What if we stopped designing congregations to preserve what we already know and instead built them to stretch us toward what we don’t?
What if, instead of just asking whether a church is welcoming, affirming, or inclusive, we designed our faith spaces to encode expansiveness—to make room for newness, for difference, for the radical unpredictability of the sacred?
What if faith communities were intentionally built as incubators for exposure to the other, for encounters with the unfamiliar, for engagement with the queer, the unexpected, the disruptive, the transformative?
Expansiveness as a Built-In Feature, Not an Afterthought
Most congregations are designed around preservation—preserving theology, tradition, culture, and, too often, power. Even those that claim to be welcoming often function as spaces where people are allowed to enter as long as they conform to what’s already there.
But what if we embedded expansiveness into the very architecture of our communities?
• Instead of inclusion, we practiced fluidity.
• Instead of centering comfort, we prioritized transformation.
• Instead of assuming sameness, we cultivated wonder at difference.
Expansiveness isn’t just about diversity—it’s about designing communities that do not assume they are the center of truth, but instead expect to be changed by the people who enter.
This means encoding expansiveness as both a spiritual and structural principle:
• Spiritually, expansiveness means embracing a theology that expects and welcomes change. It recognizes that God is not static, that truth is not fixed, and that wisdom is always unfolding in places we do not yet know.
• Structurally, expansiveness means designing communities that do not require assimilation. It means creating spaces that flex, stretch, and evolve in response to the people who show up.
Exposure to the Other as a Spiritual Practice
Most faith communities function like echo chambers, reinforcing a narrow set of beliefs and identities. Even progressive spaces often replicate the same dynamics—just with different talking points.
But what if faith was fundamentally about exposure to the other?
• What if encountering difference was understood as a sacred practice—a direct experience of God?
• What if we approached the queer, the outsider, the stranger not as problems to be solved or welcomed in, but as necessary voices without which we cannot know truth fully?
• What if congregations functioned more like hush harbors and mixtapes—where spiritual fugitives, thinkers, and seekers remix wisdom together, rather than replicate dogma?
Building the Future Church: Expansive, Queer, Unruly, Alive
What we build today will shape the future of faith.
If we want that future to be alive, liberatory, and untamed, we need to encode expansiveness—not just as a value, but as a foundational principle of how we structure, imagine, and embody spiritual community.
• Expansiveness makes space for the unknown.
• Exposure makes room for transformation.
• Queerness, in its broadest sense, breaks open the rigid and makes the sacred strange again.
The question is not whether we should include the other. The question is whether we will allow ourselves to be changed by them.
If we want a faith that is truly free, we must build spaces that expect transformation. We must create congregations that do not demand sameness but instead thrive on encounter, mutation, and evolution.