Connection in Creation
A Review of
Field Guide to Church of the Wild
Victoria Loorz and Valerie Luna Serrels
Paperback: Broadleaf Books, 2025
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Reviewed by C.S. Boyll
Do you know the gospel hymn about the church in the wildwood? Field Guide to Church of the Wild counters that kind of “inside church” with ideas and practices for doing church outside. It invites people into the wilderness and is a companion piece to Loorz’s 2021 Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred.
Loorz, who served as a minister and climate activist after getting an M.Div. at Fuller Seminary, admits that burnout pulled her more and more into nature’s sanctuary. She now runs a Center for Wild Spirituality in Bellingham, Washington. She writes,
“A large oak tree in Ojai, California, beckoned the first Church of the Wild into existence…. There, a small group gathered to embody spiritual practices that helped them fall in love with a suffering world….Church of the Wild, practiced as a personal spirituality or in communion with other people, is more than a novel way to do church outside. It is an emerging yet ancient spiritual practice of reconnection with the rest of the living world as kin. It is a practice of re-sacralizing our wild and alive Earth and, in the process, remembering our role in the web of life.”
Co-author and Loorz’s sister Valerie Luna Serrels, a certified spiritual director and Reiki practitioner, describes her wild church entry this way,
“I had been coming home from church each Sunday feeling depressed and disconnected. Instead of feeling a sense of community with others or a sense of the Holy, I felt adrift and alone. Only when I started a Church of the Wild in Virginia and began to embody practices that offered a deeper connection with Earth and Spirit did I realize that the intimate human community I was yearning for was happening.”
The authors admit they were surprised to find their worship experiences in the wild resonated with others,
“We thought we were making things up at first; we had just started doing what our hearts were longing for: creating spiritual practices to reconnect with Earth as sacred. Once we met and started sharing our stories, though, we realized we were part of something larger than us: a work of the Spirit, a zeitgeist of an emerging consciousness that Earth herself seemed to be initiating. We built a website and named what was happening a ‘network.’ Only then were we able to see the larger picture: our little gatherings are part of a larger movement of an important emerging story, one that is helping to shift a worldview of dominance into a worldview of kindred interconnection.”
The authors use the language of being “edge walkers” between their church heritage and the larger “Christ history” along with the ancient practices of Celtic roots and the natural wisdom of indigenous groups.
For Field Guide, Loorz and Serrels solicited ideas, prayers, and practices from their Wild Church connections. That represents a major portion of this book offering a potluck of Christian, neo pagan, and panentheism practices. Some ideas are: “Eight Directions Prayer,” “Earth Eucharist,” Gaian reading of 1 Corinthians 12:12-31, ceremony for trees being removed, and summer solstice ritual.
“You won’t find a list of dogmatic how-tos in this book,” the authors write. “Dogs are more welcome than dogma at a church of the wild.” In other words, Wild Church may be whatever the gatherers determine it to be as long as it is respectful to everything in nature from ant to tree to watershed to human.
What many Wild Church gatherings have in common is a specific place in natural spaces. Usually the format includes “sauntering” alone and then regathering to share.
When I tried to explain this book to an elderly church member, she declared “It sounds like a church camp gathering around a campfire for testimonies and finding solitude with God by a tree.” This slightly echoes in the book, but the language means something different. Since this is the companion book to Loorz ‘s Church of the Wild, I recommend reading it first as a frame of reference.
Field Guide is well-designed by Loorz’s daughter Olivia Loorz, with lovely pen and ink illustrations by Manne Green. I had difficulty understanding how some labeled parts of the illustrations connected with Wild Church anatomy. For example, an oak tree sketch has arrows for emergence, leadership, grounding, stories, rituals, cycles, sauntering, sharing, and reciprocity. Grounding makes sense pointing to the roots, but the reasoning around why stories were marked near the trunk’s base and rituals placed in the high branches could use further explanation..
Loorz and Serrels have tapped into many people’s longings for experiencing creation with their souls as well as their bodies (a nature sabbath rest, perhaps). I wonder why more orthodox, traditional “inside churches” don’t prioritize this need and encourage services and small groups to meet more often outside in God’s beautiful creation.
C.S. Boyll
Cynthia Schaible (C.S.) Boyll writes from Colorado Springs and saunters in the Rocky Mountains. Her picture bookAlways Flying Bobby, with illustrator Jessica Santiesteban, released in April 2024. Find her atwww.csboyll@q.com.
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