Field Guide to Church of the Wild
- Prayer & Spiritual Formation
- Publisher: Broadleaf Books (Augsburg Fortress)
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
From Victoria Loorz, author of Church of the Wild, and Valerie Luna Serrels, spiritual guide and wild-church leader, comes a guide for all who long to reconnect their spirituality with the rest of the living world. Field Guide to Church of the Wild serves as a companion to a movement committed to restoring sacred relationship with Earth. With a wide-ranging collection of stories, rituals, and practical resources, its pages lead us toward prayer and mountain, ritual and wren, gatherings and forests. Practiced as a personal spirituality or in communion with others, Church of the Wild is more than a novel way to do church outside or declare nature your church. Expanding beyond religious and institutional boundaries, this book offers ways to rewild your spirituality no matter your spiritual heritage. Field Guide to Church of the Wild invites us into landscapes and wild church communities to meet the movement's leaders and participants, both human and more-than-human. Join Loorz, founder of the Center for Wild Spirituality, and Serrels, director of the Wild Church Network, as they present wisdom collected from among the hundreds of wild churches blooming throughout the world. Gather inspiration and courage to invite a group of friends to practice wild spirituality. Create eco-spiritual practices that honor the sacred presence you already experience in nature. Each chapter includes stories and practices common to many wild churches, including grounding practices, land acknowledgments, liturgies, prayers, solo sauntering prompts, and ways to listen reverently to the land and one another. Take this field guide with you into the fields and wildish edge lands of your home place. Join an emerging yet ancient spiritual practice: remembering our place in an alive and holy web of interconnection.
Endorsements (7)
“In the long years when I was a Methodist Sunday school teacher, we met outdoors as often as in--because that is where it felt most natural to understand the God of creation. This beautiful book will help many to make that lovely and powerful connection.”
“Field Guide to Church of the Wild is an indispensable resource for starting and nurturing church in the wild. A feast of rituals, stories, and wisdom, this book inspires and invites us into the practice of reconnecting, re-storying, and restoring wild spirituality with humans and more-than-humans. A must-have companion to The Church of the Wild!”
“I had hoped that this Field Guide to Church of the Wild would give you practical, step-by-step instructions for forming and guiding a church of the wild. The authors actually give you something so much better--living examples of what people are actually doing right now in wild churches around the world. Be careful: as you read this book, you might just feel both an invitation and empowerment to bring some people together in an outdoor spiritual adventure.”
“Field Guide to Church of the Wild includes a treasure trove of ecospiritual practices and resources generously offered by a diverse group of wise, experienced leaders. Wrapped in the inspiring prose of Victoria Loorz and Valerie Luna Serrels, this book holds the potential to deepen and enrich the work of all those committed to deeper relationship with this sacred Earth.”
“The Church of the Wild movement is one of the most exciting advances in spirituality since Franciscan, Sufi, and Kabbalah mystics entertained dialogues with one another in Spain six centuries ago. But like any rewarding trip into the wilderness, you need a good field guide. Not only will this book reenergize your own faith, but it can help you build a stronger local community through creative liturgies and inspiring insights. It is a keeper.”
“I highly recommend this invaluable resource for anyone wishing to start a church of the wild and develop a deep, sustained connection with nature and Spirit. Drawn from years of the authors' own experience as well as that of a number of Church of the Wild leaders, the book is not only chock-full of practical resources, rituals, and practices; it also provides a rich spiritual grounding for these gatherings.”
“This valuable guide offers an abundance of simple but profound practices and experiments for recalling, reconnecting with, and appreciating the sacred dimension of the natural world. These places of reconnection reveal an emerging story of our passage as a species from an artificial state of exile into our birthright of earthly homecoming. This is exactly the kind of guidance we need to mature and deepen our relations with our mistreated but vitally animate world even while building inclusive relationships with one another.”
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