God Gets Everything God Wants

By Katie Hays

A gospel of hope, inclusion, and defiance 

If God gets everything God wants, and if what God wants is you, can anything stand in God’s way? 

Too many Christians have been taught that core aspects of who they are—their gender, their sexual orientation, their politics, their skepticism—prevent God from loving them fully. For these individuals, church has been a painful experience of exclusion, despite the reality that Jesus was the embodiment of God’s radical inclusion. 

Katie Hays invites weary Christians, former Christians, and the Christ-curious to take another look at God through the testimony of our biblical ancestors and to reimagine the church as a community of beautiful, broken, and burdened people doing their best to grow into their baptisms together. Hays insists that yes, God does get everything God wants, and—even better—we’re invited to want what God wants, too, and want it “more and more and more, until life feels abundant and eternal and delicious and drunken with possibility.” 

This is a message of stouthearted faith anchored in wonder—not false certainty. Atheists are welcome. Those who feel uneasy inside a church are welcome. Those still angry at other Christians are welcome. Because no matter what we’ve experienced, the God who still adores this world is the God of hope, inclusion, and defiance of the powers that be. And for those who are willing to collaborate in “the painstaking work of examining our Christian faith and sorting it out—the good stuff from the harmful stuff, the stuff with integrity from the stuff we simply inherited from family or church or . . . the cultural air we’re breathing”—there await life-giving possibilities found nowhere else.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781467463607

Katie Hays

  Katie Hays is the founder and lead evangelist of Galileo Church, a church that seeks and shelters spiritual refugees, especially young adults and LGBTQ+ people, on the outskirts of Fort Worth, Texas. She is also the author of We Were Spiritual Refugees: A Story to Help You Believe in Church and the coauthor, with Susan Chiasson, of Family of Origin, Family of Choice: Stories of Queer Christians.

Book preview

PREFACE

The universal gospel that God gets everything God wants is shaped by location: the people, places, sounds, history, and experiences of Christian community. For me, that location is Galileo Church.*

Look, nobody gets to Galileo Church by accident.

For one thing, we’re hard to find. Exit 442A off I-20 on the southeast edge of Fort Worth leads to a tree lot on one side of the interstate. Over on our side there’s a Mickey D’s, a charity thrift store, a liquor store, a metal-galvanizing plant, and our Big Red Barn. Which is, honestly, not all that big—and more of a rusted, corrugated sheet metal hue.

By the time you show up here, you’ve probably combed our website obsessively, on high alert for any whiff of the kind of stuff that can bring all your pain back to the surface. You have learned to be exquisitely careful around All Things Christian—church, the Bible, and especially Christians themselves. All that stuff has hurt you. You don’t wish to be hurt anymore.

Photos on our website—of communion, of people singing hymns—make you flinch. You remember the day you stopped pretending you’re not gay, or that your cousin or your roommate or your moms aren’t gay; or you stopped keeping your mouth shut about the US empire and consumer capitalism and systemic racism and the havoc we keep wreaking on each other and the rest of the world; or you stopped sequestering science from religion in your brain, no longer hoping they’d never meet and have an actual conversation.

And when you stopped doing those things, you slammed into the painful insistence by your church that you were the problem: your way of being, your way of thinking, your way of voting, your way of asking pesky questions that unsettle what has long been settled. Maybe they didn’t kick you out, not officially—actual excommunication is rare these days, as most (predominantly white, North American, Protestant) churches are desperate to keep everyone and mostly lack the gumption to take a costly stand—but they made it clear that you weren’t welcome any longer. Not all of you, anyway. Not 100 percent of your queer or queer-adjacent, skeptical, science-y, socialist-curious self.*

In case it matters to you, can I affirm that your skittish skepticism is a rational response to what you’ve experienced? Maybe you’ve already worked this through with your therapist as I have with mine. I hope so. But sometimes it helps to hear again that your decision to walk away from church, if that’s what you did, or to simply stop pursuing it when it obviously wasn’t that into you, was a healthy one.

But here you are, melting in your car on a hot Sunday afternoon, scooching down in the driver’s seat, peering at people making their way through the parking lot, down an asphalt path, and disappearing around a corner where there must be a door. A sign chained to a stop sign pointed you to our parking lot.* You simply cannot believe you’re contemplating going inside for worship. It’s been so long, and you don’t understand why you’re still drawn to it. I wish I knew how to quit you, you’ve said to the church, to God, to the anonymous heavens more times than you can count.** But here you are.

If you came to me today with your confession of how long it’s been since you last attended a worship service, and/or how hard it is for you to believe any of this stuff anymore, and/or how impossible it seems to you that God has done anything good to recommend Godself lately—I’d say, Yeah, and that’s on us, the church. It’s on the churchy people like me for whom it mostly does work much of the time, we who have made our peace with the church’s real failures mostly by ignoring them. We did that to you. We pushed you away, sometimes on purpose, sometimes completely by accident. Whether it was aggression or negligence on our part, you deserved better. I’m so sorry. You don’t have to forgive us, but I’d love a chance to make it up to you. No strings. Just … come and see.

And what then? If you took me up on it, what would I show you? What could be happening in that sheet metal, not-so-red barn tucked under I-20 that might be worth your time and attention?

I have taken to calling our primary work at Galileo Church theological rehabilitation. Together we are doing the painstaking work of examining our Christian faith and sorting it out—the good stuff from the harmful stuff, the stuff with integrity from the stuff we simply inherited from family or church or, here in the Bible Belt, the cultural air we’re breathing. It’s not fast or easy work, and I’ve come to believe that nobody can really do it on their own. We’re in it together, trying again to figure out what it means when we make the syllable God with our mouths,* or how it forms us to take the name Christian for ourselves.

It’s risky work, right? To consider again the possibility that God might know exactly who you are and love exactly that about you? To consider again the possibility that the Christian faith might be good for you, helping you to flourish in all the fullness of your gorgeous, sparkly, queer, and/or quirky AF humanity? Maybe that’s why we need each other—so none of us bears all the risk alone. Maybe that’s what church is supposed to be: people sharing the gamble of faith, daring to hope, taking a chance on love.

Here’s what I can’t do: I can’t say everything that needs to be said to repair all the ways Christian theology has hurt people, including you. That’s partly because I can’t begin to know all the ways that God and the people of God have disappointed people, including you. And it’s partly because I’m not a systematic theologian—that is, I don’t have a lot of training or practice in articulating or even aiming at articulating the Whole Truth about God.

But for a long time now I’ve been listening, and learning, and praying, and studying, and exploring with my church-full of spiritual refugees. We’ve been exploring together how we might recover ways of expressing Christian faith, faith that is rooted in love and produces real hope. There are ways, I’m telling you, of doing that, so that Christianity is an actual help instead of a hindrance to the flourishing of this world, and the flourishing of you.

What I hope to do in these pages is show you what we’ve learned over several years of not taking our faith for granted. We’ve leapt. We’ve wrestled. We’ve dreamed and argued and wept and cursed and laughed. We’re not saying we’ve figured everything out, but it’s been a damn fine effort, if we do say so ourselves. We’ve been grateful for the time and space and companionship to work through it. And we’re happy now to come alongside you on this path of faith-or-something-like-it. You didn’t get here by accident. We’re really glad you came.

You can tell a lot about an author’s theology by how they organize their subject. Do they start with God, or with Jesus? (Nobody starts with the Holy Spirit, bless her heart.) When they talk about people, do they give more pages to Genesis 1 (people are beautiful and bursting with potential) or Genesis 3 (people are broken, deceitful, ashamed)? What’s the proportion of time spent with the teachings of Jesus versus the teachings about Jesus? Where do they mostly locate the activity of God: in the church, or out there in the cosmos? Are they more interested in how we should live or in what happens when we die? What do they care about more: what we believe or what we do? Do they tend to imagine human beings relating to God as individuals or as members of the collective human family?

This point about the organization of the subject came home to me in a rereading of Douglas John Hall’s Professing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context (1993). Hall ultimately settled on three main divisions for his systematic work: Theology, Creaturely Being, and Christology. But, he said:

A … finally insoluble limitation must be acknowledged. Like every great story, the story with which Christian theology has to concern itself is characterized by one overarching feature: integrity…. Thus the entire practice of separating the parts, of ordering them according to a certain schema, … is at some basic level artificial and potentially misleading. Where does Theology leave off and anthropology begin? How does anyone discuss Christology apart from a simultaneous consideration of divinity and creatureliness? In saying this, we are only reiterating the need for modesty. (31–32)

TL;DR: I probably won’t get this exactly right, but it’s worth a (modest) try.

Modestly speaking, then, here’s how we’re going to move forward from here:

Introduction

No, this isn’t it; you’re still in the preface. Hang on a sec.

Part 1: God Gets Everything God Wants

This claim is so basic at Galileo Church that we often abbreviate it: GGEGW. It’s a way of talking about God, and God’s activity, that is dynamic instead of static. All the prophets know it, and they’re itching for the rest of us to catch up.

Part 2: Jesus Is God Getting Everything God Wants

GGEGW has become the lens through which we observe and cheer for Jesus’s entire life and ministry, because wherever Jesus is, there God is Getting Everything God Wants. We know what Jesus was obsessed with, and we know why: because he was the Logic of God walking around with skin on. In a hamster ball. Wait for it.

Part 3: When God Doesn’t Get Everything God Wants

God insists on partnership with human beings, especially as demonstrated through Jesus’s bestowal of the Holy Spirit on his friends and the subsequent not-without-hiccups development of the early church. Sometimes people cooperate with that Spirit and get things amazingly right. And this has become our anthropology: that we are, each and every one of us, grown-ass adults imbued with the Spirit of the living Christ.

Part 4: I Want to Want What God Wants

Here, then, is how to live: by aligning our desires with what God wants, leaning into God’s future, finding beautiful what God finds beautiful. Even if it turns out that what God wants most of all is you—all of you, and everybody else too.

Part 5: We Want to Want What God Wants

All that stuff I said in part 4? We do that together. And that’s what makes us a church, subversive and strong and useful in this world God still loves.

Conclusion: What Do You Want?

Well?

*Galileo Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is a community of belonging in Jesus’s name (i.e., a church) on the southeast edge of Fort Worth, Texas, born in 2013 to seek and shelter spiritual refugees. We’re named after the Christian astronomer who scared the church by showing, with his math and his telescope, that we earthlings are not the center of the universe—a view that the church feared would undermine its teaching that human beings are the pinnacle of God’s creation. We chose the name in humble recognition that the church itself could use decentering—and because Galileo was devout and kicked out, just like a lot of us. And because we like science.

*I have actually heard, multiple times, of church members being told, You can still attend worship here, still sign up for certain kinds of service here, still give money here; but you can’t have membership status now that we know who you actually are. Yep, for real.

*Another sign in the lot warns you to Trust in the Lord, but DON’T leave your stuff in the car—Matthew 10:16. Look it up; you won’t be sorry.

** Say it like Jake Gyllenhaal to Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain . Say it right out loud. Nobody’s listening but God, and God has heard it before.

*A hearty thanks to Rob Bell for reminding us we’re not all saying the same thing when we say God, in What We Talk About When We Talk About God (2013).

0

THE GOOD AND NECESSARY WORK OF THEOLOGICAL REHABILITATION

Come on, come on, come on, you can do it! the physical therapist urges the person sweating and grunting and gritting their way from one end of the parallel bars to the other. The patient is recovering from a car wreck–induced spinal cord injury, retraining her nervous system and her musculoskeletal system, learning how to walk again like a thirty-year-old toddler. It takes everything she’s got to cover three yards or so, and the whole rehab center PT room cheers when she gets to the end.

The speech therapist exaggerates her own facial movements, lips pushed forward to form Ooooooo, then stretched wide for Eeeeeee. The stroke survivor wants more than anything to tell their partner, I love you, and thank you for sticking with me through all of this. It’ll be a while before they can speak all those words with clarity, but progress is coming with several hours of daily rehab.

The recovering addict confesses to his counselor how terrified he is of drowning in the flood of emotions that have surged now that he’s clean and sober. He has miles to go on this journey of learning to feel his own feelings; it won’t feel safe for a long time. He’ll stay in rehab, doing the work of reconnecting with himself, until everyone on his care team agrees that he can maintain sobriety and manage all the feelings on his own.

It’s a mess, but it’s got good bones, the realtor says to their buyer. Yeah, I’ve got some ideas, the buyer says, knocking on walls, already imagining how she can rearrange this square footage to suit her needs. It’ll take a year or more working every weekend, but rehabbing an old house—knocking out some walls, tearing out carpet to see what’s underneath—sounds like fun. Bet it’s hardwood, she thinks. Maybe my girlfriend will want to help.

Going to Rehab

Some years ago I started talking about my primary work at Galileo Church as theological rehabilitation. I was drawing on the familiar idea of rehab, where something old is restored, or something broken is repaired, or something forgotten is relearned, or something neglected is tended to. Rehab is the kind of work that remembers what came before for the sake of what comes next. You’re not starting from scratch, building from the ground up; in rehab, you’ve got material to work with—it just needs rearranging, or recovering, or rebuilding. Above all, it needs care; rehab is a slow, care-full process. By paying attention to detail and not getting in a rush, rehab resists doing any further damage. It might take a long time. Do you have the patience for it?

Theological rehabilitation, then, is the slow, care-full work of remembering what we think we know about God, the universe, and everything and figuring out which parts of that are good and

Reviews for God Gets Everything God Wants

[jetangen4571 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What an excellent book! It serves as a reminder that denominations are inherently flawed when compared with the principles in the translated and retranslated Old and New Testaments and also reminds us that Jesus lived in times when literacy was confined to certain small pockets. Which is by way of saying that the people who might be Christians are meant to be inclusive of others and that also means studying the words should be together as it was then. Jesus did not carry a pocket bible and wave it around.Beyond that, all of the quotations in this book are in context and told in a realistic manner similar to Eugene H. Peterson's The Message. The most important thing in this book is inclusivity. God loved his people even when they were stupid, didn't trust him, did things he didn't like. And so should we.I requested and received an audio from the publisher without expectation.The audio is narrated by the energetic author, and that always makes a book better!