What If We Could Encode Expansiveness? Building Congregations That Hold the Other, the Queer, and the Unknown

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, …