Rewilding the Sacred: Finding God in the More-Than-Human World

Phillip Dieke

When we started Radical Sacred, it wasn’t about launching a podcast—it was about finding a space to breathe.

Both of us had worked in churches that did good work but avoided hard conversations. There were things we couldn’t say out loud—questions about empire, creation, capitalism, or even doubt. We wanted an outlet where we could explore those things honestly, without worrying who might be uncomfortable.

That’s how Radical Sacred began: a space for open dialogue about the spiritual life we’re actually living.

The Name

We chose the title intentionally. Radical comes from radix, meaning root. It’s about returning to the fundamental nature of things, not being extreme. And Sacred reminds us that holiness isn’t confined to a sanctuary. Together, Radical Sacred became a declaration that the divine runs through all things—the soil, the city, the questions we’re told not to ask.

We also wanted to reclaim radical from its negative connotations. For us, radical faith means going back to the root of the sacred, not running from it.

Over time, a theme kept emerging in our conversations—nature.

We’d start with theology or spirituality and somehow end up talking about trees, rivers, and weather. Eventually we stopped fighting it. There was something in creation calling to us.

Most of our work in the church had centered on human-to-human and human-to-God relationships. But we realized how rarely we talked about the more-than-human world—the plants, animals, and ecosystems we’re part of. Once we noticed that absence, we couldn’t unsee it.

That insight led us into a whole season on pilgrimage—not just the kind that takes you across oceans, but the kind that starts the moment you step outside your door.

Wes Granberg-Michaelson once told us that pilgrimage is about walking out of empire so that you can be transformed—and then walking back in to help transform it. That image stuck with me. It reframed faith as movement: leaving the familiar so we can return differently.

Learning to Rewild Church

That idea carried us into conversations with people like Valarie Luna Serrels and Victoria Loorz of the Wild Church Network. Their work helped us see that “rewilding” isn’t about rejecting the city or going off-grid. It’s about remembering that we belong to creation, not above it.

I told Valerie once how hard it was to find wildness in Dallas—the concrete, the noise, the sheer sprawl. She smiled and said, “Even concrete comes from the earth. It has a story too.” Then she talked about the dandelion that pushes through the sidewalk—a tiny act of persistence and grace.

That image has stayed with me. Just last week I was running with my dog near the lake and saw a green bush growing straight out of the dam—out of concrete. Life insisting on itself. That’s rewilding: the sacred breaking through where it shouldn’t be able to.

For us, Radical Sacred has become more than a podcast; it’s a kind of digital wild church.

We started online, but the community we’re cultivating feels deeply rooted in soil and spirit. People write to tell us they’re taking walks differently now, paying attention to trees, rivers, or even the weeds in their neighborhoods. That’s what I hope for—to help people remember that the sacred is not somewhere else. It’s right here.

Rewilding church doesn’t mean leaving institutions behind. It means remembering what they were built to nurture: connection, awe, and transformation. Faith was never meant to stay contained inside walls. It’s meant to spill out—into the streets, the forests, the air we breathe.

The Invitation

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Radical Sacred, it’s that spirituality begins with attention. The sacred doesn’t need us to manufacture it. It’s already here—waiting for us to notice.

So maybe rewilding isn’t about finding something new. Maybe it’s about remembering what’s always been true:

that God still speaks through wind and water, through concrete cracks and city trees, through podcasts and people learning how to listen again.