Field Guide to Church of the Wild

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.

Valerie Luna Serrels is a co-founder and director of the Wild Church Network, and founder and guide of Shenandoah Valley Church of the Wild and of Hagia Sophia, where she offers eco-spiritual guidance for individuals and groups. She holds a masters degree in conflict transformation and peacebuilding and is certified as a spiritual director. She lives in Bridgewater, Virginia.

Victoria Loorz is a wild-church pastor and eco-spiritual director, author of Church of the Wild, founder of the Center for Wild Spirituality, and host of The Holy Wild podcast. She has become a leading voice for the wild spirituality movement that regards the natural world as kindred companions on the spiritual journey.