Letter from Amy: April 9, 2025

One thing we love at Drew: the courtyard!

Dear Incarnation,

Over the past two years, I have written and spoken many times about the changes we're observing to Incarnation's place and space. By "place," I mean the reality that our community is now spread across a much broader geography than we ever imagined when we planted a neighborhood church on Columbia Pike in South Arlington seven years ago. Since then, our congregation has become far more dispersed across neighborhoods throughout DC, MD, and VA, and our overall center of gravity has shifted eastward. The Maryland service is the most visible expression of that shifting geographic reality.

By "space," I mean the ever-shifting needs and constraints of our worship locations. Drew Elementary has been a stable, sunny, and flexible home base for us for nearly 2 years (believe it or not, this is a longevity record for us!). But the school is unavailable outside of Sundays, and is often unavailable for key holidays — most challengingly, the Sundays surrounding Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. In the past, we’ve relied on Greenbrier Baptist as a second worship site, and we continue to keep office space there with a growing number of other ministries. However, we’ve nearly outgrown the Greenbrier sanctuary, and its westward location and lack of accessibility now pose additional challenges to our congregation.

For that reason, late last year, we began a new friendship with Beverley Hills Community United Methodist. We’ve worshiped there a handful of times since December, and will worship there again during Holy Week. They’ve been welcoming, hospitable, and generous. After our Advent and Christmas worship, we took an informal survey to ask what you all thought of this new space, and of our existing spaces and times. Here’s what we learned:

You love Drew! It’s a great spot for our needs right now in so many ways. But you also see the limitations of the space (particularly as our children’s ministry grows), and the challenge of setting up and tearing down each week. Many of you questioned the long-term viability of our worship there.
When we can’t worship at Drew, you unanimously prefer Beverley Hills to Greenbrier. Beverley Hills isn’t perfect (parking, a noisy sanctuary, tech constraints, and kids' spaces were all mentioned), but it’s spacious, beautiful, completely accessible, centrally located, and has lots of possibilities for indoor/outdoor fellowship as well as children’s rooms.
You love our current service time of 10am. If you were forced to choose a different time, you’d pick 5pm. Everything else — earlier, later, and everything in between — is pretty much evenly tied for a distant third place.

Given these results, we’re proceeding in the following ways:

Staying put at Drew, grateful for a space that meets our needs!
Moving our special services over to Beverley Hills (Holy Week, Easter, Christmas, etc).
Exploring ways to minimize strain on our staff and volunteers at Drew, and to maximize opportunities for fellowship there (so that we're not always working and worshiping; we're also having fun!). As part of this effort, we're hoping to bring back occasional potlucks and after-service snacks. This has proven more logistically challenging and labor-intensive at Drew than at any previous location, but Incarnation is a community built around shared meals — so we’re trying anew to figure it out! If you’re interested in helping, email Brian Bussey: brian_bussey@hotmail.com.
Continuing to built trust in our relationship with Beverly Hills. With time, we hope to explore ways to address our concerns around parking, noise, etc.
Praying! We're continuing to discern these questions of place and space as our church continues to grow and change.

That’s been our plan, and we’ve already had opportunity to act on it. We recently learned that we could not worship at Drew on Easter Sunday, so we asked Beverley Hills and they generously (unsurprisingly) said yes, bending their own plans to accommodate us. They also agreed to host us throughout Holy Week. (Sadly, neither they nor Greenbrier could host us on Maundy Thursday, but we are excited for the home fellowship we’ll try instead, which feels particularly appropriate for this night.)

Meanwhile, we’ve also begun worshiping each month at Hyattsville Mennonite, and we're now discerning a whole new set of questions around space and place there. Our next service there will be on Sunday, April 27 — spread the word!

Questions? Thoughts? Prayers? Hopes? Dreams? Visions? Words from God? :) I’d love to hear from you. And I would love your prayers for discernment.

Holy Week begins on Sunday outside at Drew. Come ready to wave palms, hear the passion reading, and enter the final week of Jesus’ life together. You can find details about all of our services — in a variety of spaces and places around the DMV — on the Holy Week page of our website.

With love,

Amy

p.s. Save the date for a parish meeting immediately after the service on Sunday, May 4. We'll provide updates on our finances, Maryland, and my sabbatical. Hope to see you then!

Comments