Galileo Church

We seek and shelter spiritual refugees, rally health for all who come, and fortify every tender soul with the strength to follow Jesus into a life of world-changing service.

5860 I-20 service road Fort Worth, TX 76119 USA

(682) 760-1274

OUR MISSIONAL PRIORITIES:

1. We do justice for LGBTQ+ humans, and support the people who love them.

2. We do kindness for people with mental illness and in emotional distress, and celebrate neurodiversity.

3. We do beauty for our God-Who-Is-Beautiful.

4. We do real relationship, no bullshit, ever.

5. We do whatever it takes to share this good news with the world God still loves.

Trying to find us IRL?
Mail here: P.O. Box 668, Kennedale, TX 76060
Worship here: 5 pm CT Sundays; 5860 I-20 service road, Fort Worth 76119

Trying to find our Sunday worship livestream?
click here!

Praying in a crowded House

January 15, 2023 - February 19, 2023

Jesus’s early disciples asked, “Teach us to pray.” “How does prayer work?” is a frequent question at Galileo Church. In this series, we’ll return to the Psalms for models of our ancestors’ prayers – not for a guarantee of how God receives and responds to our petitions, but for reminders of what prayer draws out of our own spirits. We don’t know whether or how prayer changes God, but we know for sure it changes us. And maybe that’s the point.

Praying to Awaken. Sometimes our eyes are wide open to notice the presence and power of God in this beloved world (and sometimes they’re not). There is a way of prayer that simply lets God know that we get it, and we appreciate it, and are wowed by it. And by praying our awakening, we become more and more attuned to the world, and thus have more content for these awakening prayers…it’s a virtuous cycle.

Praying to Remember and Hope. We have inherited our ancestors’ experiences of God’s presence and power, and one form of prayer is a recitation of God’s faithfulness in the past. Our communal memories are not “proof,” exactly; but they are testimony of what God has already done as fuel for our hope in what God will do.

Praying to Cry. The typical “psalm of lament” involves a recontextualization of suffering. There is the fact of our suffering, held up alongside our trust in God – neither negates or obviates the other. Both things can be true: we suffer, and we trust in God to relieve suffering.

Praying to Complain. Sometimes our lived experience leads us to think God has forgotten us, or just isn’t paying attention – like we’ve been more faithful than God has been in this relationship. And, when it’s our fellow human beings who are causing our distress, we want God to hate them as much as we do. It adds to our distress to think that God might not. Prayers like this are part of sacred scripture. God is ready to hear these accusations from us.

Praying to Confess. Sometimes the mess we’re in is one of our own making, and we know it. We have to ask for help, but not without confessing that we’re reaping what we sowed. There remains a sense that, no matter how despicable or dumb we’ve been, God is ready to hear our confession and respond with kindness.

Praying to Celebrate. A rescue from danger, a victory in battle, a recovery from illness, a reprieve from all manner of heartache – these are occasions to say out loud that, at least for today, “God is in God’s heaven and all is right with the world!” Alleluia!