ABOUT INCARNATION

Incarnation is a new Episcopal congregation in Beaver County that is still in the process of forming. You might wonder about the need for a new congregation when Beaver County already has so many churches. We recognize and celebrate the faithful work that many churches are doing here to spread the love of God. At the same time, we believe the Episcopal Church has a unique vocation in this time and place and that an Episcopal congregation has something to offer Beaver County.

 

THE RICHES OF AN ANCIENT FAITH

American Christianity has a habit of acting as if in between the New Testament and the twentieth century, the Holy Spirit took a long vacation. We appear to be making things up as we go, and all based on a private interpretation of Scripture and a personal relationship with someone named Jesus, who conveniently seems to look and think and act in much the same ways we do. Don't misunderstand us: union with Christ Jesus is the beginning and end of the Christian life. As we pray in one of our collects, "To know you is eternal life, and to serve you is perfect freedom." But the individualistic impulse that is so common in American Christianity is ripe for error and abuse, and we see the way it has devastated the Christian witness in our country. In the Episcopal tradition, we experience God's grace in giving us boundaries and guidelines that are outside ourselves, handed down from the apostles and preserved through the centuries of the Church's life: the beauty and stability of a formed liturgy, the centrality of the sacraments, the bedrock of the creeds, the Church Year, even the ordained authority of deacons, priests, and bishops. All these things make the Episcopal Church a distinct doorway into the Christian life in our time and place, preserving and passing on the riches of our ancient faith as we attend to the ever-present and sanctifying work of the Spirit.

 

GOD'S GLORIOUS WELCOME IN CHRIST

The Episcopal Church welcomes all people into the sacramental life of the Church purely on the basis of God’s glorious welcome of sinners in Christ, rather than on any other ostensible qualification. Churches in America are too well known for their exclusionary impulses—for the (often contemptuous) reflex to draw and redraw the line between who is “in” and who is “out.” As our nation becomes increasingly polarized, this reflex fires ever more zealously among Christians. Incarnation seeks a different way: to welcome all in the name of Christ—across the many stark and serious divisions that can and do divide us in twenty-first century America—and to preach and model the peace-making power of Christ which overturns every kind of hostility. Let peace be proclaimed to those who are far off and to those who are near (Eph 2:17). This means we may find ourselves worshipping alongside people who think in radically different ways than we do—we might even call them our enemies! Thanks be to God that union with Christ in baptism turns enemies into sisters and brothers, into members of the same body, and bids us to love and serve each other as we grow in our common life in Christ. 

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PREACHING JESUS

Many of us have experienced firsthand the damaging effects of hearing "do better" moralisms, threats of damnation, or plain political agendas passed off as the good news of God in Christ. This is a grievous thing. No one should search for bread and be handed stones. Our hope in starting a new congregation in Beaver County is that it would be another church in which Jesus is preached week in and week out, and that through this, "God [would fill] the hungry with good things" (Magnificat, Luke 1:53).