Why I Built This Whole Thing Around a Front Porch

Years ago, back when it was still MOPS and not MomCo, I sat in a folding chair in a church fellowship hall with my newborn asleep in a wrap against my chest and my toddler safely tucked away in the childcare room down the hall — the first real break I'd had in weeks, and I remember not quite knowing what to do with my own two free-ish hands. I was running on the kind of exhaustion that makes you half-listen to everything, one hand resting on my baby's back out of habit more than need. But something about that room stuck with me anyway. The way I was let in before I'd proven anything — before I'd showered properly, before I had a single coherent thought to offer anyone. The way nobody asked if I had my theology sorted out before they handed me a cup of coffee and a seat next to them. I didn't have a name for it. I just knew I'd felt it, and I never forgot the feeling.

I didn't get the actual words for it until this year, working through the Good Company curriculum as we built out our own MomCo group. That's where I first read the phrase — we are the front porch — and something in me sat up. It wasn't a new idea to me. It was a name finally showing up for something I'd been carrying since that folding chair years ago, and had already started building toward without knowing what to call it. I thought hard about what it would feel like for a mom to walk through our doors for the first time. Not a mom who already had it figured out. Not a mom who'd been in church her whole life and knew the language and the songs and where to sit. A mom who was scared, or skeptical, or simply tired, and wasn't sure she belonged in a room full of women who talked about Jesus like He was someone they actually knew. I wanted her to feel like she could sit down before anyone asked her to believe anything. I wanted the porch to come before the sanctuary.

That's the whole idea. And it's the idea Soft Sacred Slow is actually built on.

What a Front Porch Actually Is

Picture a house. Somewhere inside that house is the room you'd call the deepest one — the place where the real study happens, where Scripture gets opened and wrestled with and turned over slowly. That room matters. I love that room. But nobody meets a stranger at the door of the deepest room in their house. You meet her on the porch first. You hand her something warm to drink. You let her sit a while before you ask her to come inside.

A front porch doesn't require anything of the person standing on it. She doesn't need to have her theology sorted out. She doesn't need to know which translation she prefers or whether she's "ready" for a Bible study. She just needs to be a woman who's curious, or hurting, or lonely, or looking for something steadier than what she's been handed so far. The porch is where faith gets to be evident — visible in how I write, how I live, what I choose to notice out loud — without ever being a locked door she has to get past first.

That's what I mean when I say front-porch theology. Faith that's felt before it's explained. Welcome before requirement. A woman gets to come exactly as she is, and the deeper rooms of the house are still there, still open, whenever she's ready to wander further in — if she ever wants to at all.

Why I Won't Split This Into "Light" and "Deep"

I thought about doing it the way a lot of faith-based spaces do — a free layer for the woman who's not ready for much, and a paid layer where the "real" depth lives behind a purchase. I sat with that model for a while, honestly. It would've been simpler in some ways.

But it never sat right, because it would have meant the porch was really just a waiting room. A place to keep her occupied until she was willing to pay for the good stuff. And that's not welcome — that's a sales funnel wearing a cardigan.

So here's what I decided instead: everything here is genuinely faith-forward. Not everything is a Bible study — some of it is a recipe, or a story about my marriage, or something I learned digging through my family's history, or just an honest few paragraphs about a hard week. But none of it is watered down to make it more palatable, and none of it is being held back to make you pay for the "real" version. Depth is what actually builds connection between us. Not a locked door.

What This Means for You, Practically

If you've never opened a Bible in your life and you're not sure you want to yet — you're welcome here. Come for the recipe, or the home story, or whatever brought you through the door today, and stay as long or as briefly as you'd like.

If you've been in church your whole life and you're tired of resources that assume you're either brand new or already a mature-in-Christ Bible teacher, with nothing in between — you're welcome here too. There's room on this porch for exactly where you are, whatever that looks like this week.

I built this space especially with women like me in mind — the ones who feel unseen more often than seen. Neurodivergent brains that don't process things in a straight line. Multipassionate hearts that can't pick just one thing to care about and stop caring about the rest. Women choosing to live a little countercultural, a little slower, a little quieter than what's expected of them. If that's you, I wanted you to walk up and feel like the porch light was already on for you specifically.

So What's Actually Inside This House?

Because I can't pick just one thing to care about, this space doesn't either. Some weeks I'll be writing about Scripture and prayer. Other weeks it'll be a recipe with a story behind it, or something I dug up tracing my family back a few generations, or an honest post about marriage, or what I'm reading, or how I'm learning to make an apartment feel like a real home instead of a waiting room for "someday." It's not a niche blog. It's closer to my actual life — which has never fit inside one category, and I've stopped trying to make it.

That's the whole reason for the porch. Not because I don't care about the deep rooms of the house — I care about them enormously, and I hope you'll wander into them with me over time. But nobody has to earn her way there first. She just has to be willing to sit down.

If this resonated, I'd love to have you subscribe and become a member of my community — you'll get The Sunday Sabbath in your inbox every week, plus the ability to reply and share your own story right here on the blog. Come sit on the porch a little longer.

If this stirred something in you, I'd love to hear it — reply and tell me what this brought up for you, or share your own story below. This is a space to process together, not just read alone.