I picked up God Gets Everything God Wants because I didn’t think I agreed with the title’s assumption, but by the end of the book I found myself nodding along with Katie Hays and murmuring my agreement. I quoted the book in a church leader’s group and, if the people in those groups are trustworthy, got Katie a few sales out of it. The quote in question…well…Katie actually repeats it in the podcast so see if you can figure it out. I knew I had to talk with her and she was kind enough to schedule a time with me. So I present to you know, the Rev. Dr. Katie Hays and God Gets Everything God Wants.
The Conversation | Rev. Dr. Katie Hays
This excerpt has been lightly edited for conciseness and clarity. Listen to the full interview on the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Josh Olds: Tell me about you, your church, and your book.
Katie Hays: You bet. So I’m a church planter. Galileo Church, my church on the outskirts of Fort Worth, Texas, is just about eight years old. And our main reason for being is to seek and shelter spiritual refugees. Spiritual refugees are people who have felt they’ve experienced the kind of collapse of their Christian faith. I’m here in the Bible Belt: everybody here has met Jesus at some point or another. And they felt the collapse of that for all kinds of reasons. And they’re working through that sort of process of deconstruction and maybe kind of concussed sitting in the rubble of what used to be their faith and sort of wondering what to do next. And you can make an amazing community of Beloveds out of folks exactly like that.
Folks, who for a little while, need to talk about what they don’t believe anymore. They’ve worked so hard to get to the place where they can with some clarity say, Yeah, you know, some of these things I was given as a child I inherited from my parents or the church of my youth. I don’t believe that stuff anymore. And we’ve worked pretty hard to get to a place of honesty about that. The next step, then, for those of us who have been through that experience, is to try to say in the positive, okay, then what do we believe? I say now about my own Christian faith, that I believe a lot less than I used to—meaning a lot fewer things—but that the things I believe, I believe real hard, like there is just a couple, and they’re really deep in me. And I have sort of settled with those things. And from there, our church together is doing this sort of theological rehabilitation to rebuild something that’s just much more inclusive and beautiful and generous to all of us. And this book is a distillation of that.
Josh Olds: I like the point that you make about being spiritual refugees, because there are so many people that are going through this. I even I know even for myself as a pastor, as someone who, right around COVID hit, stepped out a formal ministry. And I started going, what, “What do I want out of church?” Just because there had been a way that I had done church for so long. And I think for a lot of people that was true, they may have just felt like, well, this is what I’ve done on Sundays for my entire life. And then when they were pushed out of that pattern, even if we just moved online, they started to be rethinking of why, why am I here? You know, what am I doing? What do I want from this experience? I’m not really getting it, or even I’m not missing it. You know, I had friends who, who just like, you know, faithful, committed Christians and continue to be but just found out they did not miss the church experience they had been a part of.
Katie Hays: Josh, you’re not supposed to say that out loud! Don’t you know that we clergy have a code where we don’t say that out loud? *laughs* No, it’s absolutely true. People found that they weren’t missing it. And why? Why weren’t they? Well,