OUR STORY
How the Ozarks Church of Nature Came to Be
The Ozarks Church of Nature did not begin with paperwork. It did not begin with a nonprofit corporation. It did not begin because someone woke up one morning and decided it might be fun to start a church. Its roots go back many years.
For much of my life, I was searching. I sometimes jokingly called it church hopping. I would find a church, begin asking questions, discover something that did not sit right with my conscience, and eventually move on to another.
And another.
And another.
😂
I was baptized Catholic as a baby. I spent time around Greek Orthodox Christianity. I explored churches with highly emotional and theatrical worship. Later, I was baptized Mormon. And even later than that, I was baptized Baptist.
Over the years I visited, studied, questioned, listened, prayed, read, and explored traditions far beyond those few examples. I was sincerely trying to understand God. I was not looking for reasons to reject religion. I was looking for a religious home. But again and again, I encountered the same difficulty.
I would hear beautiful words about love, grace, compassion, forgiveness, freedom, and the goodness of God. Then I would ask questions. And sometimes the love seemed to disappear.
THE QUESTIONS WERE NEVER THE PROBLEM
I have always questioned things. Not because I wanted to rebel. Because I truly wanted to understand. If someone told me my dog had no soul, I wanted to know why. If someone told me that dreams, intuition, or inner spiritual guidance came from evil, I wanted to understand how information that inspired compassion, protection, creativity, or help for another person could automatically be considered wicked. If I was told that a loving God would punish someone eternally for asking sincere questions, I struggled to reconcile that with the God of love I was being taught about.
The more I asked, the more I realized something important:
I did not believe God was afraid of questions.
If truth is true, a sincere question cannot destroy it. Questions became part of my spiritual practice. They still are.
WHEN AUTHORITY REPLACES CONSCIENCE
Over the years I also encountered religious environments in which obedience to human authority seemed more important than personal conscience. I was sometimes taught that religious leaders possessed answers I was expected to accept simply because of their position. In one particularly disturbing experience, I was told that obedience to church leadership should be so complete that members should follow leadership even if they were directed toward violence against people outside their community.
That moment stayed with me. Whatever else I might believe about God, I knew one thing:
No human being gets to borrow God’s name in order to own another person’s conscience.
That eventually became one of the central principles of the Ozarks Church of Nature. Leaders may teach. They may counsel. They may share wisdom. They may disagree. But they do not own another person’s relationship with the Divine.
I learned that we are ALL students and teachers of one another.
WHEN RELIGION BLAMED THE WRONG PERSON
There were other experiences that were painful in different ways. I encountered situations in religious spaces where married men crossed sexual boundaries with me and responsibility was placed on me for their inability to control their own behavior.
That taught me another lesson I would carry forward:
Spiritual communities must protect consent instead of protecting reputations.
A person’s clothing, personality, friendliness, body, gender, spiritual beliefs, or presence never makes someone else entitled to touch them. Adults remain responsible for their own behavior.
That principle is now built directly into our Code of Ethics. Consent is sacred.
WHEN LOVE BECAME CONDITIONAL
Again and again, I watched people speak passionately about unconditional love while placing conditions around who deserved to receive it.
Believe correctly.
Dress correctly.
Vote correctly.
Love correctly.
Worship correctly.
Interpret scripture correctly.
Ask the approved questions.
Stay within the approved boundaries.
And then you belong.
I could never make peace with that.
If Divine love is truly greater than human love, why would our version of it become smaller every time somebody was different from us? That question followed me for years.
I KEPT SEARCHING
Eventually I began studying sacred traditions side by side rather than assuming only one could contain truth.
Christian writings.
Mystical traditions.
Indigenous teachings.
Eastern philosophies.
Ancient stories.
Modern spiritual thought.
Nature traditions.
Science.
History.
Psychology.
And the experiences of ordinary people trying to understand existence.
I discovered something surprising. They were not all saying exactly the same thing. But they were not all completely different either.
Again and again, certain ideas appeared:
Love matters.
Compassion matters.
Humility matters.
Service matters.
Gratitude matters.
Relationship matters.
How we treat one another matters.
How we use power matters.
How we care for the living world matters.
My search eventually became formal as well as personal. As part of trying to understand God, consciousness, spirituality, and the deeper questions of existence, I pursued a degree in metaphysics. That study became another part of the same long journey. I was not looking for a title or trying to prove that I had found “the one correct religion.” I still was trying to understand.
I wanted to know why different traditions described the Divine so differently, where their teachings overlapped, where they contradicted one another, and what remained true when the labels were stripped away. Metaphysical study did not end my questions. It gave me more language with which to explore them.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped believing I needed to choose only one human vocabulary for God.
God seemed much larger than our labels.
And, like the churches, sacred texts, Nature, dreams, intuition, service, and life experience that came before and after it, it became one more part of the path that eventually led to the Ozarks Church of Nature.
NATURE HAD BEEN TEACHING ME THE WHOLE TIME
While I was searching through religions, another teacher had quietly been present throughout my life.
Nature.
Plants.
Animals.
Gardens.
Weather.
Birth.
Death.
Healing.
Seasons.
Food.
The body.
The land.
The more closely I paid attention, the more sacred these relationships became. Eventually I understood that I did not experience Nature as something God had created and then stepped away from. I experienced Nature as an expression of the Divine itself.
Mother Nature was not outside my spirituality. Mother Nature was at the center of it. And when I stopped trying to force that understanding into somebody else’s religious box, much of the searching finally became quiet.
THE DREAM WAS OLDER THAN THE NAME
Long before there was an Ozarks Church of Nature, there was a picture in my mind.
As a child and teenager, I often talked about a place surrounded by Nature, a food forest, gardens, people gathering and learning, a sanctuary overlooking water, a place where life and spirituality were woven together. I did not have the language for it then. I certainly did not have a nonprofit plan. 😂 I just knew I could see it.
Those ideas came up again and again in conversations with childhood and high-school friends. And many others heard versions of the dream years before I ever moved here. At the time, much of it sounded impossible. Some of it became a running joke.
For decades, friends joked that someday I would probably end up with my own church. I was even jokingly called “the Anti-Christ-ie” by people who knew how relentlessly I questioned religious authority and conventional answers. 😂 The joke was funny because starting a church was about the last thing I imagined I would seriously do.
I was the one questioning churches. Leaving churches. Trying another church. Getting myself in trouble by asking uncomfortable questions. Arguing that God had to be bigger than the boxes people kept putting God into. And yet, underneath the joke, the same vision kept returning.
Nature.
Water.
Gardens.
Food.
Animals.
Healing.
Learning.
People gathering.
Freedom.
Service.
A place where people could come without first proving that they believed the correct things. For many years, I thought these were simply dreams, ideas, intuitions, or pieces of imagination. Only much later did I begin to recognize that they had been pointing in the same direction all along. I do not need everyone else to interpret those experiences the way I do. But in my own spiritual life, those early dreams and intuitions became part of the path that eventually led here.
I could see pieces of the sanctuary long before I knew it was a sanctuary.
And when I eventually arrived on this land and began planting, teaching, caring for animals, building gardens, creating gathering spaces, and opening the property to others, something strange happened. Pieces of the childhood picture began appearing in real life. Not all at once. Not perfectly. And certainly not easily. 😂
But enough that I began to realize:
Maybe I had not spent my whole life trying to invent this place.
Maybe I had spent my whole life slowly finding my way to it.
THE MINISTRY EXISTED BEFORE THE CHURCH NAME
Long before the Ozarks Church of Nature became a formal organization, these beliefs were already shaping my life.
For nearly two decades, I have taught freely. Fed homeless, cared for the sick and dying.
I have shared knowledge.
I helped create a free school.
I created Project Love Your Neighbor.
I taught herbs, gardening, food preparation, practical skills, spiritual ideas, and ways of living closer to Nature.
I fed people.
I shared what I had.
I cared for animals.
I planted.
I grew food.
I made medicine.
I listened.
I learned.
I helped people wherever I reasonably could.
Sometimes it worked beautifully. Sometimes I helped beyond healthy boundaries and learned painful lessons from that too.
But the underlying belief never changed:
Love should eventually become an action, not just stay a word.
Over time, I realized that the Free School, community projects, herbal teaching, gardening, feeding people, free plants and herb walks, caring for animals, spiritual conversations, meditation, planting memorial trees, and creating sanctuary were not separate projects.
They were all expressions of the same faith.
SO WHY CREATE A CHURCH?
Because eventually I realized I had spent years searching for the kind of spiritual community I wished existed. One where you could believe deeply without demanding everyone believe identically. One where questions were not dangerous. One where Nature was sacred. One where animals mattered. One where intuition was not automatically condemned. One where science did not have to be an enemy of spirituality. One where spirituality did not require surrendering personal conscience. One where women were not blamed for the misconduct of men. One where spiritual authority did not mean control. One where FEAR of God wasn’t at the identity of belief. One where nobody threatened eternal punishment because you disagreed.
One where Christian, pagan, Buddhist, atheist, mystic, seeker, herbalist, farmer, skeptic, and curious neighbor could sit together without somebody needing to win.
One where:
You can love your own path without hating somebody else’s.
And eventually the question became obvious. If I had spent decades searching for that place…maybe it was time to help create it.
THIS CHURCH IS NOT A REJECTION OF OTHER RELIGIONS
We do not believe Christianity is wrong.
We do not believe paganism is wrong.
We do not believe Buddhism is wrong.
We do not believe someone must abandon another religion to participate here.
We recognize beauty, wisdom, history, mistakes, contradictions, and human fingerprints throughout religious traditions. Including our own.
We do not claim perfection. We simply choose to practice differently. A person may enter our sanctuary carrying a Bible. Another may carry tarot cards. Another may carry the Bhagavad Gita. Another may carry nothing.
We are more interested in how people treat one another than what object is in their hands.
FREEDOM OF RELIGION IS PART OF OUR RELIGION
This may be one of the simplest ways to understand the Ozarks Church of Nature:
Freedom of religion is itself part of our religion.
Freedom of conscience is not merely something we grudgingly allow other people. We consider it sacred. We believe a person has the right to seek God directly.
To question.
To explore.
To change their mind.
To follow intuition.
To study multiple traditions.
To belong.
To leave.
To disagree.
To believe deeply.
Or to remain uncertain.
Our freedom to live our beliefs does not require somebody else’s freedom to disappear. Their freedom does not require ours to disappear either.
We can hold strong convictions without holding one another captive.
WHAT WE WERE LOOKING FOR
After all those years of church hopping, searching, questioning, studying, teaching, serving, planting, growing, falling down, getting back up, and learning…
I think I finally understand what I was looking for. Not the perfect religion. Not the perfect church. Not the perfect leader. Not a place where everyone agreed. I was looking for a place where love remained love after disagreement began.
A place where freedom did not belong only to the people in charge. A place where nobody had to pretend they knew everything. A place where life itself could still teach us. A place where people could belong without surrendering who they were.
That is what we are trying to build. The Ozarks Church of Nature did not create these beliefs in 2026.
2026 is simply the year we finally gave them a name, a structure, and a home.
And perhaps the simplest way to explain why we exist is still this: