Finding God in the great outdoors

Andrew Ollerton discusses The Map and the Mountain, a short film by Bible Society that captures his journey with God summiting a 4,067m-high peak in the Swiss Alps. 

‘For a lot of people, Christianity has only ever been like a religious map, a moral guide, this ethical, abstract idea,’ Andrew says. ‘But what if the real experience of Christianity is the mountain, not the map?’

Paul’s letter to the Romans is the literary equivalent of a mountain: majestic, challenging and complex. You’ll know that if you’ve taken The Romans Course or read Andrew Ollerton’s book, Romans: A Letter That Makes Sense of Life. But you haven’t seen that mountain climbed – until now.

A way to win the outdoor community for God

With the help of two expert climbers and a courageous videographer, Andrew documented his longest sustained multi-pitch climb as a way to share the gospel. Andrew weaves together teaching from Romans and what it means to follow Jesus as he crosses valleys, traverses glaciers, and reaches breathtaking heights.

Andrew shares, ‘In Romans 12, Paul says, “In view of God’s mercy ... ” Even though the Christian life is not a mountaintop experience all the time, in his letter Paul gives you a new view of what God is like, and the idea is that then you can live all of life with that altered perspective. I thought, “Well, that’s what happens with mountains.”’

More than anything, Andrew wanted this experience to highlight the relationship that exists between faith and the outdoors. ‘Too often the Christian faith is synonymous with a sort of indoor religion,’ Andrew says. ‘I wanted to reach the outdoors community and ask, “What if faith was less like attending a church service, and more like going on an adventure?”’

‘A lot of people have had profound encounters in nature, and they think of those wild places as being as close to a church or a temple as they’d want to go,’ Andrew says. But what if they could see that God himself can be encountered in those wild places that they love, through the beauty of the world he has made?

Andrew’s mountaintop miracle

Although you won’t see this in the 12-minute video, Andrew encountered God in the middle of the filming, while he and the team were halfway up the mountain. ‘I wear contact lenses when I’m filming, and on the first night of our two-day journey I lost my contact lens in my eye,’ Andrew shares. ‘We tried to flush it out, but we couldn’t get hold of it. When I woke up in the morning my eye was red and sore, and we all agreed I needed to go to hospital. I was gutted because I knew we didn’t have a film – we hadn’t been to the summit.

‘As we started down the mountain, I had a thought that our videographer, Andy, who is a Christian, could pray for me. He put his hand on my shoulder and prayed a simple prayer, and when I opened my eyes something felt different. He looked at my eye and said that it didn’t seem to be red anymore. Within five minutes I had a new contact lens in – I still don’t know what happened to the other one – and we turned around and started back up the mountain. It was a reminder to me that God is with us in these natural spaces just as much as he is in a church building.’

The living word of God

What about the Bible? What if people who are turned off by formal, institutional religion could realise that the Bible isn’t just a moral handbook, confined to religious settings, but the living, breathing word of God?

In several of the beautiful shots of scenery in the video, you’ll see Andrew reading from his Bible. ‘I like the idea, even on camera, of people seeing the Bible read not in a church service or a school assembly, but on a ridge or in the snow,’ Andrew says. ‘The story of Scripture mostly unfolds in outdoor environments and can be engaged with outside of a church building.’

It’s there, resting against a cross on the top of an Alpine peak, that Andrew says, ‘The cross is the very centre of the Christian message. You can’t understand what Christianity is about until you’ve understood the cross on which Jesus died.’

The hope, Andrew says, is that this video would be an encouragement that God is someone who can be found in creation. ‘We hope people will watch it and share it with their communities or friends who are passionate about the great outdoors. Church groups or centres can watch it together and have a discussion off the back of it, then share it with people who they’ve been out climbing, canoeing or skiing with who don’t know Jesus yet.’

Watch The Map and the Mountain and share it with other outdoor explorers.