine:

show us that human work is involved in worship; and
that we receive worth from God in order to give worth out; and they
witness to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

These three things further reflect the three offices of Christ: prophet, priest, and king. The booklet below elaborates.

The offices are qualified by values, which together – royal faith (receiving worth from God); priestly love (adding worth to the world); and prophetic hope (vouching for worth’s resurrection) – give:

a model of whole-life discipleship (that permeates our discipleship and “Gospel outline” booklets, which you can see here); and is also
a glimpse of the new creation – the feast to come.

Since breaking bread together gives us a model of whole-life discipleship, our mission is to embody what breaking bread is all about, which we do by providing physical and spiritual food. And our vision is the feast to come, to which breaking bread together directs us.

HOW IS THIS REFLECTED IN OUR @WORK COURSES?

Each of these offices – the prophetic, the priestly, and the royal – has at least one corresponding workplace course. These courses can be tabulated as follows:

Course	Office	Value	Benefit – objective	Benefit – subjective*
Worship@Work	Royal	Faith	Equality**	Flourishing***
Forgiveness@Work	Priestly	Love	Worth	Affection
Stress@Work	”	”	”	”
Witness@Work	Prophetic	Hope	Truth	Reflection

* OECD (2013), OECD Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being, OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264191655-en, 10, 29—32.
** “Equality” is shorthand for saying that “generosity mitigates inequality”. Whereas Bread of Hope focuses on generosity, others focus on equality; for example: Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (London: Penguin, 2009).
*** Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Wellbeing (London: Penguin, 2018).

WHAT DO WE BELIEVE?

Bread of Hope subscribes to the historic creeds of the Christian Faith, such as: the Apostles’ Creed; the Nicene Creed; and the Athanasian Creed.

Bread of Hope also believes in:

the dignity of all people, made male and female in God’s image to love, be holy and care for creation, yet corrupted by sin, which incurs divine wrath and judgement;*
the sufficiency of Jesus’ life and death as a sacrifice for sin;
Jesus’ bodily resurrection as the first fruits of the new creation, which includes the resurrection of people ‘from every nation, tribe, people and language’ [Revelation 7:9];
the divine inspiration and supreme authority of the Old and New Testament Scriptures, which are the written Word of God – fully trustworthy for faith and conduct.*

* Evangelical Alliance Basis of faith.

WHERE DO WE COME FROM?

Bread of Hope was founded by five guys in 2015:

Johnny Douglas (then: Associate Minister, Emmanuel Church, Northwood; now: Vicar of Swanley, St Paul, and Hextable, St Peter);
Tim Knight (Public Sector Christian Workplace Group);
Mark Davies (then: Christian Workplace Group, BP Canary Wharf);
Andy Nunn (formerly, Christian Workplace Group, BarCap); and
Jon Horne.

More about our story and rationale can be found here.

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WHAT ARE THE HEADLINES?

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER

WHAT DO WE DO?

WHERE DO WE DO IT?

SATURDAY NIGHTS 2025

MONDAY NIGHTS 2024–2025

WHY DO WE DO IT?

HOW IS THIS REFLECTED IN OUR @WORK COURSES?

WHAT DO WE BELIEVE?

WHERE DO WE COME FROM?