God Gets Everything God Wants

By: Katie Hays

Narrated 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.

©2021 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (P)2021 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

A beautiful book beautifully read

Hays gives a theology that speaks truthfully to the ways God is at work in our midst today. Being such an excellent preacher, Hays is incredibly inspiring and fun to listen to in the audio book!

Theology 101

If you, like so many other Christians, have experienced a deconstruction of your faith and are wondering, "What's next?", this book is for you. Reverand Dr. Katie Hays paints a powerful portrait of a more inclusive faith, where there is hope that a good God will get everything God wants in the end.

A new (or old?) way to imagine the Body of Christ

Thought-provoking and inspiring. Hays offers a vision of what the work of the church is in light of the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice. Personally, after reading this, I would love to pick up more books by Hays and, as a practical theologian/pastor, I would love to see Galileo Church in action!

And learned things, too!

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!

A vision of what the church should be like

God Gets Everything God Wants is a book I would never have picked up if I had not recieved a free copy via a Twitter giveaway. First, I am pretty strongly not in the deterministic stream of the Calvinist tradition, and the title hints at that. It is not that I am an open theist, but that I get very uncomfortable with relying on God's will or election being the answer to complex questions. Second, this is a very theologically progressive book. I lean toward progressive theology, but I am also increasingly wary of white progressivism interested in its own freedom, but not aware of the weaknesses of white progressivism's lack of grappling with the way it has fallen short of being inclusive for all. And so, while I grew up in a denomination that was in the mainline progressive tradition, I was mainly in a small evangelical wing of that denomination and have mostly found spiritual insight in the Black church tradition or Catholic tradition because my overly broad perception is that the progressive mainline tradition has not been oriented enough toward constructive theology.

That being said, I intentionally went to the University of Chicago Divinity School for my seminary program because I needed to get out of Evangelical institutions and experience a broader sense of Christianity. And one of the most important aspects of my mainline Protestant-oriented seminary program was experiencing the seriousness that so many of my classmates and professors gave to their faith. I believe that many in the Evangelical and Pentecostal traditions dismiss mainline faith expressions because they have not sought out mainline Christians to understand the expression of mainline faith in its own context. Over the past couple of months, I have been increasingly dismissive of Christians unwilling to acknowledge the Christianity of those who accept women as pastors. The fights over Jesus and John Wayne and the Making of Biblical Womanhood are just not my fights. I have always believed that women should be ordained to all roles in the church. And this doubling down on people pointing to 1 Tim 2:12 as the end of the discussion without acknowledging Roms 16 (Pheobe being the one that Paul sent to read and teach the book of Romans, the acknowledgment of Priscilla as the more important of the teaching team, Junia being described as an apostle, etc.). I am not here to argue about women as clergy but to give context to my reading of God Gets Everything God Wants.

Katie Hays is the pastor of Galileo Church in Texas. The church attempts to love the marginalized people of their community as Jesus would. Its first missional priority is to support the LGBTQ+ community. And that priority is communicated throughout God Gets Everything God Wants. And many Christians will never pick up this book because of that. But I want to communicate here more than anything that if people do not pick up this book solely for that reason, they are missing a call for the church to love radically. The very best parts of this book are the grappling with what it means to love well (and the honest grappling with how Galileo and all churches will end up being inadequate to loving as they should because of sin.)

I keep coming back to NT Wright's biography of Paul because Wright so strongly emphasizes that what Paul did was orient the church to be a transitional, trans-ethnic, and trans-class body. Amos Yong's commentary on Acts walks through how the book of Acts primarily breaks down lines of division within the church and becomes an increasingly inclusive body. Raphael Warnock's The Divided Mind of the Black Church is even about how the Black church, in its work to be inclusive, has to keep striving to follow God's calling toward inclusiveness. The need for the church to return to its vision of radical love is a common theme historically within Christian writing because it is so hard to do in practice.

God Gets Everything God Wants is a book that grapples well with what is most often called deconstruction and lovingly points a path forward to the church and as an inherently flawed but still vital part of what it means to be a follower of Christ. Katie Hays is gentle as she acknowledges the harm that so many have felt from the church. But she also points to a vision of what the church should be striving toward as an ideal.

I did set this book down for a good long while before finishing it, I don't think it is a perfect book, but I want to commend it to many. The last couple of chapters are the best part of the book, in my opinion. And the seriousness and faith-driven commitment to her ideals of the church, I think, is essential for people committed to a male-only pastorate or who are skeptical about the compatibility of Christianity and the LGBTQ+ community. If you are theologically committed to a male-only pastorate or a traditional sexual ethic, Katie Hays is not trying to change your mind, and this book won't do that. But what it will do is help you an author that takes her faith very seriously (albeit with a few swear words in the text) so that it is harder just to dismiss faith claims of people that theologically disagree with you.

Thought-provoking

Some aha moments.

Katie Hays did a good job writing and narrating this audiobook.

I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.