Imagine Incarnation

Reimagining Our Campus to Serve God's Mission in the Years Ahead

Back in 2020 our vestry established a task force to help generate ideas for the future of Incarnation's campus. Now, as we regather after two years of disruption, that task force is ready to invite our congregation into a broad conversation about how our buildings and grounds can best serve God's mission in the years ahead. We're calling that conversation Imagine Incarnation.

Imagine Incarnation

Phase 1 (Fall 2022). We held three in-person Congregational Conversations plus an online survey in September and October 2022, facilitated by our consultants Sarah Lightfoot, Barrie McClune, and Jim Heid. Together we reflected on the 150-year history of our campus, our understanding of our mission, and our hopes and dreams for the future of our buildings and grounds. Facilitators at each table group recorded members' comments, and our trained "themers" worked to distill everyone's comments into the most prominent recurring themes, which were presented back to the full group for more discussion.

These three meetings helped us produce the following common themes to carry forward:

Themes from Imagine Incarnation Congregational Meeting #2: Our Visions of Incarnation's Future Campus

Themes from Imagine Incarnation Congregational Meeting #3: What We've Learned, Possible Challenges and How to Face Them

A full, 60-page report on this Phase 1 process, with a complete list of all participants' comments, is downloadable below:

Imagine Incarnation Phase 1 Report

Phase 2 (coming up in 2023). The next phase in Imagine Incarnation will likely be to engage a professional partner with campus planning expertise to help lead us through a campus master planning process. This will help us translate the themes from Phase 1 into one or more alternative design possibilities. Our planner will help us understand the potential possibilities and tradeoffs involved with various options, which we will workshop together with additional input from the congregation. The goal will be to develop a master plan that represents our best vision for our buildings and grounds and that can be endorsed by our vestry as a roadmap for the years ahead. Our Property Development Task Force will seek the Vestry's approval to move forward with this planning process in the first half of 2023.

Phase 3 (likely in 2024-25). Once we have a plan for our campus, we will move into the implementation phase of actually designing and building what it is we have envisioned together.