Ordinary Altars
How to Love the World (Even When It Breaks Your Heart)
by Sarah Bessey
Available everywhere books are sold on 26 January 2027
You don’t always get to change the world, but you do get to love it.
From “one of our most important progressive Christian voices” (Jen Hatmaker), an urgent invitation to actually love the world even when it breaks your heart.
Many of us were taught to look for God in the extraordinary: in big callings, dramatic transformations, affirmations of constant achievement, or in lives that inspire millions. But what if that way of seeing has left us unable to recognize that God is also present in the everyday—especially now, when headlines are overwhelming, our systems feel broken, and hope seems naïve? What does it mean to actually live a faithful, meaningful life when the world is on fire and nothing turns out as advertised?
Drawing from her own story of faith, disillusionment, motherhood, and decades of work as a spiritual guide, Sarah Bessey believes there comes a time when you decide that being earnest and sincere is better than being defeated. She names what she calls “ordinary altars”: places and people where the holy and the commonplace meet, not as an escape from our daily lives but as full-bodied engagement with the questions of our time and an encounter with the God who is with us in it all. Blending rich storytelling and compassionate spiritual insight, Ordinary Altars is a declaration of choosing stubbornly, again and again, to keep loving your small patch of the world when it would be easier to shut down or walk away or even become what you despise.
For readers who are spiritually tired but still hopeful, deconstructed but longing to rebuild, grappling with despair but determined to make room in their spirituality for the ache in their chest, Ordinary Altars offers honest field notes for a sturdy faith that can bear the weight of the world—rooted in reality, loving defiantly, and being stubbornly faithful enough to make the world feel like home again.
Available on 26 January 2027 everywhere books are sold.
Available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook.
Available for preorder
Ordinary Altars is now available for preorder at your local and/or independent bookstores as well as these online retailers:
Ordinary Altars: A Guided Journal
This companion journal invites you to weave the heart of Sarah Bessey’s Ordinary Altars into your everyday—a guided journey through the work of living a faithful, meaningful life when the world is on fire and nothing has turned out as advertised.
Also available on 26 January 2027
This companion journal invites you to weave the heart of Sarah Bessey’s Ordinary Altars into your everyday—a guided journey through the work of living a faithful, meaningful life when the world is on fire and nothing has turned out as advertised.
In Ordinary Altars: A Guided Journal, you will journey through the ordinary altars of your life—those unseen, uncelebrated places where God is present in the everyday—especially now, when headlines are overwhelming, our systems feel broken, and despair seems like the wiser choice. These pages are your invitation to engage with the realities of the world around us and decide to love the world anyway, whether you’re rebuilding faith after deconstruction, weary from performance-driven spirituality, or simply seeking a truer way of being with God.
Through thoughtful prompts, reflection questions, storytelling exercises, and accessible spiritual practices,
you will explore how to love our place, our people, and our limitations with courage. You’ll make space for lament, rediscover joy in the regular, and learn to see your own stories as the defiant choice and act of protest that loving can be in the world.
Ordinary Altars: A Guided Journal doesn’t promise a formula for faith—but it does offer the humble, healing work of showing up to your life and finding that God is already there.
Available in paperback and ebook.
Ordinary Altars: A Guided Journal is now available for preorder at your local and/or independent bookstores as well as these online retailers: