Christianity Today August 12, 2026 9 min signal 2026-08-12

Your spare bedroom could be a blessing

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

August 12, 2026

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Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Getty, Unsplash

Hannah Marie needed a place to live. Soon she’d be able to share a home with her new husband in Pennsylvania, where she was moving for a job in campus ministry. But for the nine months before the wedding, she needed a roof over her head.

She looked for a studio apartment, but they were all too pricey at over $1,000 a month. She could move in with her fiancé, but as a Christian holding to the traditional marriage ethic, she knew that wouldn’t be the right choice. Other options, an Airbnb or hotel, were even more expensive and less attractive.

The clock was ticking. Where could she go?

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My wife and I talked. We prayed. And when we heard God’s call, we invited Hannah Marie to stay in our green-painted spare room, which we had been using for storage and the occasional guest. Weeks later, she moved in.

For the next nine months, Hannah Marie was more than just part of our household. She became part of our family. She ate spaghetti and meatballs at our table, bounced our toddler on her knee, and joined in for vulnerable, late-night conversations about faith, ministry, and politics. The benefits of the arrangement flowed both ways: We gave Hannah Marie a safe place to live while she cooked a meal once a week, picked up groceries, and comforted our child when he got fussy.

Being able to host Hannah Marie and other housemates like her (yes, we’ve had a few) has been one of the best parts of being a homeowner with a little extra space and stability. We’ve hosted in-laws, a college student for half a semester, and two professors who stayed with us for a few nights each week. Other homeowners we know have hosted travel nurses, refugees,teenage hockey players, and people transitioning out of homelessness.

For each person we hosted, we made decisions about rent, chores, and meals on a case-by-case basis. Some of our guests paid a modest rent. Most pitched in with washing dishes, taking out the trash, feeding the cat, and other chores. A few functioned as “boarders” and shared meals with us. Others were more like “lodgers” who kept to their rooms, with their own schedules.

My wife and I are optimistic people, but we’re not naive. We always go into these situations with lots of communication. We make clear what we will and won’t provide and make sure that there are checkpoints so we can reassess to see if the setup needs to end. (Some people we know who host long-term guests draw up leases and set up separate common areas.) Thanks to upfront agreements and discussions, we’ve never had significant issues. These arrangements have been immensely positive experiences.

The more people we host, the more I wonder: Why don’t more Christians live like this?

### Homeownership Is a Good Gift—but a Poor Savior

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### What’s the Fix For the Affordability Crisis?

Compiled by Haleluya Hadero

Countless individuals in our churches and wider communities struggle to find affordable housing.Nearly half of renters are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on monthly payments that have outpaced the rate of inflation.

It’s not just young people who get squeezed. Retirees and empty nesters often struggle to find downsized accommodations that meet their needs at an accessible price.

Proposed solutions to the housing affordability crisis include increased vouchers and subsidies (on the demand side) or constructing more units (on the supply side). Yet alongside pressure for these reasonable reforms is this reality: Collectively, American households have a record-high108 million spare bedrooms.

You won’t find that number in the literature (yet). I base it on the difference between reported household sizes and the number of bedrooms in occupied households (including houses, condos, and apartments, but not counting vacant homes, vacation homes, or studios).

I always suspected that our country had plenty of available bedrooms, and I confirmed the hunch when I started playing around with a coding program. Using the 2024 American Community Survey (ACS) data and some key assumptions, I was able to break down how many spare bedrooms existed and where they are located.

Presumably, many of those extra bedrooms belong to Christians. In the midst of a historic housing affordability crisis, I think our call is clear: Let’s make some of them available to others. Maybe for a few nights. Maybe for weeks. Or months. Or a year. We don’t need to hand this problem over wholly to the professionals, the urban planners, and politicians. We can do something about the housing crisis now by practicing radical hospitality.

### The Last Christian Boarding Houses of New York

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### There Are Many Mansions in Heaven, but We’d Like Something Sooner

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This proposal might seem un-American, bringing to mind communes, hippies, or fraying nuclear families. But co-living actually used to be quite common in the United States. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independencewhile living on the second floor of a Philadelphia family’s home. Hosting lodgers in spare bedrooms was a typical way forworking-class Americans to earn some extra income. As recently as a century ago,9 percent of American households had an unrelated roomer or boarder.

Today, that’s down to roughly 1 percent. Due to a combination ofdeclining birthrates, zoning regulations, and increased demand for privacy, the average American household has far more square footage—and fewer occupied bedrooms—than in decades past.

Privacy and space aren’t necessarily bad. But left unchecked, these cultural values risk fostering the expansionist attitude the prophet Isaiah critiques:

Woe to you who add house to house

and join field to field

till no space is left

and you live alone in the land. (Isa. 5:8)

Isaiah warns of a desolate rural wasteland filled with mostly empty dwellings. C. S. Lewis imagined something similar in The Great Divorce, in which hell is a vast, Grey Town that keeps expanding forever because the residents can’t stand living near each other. The damned would rather live all alone than try to navigate interpersonal conflict. (I think a lot of people, Christians included, can relate to that impulse!)

In contrast to these warnings, Scripture is constantly commending philoxenia, the Greek word that gets translated hospitality but literally means love of strangers. Of course, it’s admirable to open our homes to blood relations—aging parents or couch-surfing cousins. But by definition, Christian hospitality extends beyond nuclear families, to friends, acquaintances, and actual strangers—the refugees and hockey players who might in fact be angels (Heb. 13:2). Elisha stayed in a guest room built for him by a Shunammite woman and her husband (2 Kings 4:8–37). Lydia insisted that Paul and his entourage join her household while they ministered in Philippi (Acts 16:15).

Hospitality isn’t a requirement just for church leaders (Titus 1:8). It’s an expectation for all Christians (Rom. 12:13). This is a challenging call for an American culture that might be comfortable inviting friends over for dinner, or hosting travelers for a weekend, but otherwise sees the home as a space for nuclear families to occupy. For many of us, co-living is unthinkable. And sometimes, there are structural barriers (for example, local zoning regulations).

Even when it’s legal, co-living does come with a cost. Sometimes that’s material—renovating an unfinished attic or putting up a room divider. Other times it’s putting two children in the same bedroom to free up a spare room.

It also comes with risk. Christians can and should rely on church networks to vet their guests, making sure the folks they’re hosting are safe. (This is especially true if children are involved.)

The risks aren’t just physical—they’re emotional and spiritual too. It’s hard to have conversations about money and chores. (Will your guest pay rent, or stay for free? Contribute to groceries or utilities?) It’s hard to host those in a position of need without treating them as a case to be managed or a problem to be solved, instead establishing an actual relationship of mutuality. Little grievances can quickly become big grudges. Perhaps that’s why Scripture commands believers to “offer hospitality to one another without grumbling” (1 Pet. 4:9).

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Kathryn Ryken

### Don’t Silo the Saints

Chris Poblete

But the benefits of co-living are also immense. When done well, these arrangements are particularly helpful for folks who are embracing God’s call to singleness and celibacy, as Andy Crouch has written. And considering we’re currently in a “loneliness epidemic,” homesharing can help all of us live fuller, more generous lives.

Beyond the fact that “many hands make light work,” my kids (and I!) have benefitted from being around people who are different from us. Some of our guests came from different ethnic and geographic backgrounds. We’ve been blessed to experience the diversity of God’s family in our own home, while also being heartbroken to hear the stories of racism and sexism that they’ve experienced.

Hanna introduced us to Korean beef and rice with seaweed, which our kids still enjoy today. Owen played worship songs on guitar and piano. Joanne showed us how we can freeze dough and just break off a little piece anytime we want a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie. And Hannah Marie taught our kids their favorite nursery rhyme, “Trot Your Horsey.”

Hannah Marie stayed with us for nine months. That’s $9,000 she saved in rent and utilities. For our part, we got some extra help during a vulnerable time in our own lives. Whenever Hannah Marie returns to visit, now thriving in her marriage and career, our children leap into her arms, eager to play and goof around. Our home is richer, and our family is bigger, because she was part of it.

I can’t promise that co-living is always easy, or that it’s for everyone. But if God is calling you to it, I can promise that it will be good.

Andrew Berg is an area ministry director with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He is the creator of Yes in My Spare Room, a project exploring co-living as a solution to the housing shortage. If you’ve experienced co-living or homesharing, you are invited to fill out his survey here.

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