We Were Spiritual Refugees

W E W E RE SPIR IT UA L R E F UG E E S

We Were Spiritual Refugees A Story to Help You Believe in Church

Katie Hays

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com © 2020 Katie Hays All rights reserved Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ISBN 978-0-8028-7778-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Hays, Katie, 1969– author. Title: We were spiritual refugees : a story to help you believe in church / Katie Hays. Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “A memoir of Galileo Church’s first five years, this is an account from its pastor, sharing what she learned about belonging from those who left the traditional church but wanted a Jesus community”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2019035982 | ISBN 9780802877789 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Galileo Church (Fort Worth, Tex.)—History. | Hays, Katie, 1969– | Fort Worth (Tex.)—Church history. Classification: LCC BX7331.F58 H39 2020 | DDC 280—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035982 The excursus “Preaching from the LGBTQ Margins” was previously published online in Circuit Rider by Abingdon Press, November 2018. Used by permission. The excursus “What Happened When Our Church Went Venmo” was previously published in a slightly different form in The Christian Century, December 5, 2018, and is used by permission.

CON TENTS

Foreword by Doug Pagitt

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Preface: I Know Why You’re Here

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Introduction: What I Hoped For 1. Before: The Making of a Church Planter

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2. Year One: Getting Our Shit Together

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3. Finding Our Voice for Worship: Everything Is Architected

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4. This Is Church: Infrastructure Follows Ethos

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5. Missional Priorities: Get You Some

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6. Things That Were Harder Than We Thought: (And That I’d Rather Not Tell You)

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7. #Adulting: We Are Not as Cute as We Used to Be

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8. We Are So Glad You’ve Come: Or: The Work I Was Born For

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Epilogue: How to Write a Book When You’re the Church Founder

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Appendix: In Their Own Words

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FOREWORD

In 2004, I visited the Ring of Brodgar on the largest island in Orkney, Scotland. It is the oldest site of human habitation that we have a record of, dating back twenty thousand years. While the purpose of the stone circles (similar to Stonehenge) remains elusive, it is apparent that they were central for rites of passage connected to astronomical observation. Whatever their specific use, being there gave me a distinct impression of their lasting importance. Twenty-seven of the original sixty thirtyfoot-high (and higher) stones are still visible. I visited with a group of friends who wanted to mark our own stages of growth into adulthood. I was on this pilgrimage as a means of honoring my father, who had died a few years earlier. And I was seeking a deep connection to what it means to be living as a fatherless father myself. Others were marking their own paths of transition. We were looking for something ancient, lasting, and monumental to help us find meaning in our daily lives and a path to walk into our future. Standing in the shadow of the large stone circle, I was taken with the fact that for centuries human beings have been forming, often at significant cost, expense, and effort, places of meaning and pathfinding. Be it the Ring of Brodgar, a town center, a cathedral, or a fireplace in our homes, we humans make places of meaning that help us find meaning. I have spent my adult life trying to make communities—and one community in particular, Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis—where people can find a path of human growth and spiritual life in the way vii

Fo r e wo r d

of Jesus. In 1983 I was invited by friends to take on Jesus as my spiritual teacher and my Lord. For more than three decades, I have sought to understand Jesus as the Son of God as a way to see all people as the children of God. I have endeavored to join the call of all children of God to live up to Love as a way of life. One thing I know for sure: this life I’ve chosen, or that has chosen me, requires community. We find meaning, explore what it means to be human, with people who are trying the same. We build the Ring of Brodgar. We build churches. That’s what makes me so excited to know Katie Hays and to follow with such admiration the development of Galileo Church. What Katie will describe in the pages that follow is one story of one community of meaning. It has all the quirky particularities of one community. It is apparent that the wonderful parts of the Galileo community were made possible by the specific people who were involved in its formation. Galileo Church is not offered here as a repeatable prototype, and that is a good thing. But it remains true: what you will find in the story of these particular spiritual refugees is the universal, ancient, modern, and postmodern pursuit of a people seeking a community of belonging and path making. What I have discovered in looking at the many ways humans have organized communities of meaning and path making is that everyone is making it up as we go. We use the tools that are available to us. Just as the ancient Scots used the stars and stones to make meaning, so we are using the internet, coffee shops, homes, bowling alleys, bars, and even a corrugated sheet metal barn to make communities today. Not all of these experiments work in the long-term. Not all of them are particularly good ideas. But that is the very point of experimentation—to try without guarantee. It is in the risking, the trying, that we find our way. They all count, every try, every time. I have been intrigued with the development of communities of Christian faith over the last two hundred years in the United States. I find it helpful to recognize four periods of cultural development over the last two centuries: the Agrarian Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age, and our current period, what I call “the Inventive Age.” While these ages are all built on one another, and are extensions of the previous age, they each also have their own way of thinking, value viii

Foreword

systems, appreciation of aesthetics, and useful tools. The communities that form in each age are not only products of the age, but help create the cultural norms of that age. I have been thinking about the impacts of these changes in the communities we form now for the manifestation of our collective faith. As I was writing my Inventive Age book series (which dives deep into the implication of community, preaching, church, and evangelism in light of the Inventive Age), I engaged with people starting communities of faith around the world. It was during this time that I first met and was instantly inspired by Katie Hays and the risky project she was endeavoring. That project ultimately became the beautiful Galileo Church community. A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to attend a gathering of Galileo Church. I was struck by how well its existence tells the story I had been seeing develop in the United States and around the world. Galileo is not yesterday’s church. Located on the edge of a sprawling urban center near a major interstate, Galileo’s Big Red Barn does not resemble the Gothic cathedrals of Europe or the tightly manicured church structures of suburban Christianity. Galileo’s people are as unconventional as its building. They are real. They proudly call themselves “quirky,” and the label fits. Pretense is left behind here. When you walk through the doors of the Big Red Barn, you have the sense that you are entering a unique worship space, a place where people live, love, laugh, cry, curse, rejoice, and mourn as community. Those who doubt the future of church have not seen or heard of Galileo Church. This community of spiritual refugees offers hope and healing to those near and far. Galileo is not a perfect church (which is the entire point of it), nor is it a church that works for everyone (which is also the point of it). I see it as one clarifying lens through which to see what a church of this Inventive Age can look like. I believe it will inspire generations to come to build communities of meaning, communities of belonging, communities of path making, in Jesus’s name, for their own times. Doug Pagitt, October 2019

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P REFACE

I Know Why You’re Here

My name is Katie, and my pronouns are she/her/hers. I know why you’re here. You’ve picked up this book because you are worried and afraid and hoping for some words of comfort and courage. You intuit that the world is moving on, that things we used to know for sure are not so certain anymore, that the ones who are coming after us would hardly recognize the world that shaped our inner landscapes, nor we theirs. You go to church, but you see the ranks thinning in the pews that used to swell with eager, or at least compliant, worshipers. You’re a mom or a grandmom, a dad or a granddad, and the kid you raised through VBSs and youth groups and lock-­ins and spring ­break mission trips has left home or hasn’t left home, but either way they don’t go to church now unless you raise a fuss and tell them it’s important to you. You watch them during worship and pray silently that something in the familiar hymns or the usual Scripture readings or the preacher’s dry sense of humor will stir some emotion in them. Your heart sinks as you read the boredom on their face; you silently seethe as they check their phone for the umpteenth time; you ache when you recognize the strong sense of not belonging they are experiencing. You know they will not come back, not really, not ever. Or maybe you’re that kid or grandkid, that amorphous “young adult” everybody is wringing their hands over. You remember loving church a long time ago when there was camp and friends and staying up way too late talking about stuff that really mattered. Your heart felt safe and happy at church, with the church, and you miss that feeling. You’ve visited a bunch of churches in the last year or two, and a couple xi

Pr e face

of them have seemed okay, but mostly they just leave you feeling empty and left out. The old folks are way too happy to see you, and you know they would welcome you back, but maybe not if they realized who you really are, what you really believe (or don’t believe), what you’re really looking for, or where you were last night. You’ve been “spiritual but not religious” for quite a while now and maybe that’s just the way it’ll have to stay, but it’s a lonely way to go. You know that better than anybody. Or maybe you’re a pastor, like me, faithfully meeting those Sunday morning deadlines fifty weeks a year, caring for the sick and dying, keeping aging church people busy with programming that is less and less well attended every year, recruiting volunteers to teach Sunday schools that are shadows of their former selves. And you’re already overworked and underpaid, but you really wish you could figure out some way to break out of the monotony. Truth is, even you are a little bored with church as usual. And you’re worried that the discontent you feel is obvious and contagious, and that it will keep spreading through our culture until the churches are completely empty. Or maybe you gave Galileo Church money in the past five years, and you want to see what we did with it. Maybe you’ve been hoping we’ve got some answers in exchange for all your gifts. Whoever you are, I suspect that you’re worried and afraid because you are a true believer. That is, you’re a devout disciple of Jesus, and you have entrusted your life to the God who vindicated his lovely way of life, and you love the idea that people who believe similarly could form a community of belonging in Jesus’s name and help each other. You don’t just love it; you’ve lived it. At some point that community of belonging in Jesus’s name has saved your ass—like, spiritual salvation, for sure, but also like when your dad died or you lost your job or that guy got elected or whatever. You couldn’t have gotten through that alone. You know that God doesn’t need the church, but God knows we do. God knows you do. What you can’t figure out, as the church diminishes in our culture, as the next generation of adults (and the next and the next) opts out of established religious community, is whether other people just don’t need it like you do, or if they just don’t know they could have what you’ve had. Lately you’ve begun to suspect that people do need xii

Preface

the companionship the church offers but can’t get to it through all the layers of doctrine and tradition and bureaucracy and bullshit. People are hungry, but the church as we know it seems disinterested in feeding anyone. The stuff we’ve built or inherited—the facilities, the programs, the infrastructure of how it all fits together, the rules we run it by— it’s just all in the wrong key somehow. The dissonance is painful, and you’ve been trying to sing along for a while anyway, but you’re tired. And worried and afraid. And you hope for some words of comfort and courage. I don’t know if I have any words like that. What I have, though, is a testimony to what can happen when somebody risks a whole heap of their privilege and applies all their best mojo to building a new kind of community of belonging in Jesus’s name. As you will see, lots of really dumb, sad, disturbing things happen. But out of all the messes I’ve ever made, God has managed to make something beautiful every time. I would like to tell you the truth about all of that, which is hard, because church planters lie incessantly. We tell you we’re doing better than we really are, that our churches have more people than we’ve actually got, and that our worship service only takes an hour. You’ll know soon enough if I’m credible. Trust your gut. But please believe this: I’m writing the story I wish I could’ve read before I started, the story of somebody who has done this before. Not because I would have replicated what they did; we all know that congregations are contextual in the extreme these days. But I would have been grateful for the truthful testimony of any church planter whose church had not already failed, about where their ideas come from and how they know when those ideas are working and how they fix it when they’re not, and what it feels like, for real, to do it. Maybe my story can be that story for you. I’m not going to prosecute an argument here; I have no thesis other than “this is what happened.” Sometimes I have the words of other people saying what was happening for them, but mostly this is about what happened in my own heart and in my own brain and in my own life. I’ll include some in-­the-­moment writing, letters and emails and blog entries and Facebook posts that I wrote along the way. I’m not especially trying to go xiii

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in a linear order, except in the broadest sense. I’ll try to make sure you know if something happened in the first year or the fifth year, and here’s the outline of that by what locations Galileo Church mostly used for gathering: Year One, 2013–2014, G-­House and my Hampton Drive home Year Two, 2014–2015, Farr Best Theater and my Hampton Drive home Year Three, 2015–2016, Red’s Roadhouse and my Hampton Drive home Years Four and Beyond, 2017–present, Big Red Barn and the Hays-­ Pape Homestead. I’ll try to tell the truth. You try to remember that I’m not saying how you should do it, just testifying to what happened—where I think God showed up—when I did it. Deal?

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INTRODUCTIO N

What I Hoped For

Let me be as clear as I can about what I hoped to do in starting Galileo Church: I hoped to gather people who did not have a community of belonging in Jesus’s name into a community of belonging in Jesus’s name. “We’re a church for people who hate church,” I would say to strangers I just met, “or for people who think the church hates them.” I wanted Galileo to make space for the good news of God’s reign to be both good and news for people who need both. Because so much of what the church has been saying lately and loudly is not really good and not really news. Conserving churches tend to mix in an awful lot of bad news in the form of judgment and boundaries, declaring who’s in (we are!) and who’s out (they are!). Liberating churches, in the interest of never offending anyone ever, tend to dull it down until God is boring as hell, bland, and sleepy, just like God’s worshipers. Is that mean? Okay. I’ve spent a lot of years in both kinds of churches, though. I think I know what I’m talking about. But I actually love church, and not just the idea of church but church actual, right on the ground, in all its human messiness. So in my imagination, before this whole thing started, Galileo Church would be like lots of churches you know. It would be a localized collection (group? gang? gaggle? flock? herd? hive?) of people who live near enough to each other to share life in the way of Jesus, offering each other safety and solace and companionship and help. I wanted Galileo Church to be able to fund its own life together, with a paid theologian in residence (me!) to guide and guard it. I wanted it to have enough infrastructure to hold together beyond my tenure. I dreamed 1

WE WERE S P I R I T UAL RE F U G EES

that we would worship together, pray together, ponder biblical theology together, help the needy together, work for justice together, and raise families together. In other words, I wanted to make a church. It’s not dinner church or CrossFit church or house church or improv church or food truck church or intentional community church; it’s just church. And that’s been disappointing to some. (I’m shrugging now, in case you can’t see me, shrugging in that way that means “I hear what you’re saying, but we just are what we are, we do what we do, and what we do is church, maybe because it’s all I know how to do.” And anyway, some of my best friends do those other kinds of churches. They’re way cooler than I am.) I didn’t just want to make another church of the kind we already know, obviously; that kind of church is failing, fading, struggling, dying, for #reasons. I wanted to make a church that would be demonstrably, radically responsive to its context in an age in which institutions of all kinds are failing to capture the hearts or serve the needs of the generations that come next. So I started dreaming about a vague idea of “Next Church,” meaning whatever comes next after what we have now. The traditional, established congregations I have loved and served I call “Now Church.” Now Church, Next Church. Snazzy, huh? These terms are my attempt to distinguish but not disconnect Galileo from what has come before, without limiting its development by defining it too precisely and without disparaging what has come before and already exists now. Galileo is church, like other churches, but it’s next. I hope this book can articulate how Galileo both is and is not like the churches you have known. Galileo Church is surprisingly orthodox in practice, meaning that we’re singing hymns you already know, praying the Lord’s Prayer in mostly familiar rhythms, sharing bread and cup at the Lord’s table with the words of institution from 1 Corinthians 11. We’re reading the Bible, lots, in worship and Sunday school and small groups through the week. We’re teaching our kids to love Jesus and preparing for their baptisms when they are ready to make a confession of faith. We’re talking about money when we have to and ignoring it when we don’t. Just like church!

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Introduction

But there are distinctives about our life together that I’d love to show you. They go beyond questions of style and aesthetic—Galileo is not about cultivating a hipster vibe overlaying traditional form and content—and, I’m hoping, these distinctive are best communicated in the stories of our life together. Because, man, have I got stories to share. Here we go.

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