Our Vision
Incarnation Anglican Church is a Gospel-Formed, Sacramental, Missional fellowship committed to seeking the good of our community in the way of Jesus.
Our vision is to participate in God’s mission to redeem the world and a people for his own possession in our communities and the world. We believe Jesus’ parables of the Kingdom to be true. God’s Kingdom is at this moment spreading like yeast through dough and growing to become the largest tree in the garden (Matt. 13). We believe that the risen Jesus is alive and at work drawing men, women, and children to faith in Jesus Christ - converting them from death to life and redeeming their hearts, their minds, their families, their vocations, and their neighborhoods and communities. To this end, King Jesus has sent us to our communities to love and serve Him and our neighbors in His name.
We are a people of an ancient faith, desiring to reflect in our worship our unity with Christ, and with his one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Our worship reflects this unity by including the products of the early church councils in the creeds we confess, and even our eucharistic prayers are themselves traditional and creed-like confessions of our faith, which are formative as we hear them in worship and seek to embody them in our lives.
We Value
Life With Jesus
The call of Jesus is “follow me.” We are followers/disciples/apprentices of Jesus and therefore are learning to receive his love, cultivate the awareness of his presence, and live out his teachings in every area of our lives. And because we will never do these things perfectly in this life, we are learning more and more to rely on his grace, confess our sins, and again begin again.
Life Together
We are designed to follow this life of faith together. Christianity is relational. We believe that deep, meaningful relationships with the people around us are critical for a deep, meaningful relationship with God (Matt. 7:12; Eph. 4:15-16). Because we are eternally secure and significant in Christ, we are not afraid to humbly give and receive bold love as iron sharpens iron. And at the same time, the church is the family of God, which means that it is to be a safe space for all of us to acknowledge that we are sinners, that we don't have it all figured out, that we haven't arrived yet, but that we are in this journey together.
Life for Others
Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40). We endeavor to follow these two great commands of the Bible corporately and individually. Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21). We are a sent people, a people in mission. This mission includes making disciples, planting churches, and seeking the flourishing of life for everyone in our communities and the world. We also want to partner with other churches in our community and in our region in ministries of word and deed.
And Beauty in All Things
As a gospel-formed community, we want to be known as a people who believe that Jesus has already done for us what we could never have done for ourselves: he took the death that we deserved so that we could have the life that he deserved. So, far from being a people who have it all together, we are a community of sinners saved by grace. Therefore, we are a generous people, desiring to share with others the welcome, acceptance, and rich feast we have enjoyed with God through Jesus. Having received the fullness of God’s grace, our cup overflows and sets us free to welcome and share with others the bounty that has been lavished on us.
We are a sacramental people, baptized (claimed and marked by God himself) and desiring a home and family. We renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil and turn to God for forgiveness, acceptance, and redemption through the body and blood of Jesus. We are also a hungry people, desiring nourishment for the body, mind, and spirit. We feast on God’s word and at God’s table.
We are a missional people, connected with the other churches throughout our diocese, and we expect our congregations to grow and to be involved in establishing new congregations in the Mid-Atlantic region. Jesus described his kingdom as one that would continue to grow and spread throughout the world (Matthew 13:31-33), and so we are excited to participate in the work that he is doing by the power of his Spirit. We also want our presence in our community to bring joy to the city (Acts 8:8). The Bible teaches us very plainly, “When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices” (Proverbs 11:10), so we want to be the kind of fellowship that makes our community rejoice.
