Pentecost Special Offering: Galileo Church

Dear Friends:

A few months into “Coronatide”, I got an email from a woman in rural Arkansas. She said, “My wife and I moved out here to get away from the hustle of the city, and we love it! But I didn’t count on there not being a church here that would receive us.” Then, in the next paragraph of her email, she reconsidered. “Actually,” she said, “we’ve never known a church that would receive us. Unless we kept our relationship a secret. We’re retired now and we are tired of living in secret.”

So someone had passed along a book that I wrote about Galileo Church—about our bold birth, about our tricky toddlerhood, and about how we are still a child-of-a-church on this journey of growing into what God has in mind for us. And she read that book and she reached out. I was so glad to tell her that Galileo Church had started livestreaming our worship services just before the pandemic, and that we intend to continue after it is safe for us to regather. And I gave thanks, again, for the partnership of so many, including the saints of Washington Avenue Christian Church, who make possible our sharing of the gospel beyond the walls of the Big Red Barn in Fort Worth.

So here’s what you need to know, Washington Avenue: Just this week, that woman in rural Arkansas is forming the first of our official worship parties. She and her wife, and their new friends in rural Arkansas are forming a community of belonging in Jesus’ name, using Galileo’s content and Galileo’s infrastructure for now, until God does the next new thing right where they are.

God is hilarious like that: Using gifts from Ohio to a church in Texas to extend the gospel of Jesus Christ to rural Arkansas. Thanks for laughing and loving along with us, friends. It is an honor to be in ministry alongside you.

Rev. Dr. Katie Hays, Lead Evangelist
Galileo Church’s