This is a list of organizations who are making the effort to bring Christianity back in connection with Earth and the Wild.

 

Wild Church Network

 

Re-connecting people with an untamed God in our wild homes.

There is a movement happening.  From isolation to connection.  From detachment to immersion.  From dualism to integration.  Spiritual leaders from a wide range of denominations are beginning to question the wisdom and consequences of regarding “church” as a building where you gather away from the rest of the world for a couple hours on Sundays.

We are a growing network of pastors and spiritual leaders, who have made bold moves to launch new expressions of church outside to re-acquaint, re-cover, and re-member our congregations as loving participants of a larger community.  In this age of mass extinctions, we feel burdened by the love of Christ to invite people into direct relationship with some of the most vulnerable victims of our destructive culture:  our land, our waters, the creatures with whom we share our homes.

And, there, people remember that they belong to a larger beloved community.  Along the way, we have remembered that our Christian tradition of spiritual transformation has always been rooted in the actual local wilderness.

Join the Wild Church Network if you lead or want to lead your congregation out of buildings and into deeper relationship with God through nature in your community.

 

Seminary of the Wild

 

Seminary of the Wild exists to:

  • Reclaim the wild roots of the Christian story

  • Cultivate a sacred relationship with Earth

  • Clarify your sense of deep purpose

  • Embody your authentic identity as a unique gift to the world.

Begin to discover through enchantment, what the world really is and who you really are through nature-based spiritual practices, contemplative wanders, sacred council and facilitated group work, ceremony, guided dreamwork and deep imagery, embodied movement, writing, challenging ecotheological study geared towards discovering and dismantling the domesticating forces of culture and society. READ MORE HERE.

 

Church of the Lost Walls

Rev. Matthew Syrdal M.Div, lives in the front range of Colorado with his beautiful family. Matt is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian church (USA), founder and lead guide of WilderSoul TM and Church of Lost Walls TM and co-founder of Seminary of the Wild TM. Matt is a fine artist who speaks writes and offers workshops, retreats, and guides immersive nature-based experiences around the country. Matt has studied ancient Christian Rites of Initiation, has studied World Religions, anthropology and rites-of-passage. Matt has spent several years developing Celtic and indigenous Christian practices oriented towards nature-based leadership, liturgy, retreats, and group immersions, for the cultivation of greater wholeness, and deepening soul work for greater service to the world.

Matt seeks to re-wild what it means to be human.  His work weaves in myth and ceremony in nature as a way for people to enter into conversation with the storied world in which they are a part.  In referencing this “storied-world,” Matt says, “there is a constellation of relationships with the more-than-human world in which our sense of self-hood, community, and myth emerges from a deep conversation that is always happening around us.” Find out more here. 

 

Order of the Sacred Earth?

At this critical time in human and planetary history, the world does not need a new religion or even a reshuffling of our old religions. It does not need a new church either.

What it needs is a new Order: a community and movement of people of varied belief systems (or non-belief systems) who share one sacred vow: to preserve Mother Earth and to become the best lovers (mystics) and defenders (warriors) they can be on behalf of Mother Earth. A post-denominational Order and a post-religious Order. Therefore, a Spiritual Order.

We, Matthew Fox, a 76-year-old elder, activist and spiritual theologian, along with Skylar Wilson, a 33-year-old wilderness and meditation guide who leads inter-cultural ceremonies, and Jennifer Listug, a 28-year-old writer, spiritual leader, and publicist, are presenting a challenge and an opportunity in the vision we launch in this modest book. That vision is about an Order of the Sacred Earth.

Learn more here.