Katie Hays - God Gets Everything God Wants

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

www.eerdmans.com

2021 Katie Hays

All rights reserved

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

ISBN 978-0-8028-7856-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hays, Katie, 1969 author.

Title: God gets everything God wants / Katie Hays.

Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : William. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, [2021] | Summary: A rehabilitated theology of hope, inclusion, and defiance for weary Christians, former Christians, and the Christ-curiousespecially those who have been excluded from church because of who they are and what they (dont) believeProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021012161 | ISBN 9780802878564 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Christian life. | ChristianityEssence, genius, nature.

Classification: LCC BV4501.3 .H3964 2021 | DDC 230dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012161

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

for Lance, without whom I wouldnt know or believe anything (Song of Songs 5:16)

for Lydia & Jack, our boon companions Here is everything I have to tell you

for Galileo Church, our familys family I am so glad to be in ministry alongside you

Part One
God Gets Everything God Wants

Part Two
Jesus Is God Getting Everything God Wants

Part Three
When God Doesnt Get Everything God Wants

Part Four
I Want to Want What God Wants

Part Five
We Want to Want What God Wants

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, were 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 theres a Mickey Ds, a charity thrift store, a liquor store, a metal-galvanizing plant, and our Big Red Barn. Which is, honestly, not all that bigand more of a rusted, corrugated sheet metal hue.

By the time you show up here, youve 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 Christianchurch, the Bible, and especially Christians themselves. All that stuff has hurt you. You dont wish to be hurt anymore.

Photos on our websiteof communion, of people singing hymnsmake you flinch. You remember the day you stopped pretending youre not gay, or that your cousin or your roommate or your moms arent 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 theyd 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 didnt kick you out, not officiallyactual 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 standbut they made it clear that you werent 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 youve experienced? Maybe youve 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 thats what you did, or to simply stop pursuing it when it obviously wasnt that into you, was a healthy one.

But here you are, melting in your car on a hot Sunday afternoon, scooching down in the drivers seat, peering at people making their way through the parking lot, down an asphalt path, and disappearing But here you are.

If you came to me today with your confession of how long its 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 latelyId say, Yeah, and thats on us, the church. Its on the churchy people like me for whom it mostly does work much of the time, we who have made our peace with the churchs 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. Im so sorry. You dont have to forgive us, but Id 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 outthe 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 were breathing. Its not fast or easy work, and Ive come to believe that nobody can really do it on their own. Were or how it forms us to take the name Christian for ourselves.

Its 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 thats why we need each otherso none of us bears all the risk alone. Maybe thats what church is supposed to be: people sharing the gamble of faith, daring to hope, taking a chance on love.

Heres what I cant do: I cant say everything that needs to be said to repair all the ways Christian theology has hurt people, including you. Thats partly because I cant begin to know all the ways that God and the people of God have disappointed people, including you. And its partly because Im not a systematic theologianthat is, I dont 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 Ive been listening, and learning, and praying, and studying, and exploring with my church-full of spiritual refugees. Weve 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, Im 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.