Spiritual Misfits Podcast · Meeting Ground

How to Pray to a Triune God Beyond Gender (Sally Douglas on Rewilding Prayer)

November 15, 2025·1 hr 1 min·4 clips

Authentic prayer is a call to the real, not a diluted distraction from it.

Sally Douglas returns to Spiritual Misfits. Will Small opens by picking up on why listeners connected with earlier episodes featuring Sally, then turns to the question of what prayer sounds like when gendered language no longer feels adequate. The conversation starts honestly. Sally names her faith crisis, her experience of being screwed over by purity culture, and her conclusion about eternal conscious torment, saying there is zero evidence for it in the Bible. That sets the tone. Again and again, the episode comes back to the problem of treating one metaphor for God as if it were the whole truth. Father is not rejected here. The issue is the habit of locking God into a single image and acting as if every other biblical name or metaphor has to stay out of bounds. Sally and Will widen the frame. They speak about God as source, conductor, composer, and divine ground of nature, while also naming why so many people recoil from gendered language. Sally points to the old man on the cloud image that can come with repeated father-language when it is not handled carefully. She does not dismiss the language outright. Instead, she suggests that the Bible itself leaves room for a wider and more generous imagination than any one exclusive metaphor. The conversation stays warm, but it also stays grounded in lived experience, especially the uneasy middle ground between honesty and wanting a prayer life that still feels possible. A clear thread runs through it all. Reworking prayer here means decolonizing church structures, telling the truth about damage, and leaving space for kindness. The episode does not rush that work. It allows room for the listener to notice how inherited language can wound, how new language can help, and how both can sit inside a deeper faith. By the close, the mood is companionable rather than settled. The episode offers prayer as a practice that can be revised without being abandoned, and faith as something that may become more honest once it stops pretending one image can hold everything.

As heard by us

A gentle case for widening God-language without losing honesty.

The episode follows Will Small and Sally Douglas as they revisit what prayer sounds like when exclusive God-language no longer feels sufficient.

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Why you'd press play

If you want prayer language that makes room for doubt, gender, and faith deconstruction, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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