For four years, our congregation has been utilizing our church building (our "campus") learning what it means to open our building as a place to live, serving as a community where residents and congregation members share life in ways that transform us all. Beginning with one LGBTQIA+ young adult, we expanded to build showers, welcome additional residents, and this year began housing families with children, also primarily LGBTQIA+.

This pastoral study will focus on the creative center of our ministry: mutual aid. We will visit other congregations and organizations offering housing to learn diverse models and discern what practices could strengthen our own. We will design and test tools for evaluating outcomes, focused on housing stability but also in shared leadership, spiritual flourishing, and mutual benefit.

Our aim is to distill best practices into a framework that can be adapted by other churches. We hope to offer the wider church a theological and practical witness to the possibilities of congregational housing that is deeply relational, affirming of LGBTQIA+ identities, and rooted in the Gospel call to shelter one another.