THE CHURCH OF...

Unlikely Altars

Where the Sacred Hides in Plain Sight.

“I believe in the Church of Baseball… I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary and there are 108 stitches in a baseball.”
— Bull Durham

It’s a great line—funny, soulful, oddly theological. But also… not exactly true.

Catholic rosaries don’t have 108 beads. They have 59. Anglican prayer beads come in at 33—one for each year Jesus walked the earth. If you’re looking for a strand with 108 beads, you’ll want to sit cross-legged with a Buddhist mala or a Hindu prayer garland. And as for baseball, yes, there are 108 double stitches on a Major League ball—216 if you're counting every single loop and doing a bit of spiritual accounting.

So yes, she was a little off. But also? She was completely right. Because baseball is holy.

Not in a stuffy, incense-and-silence kind of way, but in the way that teaches you to pay attention. To slow down. To linger in the in-between. It’s a sport of waiting and watching—of showing up for a moment that may or may not come, and being there anyway. That’s sacred. That’s formation. That’s a kind of prayer.

But this blog isn’t really about baseball.

It’s about how God shows up in unexpected places. Not just in stadiums or sanctuaries, but in Waffle House booths and traffic jams. In grief. In meatballs. In zombie apocalypses. In broken taillights, vending machines, awkward silences, and middle-of-the-night snack runs.

This is a space for naming the Unlikely Altars all around us.

Not the ones made of marble or lit by stained glass, but the kind made of messy living rooms, hospital waiting rooms, and cluttered countertops. Altars that aren't blessed with oil, but with toddler fingerprints and late-night phone calls and the kind of exhausted laughter that only comes after a long, weird day.

We’ve been taught to look for God in polished places—in perfect prayers, clean theology, and sermons delivered with just the right inflection. But grace doesn’t care about polish. Grace is sneaky. It shows up in the cracks. It leaks into our lives and waits for us to notice.

This isn’t theology for people who always get it right. It’s not a blog for people who feel holy all the time—or any of the time, really. It’s for the rest of us.

The ones just trying to make it through the week without yelling at anyone in the parking lot. The ones who cry at weird commercials. The ones who sometimes doubt, sometimes swear, sometimes forget to pray—and still hope there’s something sacred happening in the middle of it all.

So welcome.

We believe that wonder doesn’t always come with light beams and choirs. Sometimes it comes through the familiar like steam rising from a mug, a tired joke, a single moment of stillness in a crowded day. And we believe in a God who sees all of it—who steps gently into the mess and names it sacred.

Because the world is full of altars. Most of them just don’t look like altars.

But if we stop, and breathe, and pay attention—we just might see the sacred hiding in plain sight.

Maybe the ground was holy all along.
Maybe we are, too.