For people who find more honesty in trees and water than in pews, and for therapists wondering whether the office walls have stopped serving the work.
The first Wild Church gathering I ever attended was in a state park on a wet October morning. There were eleven of us. The facilitator opened with a short reading, then said, "for the next forty minutes, walk by yourself. Notice what calls you. Come back here when the bell rings." The bell was an actual bell, hung on a tree branch. Nobody had a phone out. The trees did most of the work.
When we came back, we sat in a rough circle on logs and rocks. People said what they had noticed. A woman talked about a mushroom growing out of a dead log and the relief of finding something dying in the company of something alive. A man said he had cried for the first time in a year and did not know why. A teenager talked about her grandmother. Nobody fixed anything. The wind moved through the hemlocks.
This is, in essence, what Wild Church is. A gathering of people who take the largest questions seriously, held in a place that is older than the questions, with a structure light enough to let the place do the teaching.
Where the form comes from
Wild Church is a small but growing tradition with roots in Christian contemplative practice, modeled in part on the Forest Church movement that began in the United Kingdom in the early 2010s. The forms vary. Some Wild Church gatherings are explicitly Christian. Some are post-Christian. Some are pluralist from the beginning, with people from every religious background and people from none.
The version I host in Ithaca is the pluralist version. I do not assume anyone in the circle shares a theology, including with me. The shape of the gathering is what holds people together, not a doctrine.
What the shape looks like
A Wild Church gathering is two hours. It begins at a trailhead or a park entrance, sometimes with tea, always with introductions and an agreement about how the time will work. There is usually a short opening. A reading, a song, a quiet. The reading might be from a sacred text, a poem, a piece of natural history. The point of the reading is not to tell people what to think. The point is to set the tone.
Then comes the longest part of the gathering. People walk alone. This is the most important hour and the part that people who have not been to a Wild Church before are sometimes anxious about. They worry they will be bored. They worry they will not know what to do. They are almost always wrong about both. The trees, the water, the path, and the sky carry the work. Most people, by the time the bell rings, do not want to come back.
Then there is a circle. People speak if they want to. People do not speak if they do not want to. Nobody fixes anything. Nobody analyzes anything. The aim is to receive what each person noticed and to let it sit in the company of what other people noticed. The circle usually lasts forty minutes.
There is a closing. Sometimes a song, sometimes a quiet, sometimes a final reading. Then it ends. People often linger.
Who comes
People who used to be religious and are not anymore but miss something they have not been able to name. People who never had a religion but feel a pull toward the largest questions. People in active spiritual practice who want to widen the room. Atheists. Quakers. Buddhists. Catholics who have not been to mass in twenty years. Pagans. Therapists. Hospice workers. Public school teachers. Anyone whose interior life is too large to be contained by the lunch-break conversation at work.
The age range in any given gathering tends to be from late twenties to late seventies. I have had grandparents and grandchildren in the same circle. Children are welcome at most of the family-oriented gatherings; quieter contemplative gatherings tend to draw an older crowd.
What it is not
Wild Church is not a substitute for a regular spiritual practice if you have one. It does not replace your church, your sangha, your zendo, your minyan. It is meant to sit beside whatever practice you have, or to be a doorway into something for people who do not currently have a practice and would like one.
It is not a hike. The walking is contemplative, not athletic. People with mobility limits are welcome and accommodated. The routes are chosen to be accessible.
It is not group therapy. I am a therapist, and I bring some of the training into how I facilitate, but the frame is contemplative, not clinical. If something difficult comes up for someone, they are welcome to come find me afterwards. The gathering itself is not therapy.
Why I host it
I came to this work obliquely. I am a psychotherapist by training. My professional life has been mostly indoors, in rooms with two chairs and a clock and a discreetly placed tissue box. That room can do a great deal, and I love it, but it cannot do everything.
There are some questions that do not yield in indoor rooms. There are some kinds of grief that need a larger sky. There are some kinds of healing that require water moving over rocks, or wind through trees, or the sudden silence of a deer that has noticed you before you noticed it. I started running outdoor groups because the office had stopped being enough for some of my work, and because I noticed that Ithaca, where I live now, is a town full of people who already know this.
The Wild Church gatherings are part of that larger work. They are also, for me personally, a practice. I have my own questions. The same trees are working on me.
On theology
Some people ask whether you have to believe anything to come. The answer is no. You do not have to believe in God, in any God, in many gods, in spirit, in soul, in anything you have been told you are supposed to believe in.
What you do need is a willingness to take the gathering at its own pace and to let other people's experience be different from yours without arguing about it. If a Christian in the circle describes their experience using Christian language, and a non-religious person in the same circle describes a parallel experience using natural-history language, the gathering can hold both. Nobody is being asked to translate.
What unites everyone in the circle is not what they believe. It is that they showed up to a real place with real attention, and they want to take whatever the place gives.
On the natural world
There is a way in which Wild Church is part of a slow, growing recovery of attention to the more-than-human world. Most of human history has been spent inside this kind of attention. The version of life we are inside now, where most days happen indoors and most hours happen in front of screens, is historically recent and demonstrably hard on the human organism.
You do not have to share my views on the climate crisis or on the moral status of the natural world to be welcome in a Wild Church circle. But I will admit, here, that I think these gatherings are part of how some of us are learning, in time, to be human again.
If you are thinking about coming
Come. You do not need to have done anything like this before. You do not need to be sure why you are coming. You do not need to know what to wear; you can ask. You do not need to bring anything except a willingness to be quiet for an hour with your own life in your hands.
Add your name to the interest list at the Groups page if you would like to be notified about the next gathering. I tend to run them seasonally. Sometimes in the gorges around Ithaca. Sometimes on the Cayuga Lake shoreline. Always in places that can do their share of the work.
The wild does not need anything from you. It is, in my experience, deeply willing to keep you company.