Wild Churches (what are they, and how do they help?)

Field Guide to Church of the Wild is a smashing book, which could do wonders, if all places of worship invested in a copy (or got gifted one!) Co-written by a spiritual guide and the founder of the worldwide Wild Church Network, it’s a guide for anyone who wishes to reconnect their spirituality with the natural world.

Many of us love Nature and love God, and it seems in the modern world, some people seem to think they are separate from each other (drill the Arctic, destroy polar bear homes, then pray in church?)

This book has a different outlook, including prayers, stories and practical resources for any church who believed that we are guardians of the Earth that God created.

You’ll also meet leaders and participants of the Wild Church Movement, offering wisdom from the hundreds of wild churches that are now blooming across our planet.

Victoria Loorz is a wild-church pastor and Patreon writer. She has become a leading voice in the wild spirituality movement that regards respect for nature and loving God, as being on the same path.

Valerie Luna Serrels is co-founder and director of Wild Church Network. She holds a masters degree in peacebuilding and conflict transformation. Her own Wild Church (Virginia) meets in a forest, where the ‘teachers’ are trees, cardinals, finches and ancient lichen. How refreshing!

The website has a directory of inspirational churches. One is the fantastically-named Texas town of ‘Dripping Springs’, which commits to:

Growing our Faith
Honouring & Engaging Our Children
Being in Service to Our Community
Caring for God’s Creation

Valerie invites anyone in England (or anywhere) wishing to start a Wild Church community to contact her!

What Exactly is a Wild Church?

Wild churches are very popular on the other side of the pond, and being more so here too. Also called ‘forest churches’, this is a movement where you view God as part of the natural world.

Rather than always having a service in a stuffy church, parishioners go outside and celebrate God’s kingdom through the rustle of a tree or the call of a kingfisher.

Unlike say Pagans (which view ‘nature as God’, wild churches still celebrate a creator, but one that loves all of nature and creation, rather than worships at the seat of St Paul’s Cathedral or Vatican City!

There are no strict dogmas or rules, other than that you respect nature and are kind to all creation. That was how it used to be. St Cuthbert was the first environmentalist saint, who would campaign to protect eider ducks, and legend was that otters would dry his fur, after he’d gone for a swim in the chilly North Sea!