English 
Chinese 
Dutch 
Arabic 
Spanish 
Portuguese 
Russian 
French 
Italian 
German 
Japanese To dance without leaving room for Jesus is to dance so close to your partner that no space is left between you. The saying comes from chaperones at church and Christian-school dances, who told couples to leave enough room between them for Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, to stand. Today it is mostly said with a smile.
Behind the joke is an old piece of wisdom. Three times in the Song of Solomon the bride gives the same charge to the young women of Jerusalem: “I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please” (Song of Solomon 2:7; also 3:5 and 8:4). Love is good, and it has its time. The chaperones who pulled couples apart were trying, clumsily, to say the same thing.
Where did “leave room for Jesus” come from?
It grew up among Christian youth groups, church camps and school dances in America, and it seems to have passed from one chaperone to the next by word of mouth. No one has traced who said it first, and it comes in several forms: “leave room for Jesus,” “leave room for the Holy Spirit,” or simply “leave some room.”
The Christian humourist Jon Acuff wrote about it on his blog Stuff Christians Like in April 2008. It was, he said, “the phrase that I heard at any Christian event that involved dancing,” and he remembered how it was used during a slow song: “A youth leader would come over, pull you and your partner away from each other by the shoulders and say, ‘leave some room for the holy spirit you two.’” The 41 replies under his post show how far the rule had travelled. One reader’s youth group called it “3 inches for Jesus.” At another reader’s Christian school it was “six inches for Jesus,” which that student said was “more of a student joke then an actually enforced rule.” Acuff meant it all fondly, as “a celebration of a classicly Christian phrase.”
What does the Rice Purity Test mean by it?
Many people meet the phrase as a question on the Rice Purity Test, a list of 100 questions about romance, sex, drinking, drugs and run-ins with the police that circulates among college students. The test began at Rice University in Houston, where, its website says, it “has historically served as a segue from O-week to true college life at Rice,” O-week being the orientation week for new students. The fourth question asks, “Danced without leaving room for Jesus?” It comes straight after holding hands, going on a date and being in a relationship, so the test treats close dancing as one of the mildest items on its list.
Is dancing a sin in the Bible?
Not in itself. Scripture is full of dancing, much of it holy. When God brought Israel through the Red Sea, “Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances” (Exodus 15:20). When the ark came to Jerusalem, “David danced before the LORD with all his might” (2 Samuel 6:14). The psalms ask for it outright: “Let them praise his name in the dance” (Psalm 149:3), and “Praise him with the timbrel and dance” (Psalm 150:4). In Jesus’ parable of the lost son, the elder brother comes in from the field and hears “musick and dancing” (Luke 15:25), because his father is celebrating a son who has come home.
Dancing could also go with sin. When Moses came down the mountain, “he saw the calf, and the dancing” (Exodus 32:19), and the dance was part of worshipping an idol. At Herod’s birthday “the daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased Herod,” and the dance ended with John the Baptist’s death (Matthew 14:6–8). In both stories the trouble lay deeper than the dancing: an idol in the first, and in the second a king’s rash oath and a mother’s plan.
So the Bible gives no command about dancing as such. GotQuestions.org, an evangelical ministry, says it plainly: “The Bible doesn’t give specific instructions on dancing.” What the Preacher says is that it has its season: “A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance” (Ecclesiastes 3:4). There is more on the passages in the Bible’s stance on dancing.
Why did churches tell couples to leave room?
Because they wanted young people to keep the Bible’s teaching on sexual purity, and a slow dance is close. Paul writes, “Flee fornication,” and gives the reason: “know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:18–20). He tells a young pastor, “Flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart” (2 Timothy 2:22). And Jesus went to the heart of it: “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5:28).
The space on the dance floor was a small, practical way to keep those words. GotQuestions puts the worry honestly: “many styles of pair dancing outside of marriage can be very tempting, especially to the man.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of the same virtue in gentler terms. Modesty, it says, “encourages patience and moderation in loving relationships” (paragraph 2522), and it adds that “the forms taken by modesty vary from one culture to another” (paragraph 2524). A rule about inches is one of those forms. The patience underneath it is the part that lasts.
Do churches still ban dancing?
Some still warn against certain kinds of dancing. The Westminster Larger Catechism, which the Orthodox Presbyterian Church lists among its standards today, names “lascivious songs, books, pictures, dancings, stage plays” among the sins forbidden by the seventh commandment. Its target is lustful dancing. Some Christian schools and churches once forbade dancing altogether. One well-known change came early in 1996, when Baylor University in Texas, which the Christian Science Monitor called “the world’s largest Baptist university,” reversed what the paper called “a 151-year-long ban on dancing.” Not every Baptist was pleased. Miles Seaborn, then president of the Southern Baptists of Texas, told the paper that dancing is “designed not to appeal to culture and taste, but to emotion,” and noted that Baylor would be the only one of Texas’s seven Baptist schools to allow dancing on campus. Furman University in South Carolina, then also linked to the Baptists, had allowed dancing since 1969.
Churches still differ, and where Scripture gives no command, Paul asks believers not to quarrel over it: “Him that is weak in the faith receive ye, but not to doubtful disputations” (Romans 14:1). Families and congregations come to different answers, and each should be “fully persuaded in his own mind” (Romans 14:5).
Is “leave room for Jesus” good advice?
As a rule about inches, it was always a little odd. Acuff joked that the Holy Spirit might not want to be squeezed between “two hormone drunk seventh graders.” Rules like it are easy to criticise, because they measure the body and can miss the heart. Some people link the saying with purity culture and the shame many say it left behind, which is the subject of what purity culture is. Those concerns deserve a hearing. A teenager who keeps six inches of air on the dance floor can still be full of lust, and one who dances close can be innocent.
Yet the question the chaperones were asking is a good one, and Scripture asks it too. “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life” (Proverbs 4:23). Love “doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own” (1 Corinthians 13:5). And Paul gives a test that fits a dance floor as well as a dinner table: “whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). For two young people that might mean dancing in a way that would embarrass neither of them the next morning, each paying attention to how the other feels, and leaving the dance before it turns into something else. For parents it means talking about why, so that the rule makes sense after the chaperones have gone home.
There is one more thing the saying gets wrong, and it is a happy one. Jesus does not need to be kept in the gap between two people, like a ruler on the floor. When there was a wedding in Cana, “both Jesus was called, and his disciples, to the marriage” (John 2:2), and his first sign was wine for the wedding guests (John 2:1–11). Love that waits for its time finds him already there, a guest at the feast. And God’s people are promised a day of dancing for everyone: “Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance, both young men and old together: for I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them, and make them rejoice from their sorrow” (Jeremiah 31:13).
Leave a Reply