Worshipping in the great outdoors

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This article was published 07/03/2020 (2080 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Zip up your parka, lace up your boots and dress in your warmest woollies for some worship experiences on the wild side.

Tonight a pair of United Church of Canada ministers lead a worship service at Assiniboine Park as part of the wild church movement, which calls worshippers out of their church buildings and back to nature.

“Going outside and worshipping is connecting what we love with what we want to save,” says Lori Stewart, development co-ordinator at Centre for Christian Studies.

Stewart and Karen Tjaden, a minister in Carman and Elm Creek, founded Prairie to Pine Church in the Wild last fall after hearing about the movement that ties Christian worship to environmental concerns.

Since then, they’ve met monthly at various locations near Carman, and their first Winnipeg meeting takes place today at 5 p.m. at the firepits near the volleyball courts in Assiniboine Park.

“I like the creativity of preparing worship for an outdoor setting,” says Tjaden, who incorporates more movement in outside worship compared to a traditional church service.

“All of our worship has incorporated walking or wandering in the setting.”

They ask potential worshippers to be prepared for the cold weather, with the service running about 60 minutes and including some walking time.

“We had to cancel for road conditions once, but I never want to cancel because of the weather,” says Tjaden.

Wild church worship is more than just moving traditional Christian services outdoors, but instead incorporates aspects of nature and people’s responses to it, says the convener of the Wild Church Network, which has about 75 members across North America.

“It’s part of the purpose of the wild church movement. No matter what our weather and climate, instead of complaining about it, we just embrace it,” says Victoria Loorz, a co-leader of Echoes Wild Church in Bellingham, Wash.

Loorz estimates there are about 400 wild church groups, sometimes referred to as forest churches, in North America, with more emerging every month.

A new group is just in the organizing stage in Winnipeg, says Justin Eisinga, a graduate theological student at Canadian Mennonite University.

“It’s about cultivating a discipleship of following Jesus that’s intent on caring for the watershed in our own backyard,” says Eisinga of the reason for the group.

“We gather in that watershed and to listen to and experience God in that place.”

Loorz’s group of up to two dozen people meets monthly at a public park for up to two hours of walking, sharing and prayer. She says every group has a different practice and rhythm, with some wild churches transplanting their denominational liturgy to an outdoor setting and others taking a more ecumenical stance and attracting people who wouldn’t attend regular churches.

Whatever the practice, Loorz says the wild church movement goes beyond a personal spiritual experience in the mountains or at the lake to bring people together to understand their relationship to creation.

“It recognizes that we all come from an indigenous religion that was directly connected with the land, including Judaism and Christianity,” says Loorz, who led a wild church in Ojai, Calif., before moving to Washington state a year ago.

She says as people pay attention to the natural surroundings, they also pay attention to their human community in the same settings. Wild church services can also help people deal with the climate crisis as they notice changes in nature, says Loorz.

“It’s paying attention to the grief I feel we’re all carrying, this climate grief, even if we don’t name it,” says Loorz, also a co-founder of an outdoor ministry training program called Seminary in the Wild.

“It’s giving people a ritual and ceremony and a way to process that grief.”

Worshipping outside also provides context and meaning to the many biblical passages that refer to nature, says Tjaden, who lives on a rural property near Homewood, east of Carman.

“It lifts up that natural and environmental voice in Scripture and helps us hear it in a different way,” she says.

brenda@suderman.com

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