The first time most people hear the phrase “Pagan Church of Christ,” they do one of two things. They laugh. Or they tilt their head and say, wait — can you actually do that?
The answer, as we’ve found through years of practice, is: not only can you, but maybe you must.
Because the separation between “pagan” and “Christian” is far younger than the teachings themselves. And because, for many of us, holding only one half felt like living in a house with half the windows nailed shut.
What Earth-Based Spirituality Actually Means
Before we can talk about blending, we should be honest about what earth-based spirituality actually is — because it’s not what the word’s reputation suggests.
These traditions are nature-centered, cyclical. They take the living world seriously as a site of the sacred. They tend to see the divine as present within all things rather than external to creation. They mark time by the turning of the seasons. They include practices like meditation, ritual, herbalism, and ceremony.
None of these things are inherently anti-Christian. In fact, the early church absorbed many of them — the timing of Christmas and Easter, the use of candles and incense, the practice of pilgrimage to sacred natural sites. What the church often discarded was the understanding that the earth itself is holy.
We’re putting that back.
A Teacher of the Living World
The Christ of the Pagan Church of Christ is not the Christ of empire or exclusion. He is the Christ who touched lepers, who blessed the poor, who said the kingdom of God is within you and consider the lilies of the field.
This is a Christ who seems entirely at home in a forest. Who washed feet. Who talked about seeds and soil and sparrows as if they mattered — because they do.
We take these teachings seriously. The Sermon on the Mount is one of the most radical ethical documents in human history. The parables are full of earthy wisdom. The emphasis on hospitality, simplicity, and love for the marginalized is as urgent now as it ever was.
So we don’t set aside these teachings to honor the earth. We find that honoring the earth is a way of living them out.
The Wheel of the Year Meets the Sacred Calendar
One of the most visible ways we blend traditions is through the calendar we follow.
The Christian liturgical year — Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost — follows a narrative arc through the life of Christ. The Wheel of the Year — Samhain, Yule, Imbolc, Ostara, Beltane, Litha, Lughnasadh, Mabon — follows the arc of the earth’s own seasons.
These two calendars overlap more than most people realize. Yule and Christmas share the winter solstice. Ostara and Easter share the spring equinox and its symbolism of rebirth. Samhain and All Saints’ Day share the thinning of the veil between the living and the dead.
We observe both. We light Advent candles. We also build a Beltane fire. We hold a Lenten reflection. We also mark the spring equinox with seeds and soil. These aren’t contradictions — they’re harmonics.
What We Keep, What We Release
We should be honest: we don’t carry every part of either tradition.
We release the parts of Christianity that have been used to harm — the centuries of exclusion, the contempt for the earth that made environmental destruction a religious non-concern, the demand that belonging require abandoning your full self.
We also release any earth-based practice that has calcified into commodification — the selling of ancient wisdom as aesthetic trends, the appropriation of specific Indigenous ceremonies by people with no connection to those communities.
What we keep is what seems most alive: the love at the center of the Gospels, the earth-wisdom preserved across centuries, and the circle as a model for community — no hierarchy, everyone belonging.
Why Both Belong
We don’t blend these traditions because it’s trendy. We do it because, for many of us, neither one alone told the whole story.
Some of us grew up Christian and felt an ache for the earth-centered spirituality that the church had excised. Some of us came from earth-based backgrounds and found ourselves drawn to the community, the ethics, the person of Jesus. Some of us never fit anywhere and came here still looking.
What we’ve found is that the two traditions don’t just coexist — they illuminate each other. Earth-based spirituality deepens the Christian sense of incarnation: the divine in flesh, in matter, in the created world. And the emphasis on love and justice gives earth practice a moral spine it sometimes lacks.
If you’ve ever felt torn between these worlds — or never felt quite at home in either — we’d love for you to come to a gathering and see how this works in practice. Theology is easier to understand when you’re sitting around a fire together.