A Faith of Many Rooms

Book excerpt: When your faith begins to feel too small, too confining, you could choose to leave it. But what if the faith we inhabit is roomier than we'd thought? What if our collapsing faith is just a closet in a much larger dwelling? Disillusioned by narrow theologies, church dysfunction, and constricted readings of Scripture, people are leaving Christianity in droves. But Jesus describes the reign of God as a house with many rooms, writes author Debie Thomas, one of the most auspicious voices in religious writing today. In this work of sprawling spiritual and literary imagination, Thomas claims that wherever God dwells, there is expansiveness and belonging. Thomas knows what a cramped faith feels like, what it's like to wrestle your way out of fundamentalism and toward a more capacious faith. From the diasporic church in which she grew up, which traces its lineage to the doubting disciple in India in the first century, to the disorientations of a deconstructing faith, to an ample yet orthodox Christianity that makes room for all her identities, Thomas takes readers on a deeply personal and profoundly theological odyssey. In A Faith of Many Rooms, she talks back to jaundiced versions of faith and finds evidence that the gospel insists on its own roominess. The kind of God who decided to experience the world as a guest likely feels constrained by our pinched theologies too. What sorts of ruptures and revisions would it take to find a more spacious faith--and then to inhabit it with authenticity and joy? Readers of Christian Wiman, Cole Arthur Riley, and Barbara Brown Taylor will find in these pages an ardent, lyrical take on a faith transfigured.