Field Notes for the Wilderness - Print

Field Notes for the Wilderness: Practices for an Evolving Faith

Sarah Bessey

Hard cover 256pp
ISBN 9780593593677
Convergent Books (2024)

[Allow 4 weeks]

“This is the perfect guide for all those of who need to be reintroduced to a faith full of grace, mercy, and love.” Kate Bowler, author of Good Enough

It’s hard to leave a faith that has raised us. Maybe it’s even harder to stay. But what can feel impossible is living in the tension. Living with a faith that evolves.

Bessey guides us through multiple principles to live by for an evolving faith, including:

• practicing wonder and curiosity as spiritual disciplines
• mothering ourselves with compassion and empathy
• making space for lament and righteous rage
• finding good spiritual teachers, and
• discovering what we are for in this life, and moving in that direction.

Sarah Bessey is an expert at faithfully stumbling forward. As co-founder of Evolving Faith, the foremost community for progressive Christians, she has been trusted by thousands of people to pursue a reconstruction of faith centred on compassion, truth, and inclusion. Bessey has found a deeply underserved and underestimated remnant in the wilderness of Christianity who are still devoted to Jesus, deeply rooted in the Gospel, fascinated with Scripture, and committed to reimagining their faith.

She becomes a shepherd for our curiosity, giving us a table for our questions, tools to cultivate what we crave, and a blessing for what was—even as we leave it behind.

“I have had a lot of fathers in faith, but never a mother – at least until I met Sarah Bessey. Now she is the writer I recommend to anyone who needs to be seen, loved, and held before they ever say why. Reading her new book is like opening a boxed lunch in the wilderness packed by someone who knew just what would get you through – along with a note that says, ‘Your soul is just fine.’ The only difference is that this book keeps feeding you after you have finished the last page (the one you hoped would never come). Take heart! You can start all over again whenever you want, safe in the embrace of a very wise mum.”
Barbara Brown Taylor, author of An Altar in the World and Learning to Walk in the Dark