Sara Miles Take This Bread

Why People Keep Asking About Take This Bread and What You Actually Need to Know

Sara Miles's Take This Bread is not a manual. It's a memoir about the Food Bank Cafe at St. Augustine's Church in downtown LA, where she took up the role of Eucharist minister after wandering into the congregation almost by accident. The book covers how a community built around free food became entangled with questions of race, poverty, faith, and institutional church politics. If you're looking for a step-by-step guide on running a food ministry out of a church basement, you're going to be disappointed. Miles doesn't give you one. The book was published in 2011 and is still in print across multiple formats. You can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and the usual ebook platforms. The central narrative follows Miles's experience at the cafe, which operates on a model where anyone who shows up is welcome regardless of background, belief, or circumstances. The Eucharist is offered alongside free groceries and prepared meals. It's not a typical Sunday morning service. The congregation is largely composed of people who would never walk through the doors of a traditional church. What makes the book worth reading is that Miles doesn't romanticize it. She documents the friction between the cafe's open-door philosophy and the administrative apparatus of the diocese. She writes about the board meetings, the donor expectations, the racial dynamics in a predominantly white institution serving a predominantly poor and multiracial community. There's also a personal layer involving her own struggles with authority, substance use, and what she eventually came to understand as God's presence in places that aren't conventionally holy.

I read this book a few years ago after encountering references to the Food Bank Cafe model in conversations about church-based mutual aid. What struck me wasn't the theology so much as the operational reality Miles describes. Running something like this means dealing with the IRS, the bishop, angry parishioners, and people who just need a hot meal without a sermon attached. The book captures all of that without neat resolution. One thing beginners miss when they approach this material is that the sacramental framework Miles uses isn't optional decoration. It's the actual organizing principle. The reason people show up repeatedly isn't because of free groceries alone. It's because the Eucharist creates a repeated structure of gathering that operates outside standard church expectations. That's counterintuitive for people who assume food pantries are purely logistical operations. They aren't. They're communal rituals, whether the organizers admit it or not. Another counterintuitive point: the model doesn't scale the way people want it to. You can't just install the same structure in another diocese and expect it to work. Miles herself struggled with this. The power dynamic between St. Augustine's and the wider Diocese of Los Angeles meant that every expansion attempt ran into canonical and financial gatekeeping. If you're inspired by the book and want to start something similar, the practical first step isn't finding a building. It's understanding your local diocesan structure and who actually controls the budget.

I encountered a specific edge case when advising someone who wanted to replicate the cafe model in their own community. They assumed they could simply source bread and wine from a wholesale distributor and begin hosting communion-style gatherings. The problem was canon law. In the Catholic Church, only an ordained priest can consecrate the Eucharist. A layperson organizing a communion service in a non-Church space runs into serious legal and canonical issues. The workaround Miles found at St. Augustine's was integration with the parish structure, which meant answering to a pastor and a bishop. Any independent attempt would face the same bottleneck or get shut down quickly. The book's real takeaway isn't that churches should run food pantries. It's that food distribution is never neutral. Who serves, who receives, where it happens, and under what framing all carry theological weight whether anyone admits it or not. Miles eventually came to view the Eucharist not as a reward for the faithful but as fuel for people who have nowhere else to go. That framing shifts everything about how you design the program. If you want the actual text, here's where to get it:

Amazon paperback and Kindle: search for Take This Bread by Sara Miles. The ISBN is 978-1451626415 for the Free Press edition. There are occasional references online to downloading the book illegally. I'm not going to provide or encourage that. The book is cheap enough that there's no practical reason to seek it out that way, and it supports the author directly if you buy it legitimate. Some people also bring up the audiobook version narrated by the author. It's available through Audible and other audio platforms. Miles reads her own work, which changes the pacing slightly and gives you access to inflections you don't get from the printed page. I found the audiobook useful when I was processing the earlier chapters because the delivery feels more conversational, less polished.

The main limitation of relying on this book as a practical guide is that it's retrospective. Miles is writing about events that happened over roughly a decade, and her account is selective. She doesn't document the financial ledgers, the meeting minutes, or the specific policies that kept the cafe running month to month. If you need operational detail, you'll find more in interviews and podcasts she's done since the book came out rather than in the text itself. There's also the question of whether the model works long-term. Miles left St. Augustine's after several years. The cafe continued under different leadership, but the tensions she describes didn't disappear. Church-based food programs face the same funding precarity as any nonprofit, and the sacramental framing adds a layer of complexity that secular food banks don't deal with. That complexity isn't a bug. It's the point, but it also makes sustainability harder. If your goal is purely charitable food distribution without the religious component, there are better-resourced models to study. Feeding America, mutual aid networks, and community fridges operate with clearer legal structures and less institutional baggage. Miles's approach is valuable when you're specifically interested in how sacramental theology can shape community organizing, not when you're looking for a scalable food rescue blueprint.

The book remains relevant because it names something most church administrators and nonprofit directors avoid discussing openly: that hunger ministry is as much about power and identity as it is about calories. Reading it won't teach you how to file your 990 or navigate your diocese's insurance requirements. It will make you think differently about why people show up and what keeps them coming back.