Leadership
Interim Rector
The Rev. Kyle St. Claire
Rev. St. Claire served as Vicar of St. Philip's Episcopal Church in New Hope for 22 years, retiring in 2005. He then served an interim position in Northeast Philadelphia and has done supply work. While at New Hope he also worked part-time for eighteen years for an employee assistance agency in Doylestown, doing assessment and referral work and short term counseling of all kinds. He began as Interim Rector here at Incarnation in April of 2009.
He is a graduate of Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1971) and also has another theology degree and an MBA. He has also done some teaching at the school and college level.
He has been married to Tam St. Claire for 36 years and they are the parents of a son and a daughter. They have three grandchildren, ages 5, 2 and 2 (not twins, but children of each of their children). Except for some years in Connecticut and Massachusetts, Father St. Claire has lived around the Philadelphia area, having grown up in Kennett Square, Chester County. He and his wife Tam now live in Furlong, near Doylestown.
He is comfortable with a variety of liturgical styles. He has taught and done chapel services for all ages from Pre-K through nursing homes! He believes the pastoral ministry of the priest and congregation is very important. Good worship is a close second priority, then education. He does like to work ecumenically and would hope to be part of the ecumenical clergy group around Morrisville, and also a regular member of the Bucks Deanery events. He likes to support Diocesan programs.
Director of Music
Mr. John Andrew Bailey
John Andrew Bailey grew up in the First Presbyterian Church, Greensburg, Pennsylvania. While he knew he wanted to be an organist by age five, his legs were too short to reach the pedals. He worked on his piano skills in the meantime, including extensive study with the head of Carnegie Mellon University's Music Department and former pianist of the Pittsburgh Symphony, Harry Franklin. He began singing in the church's choirs when he was seven and playing hymns on the piano for Sunday School worship at age eleven. Finally, at fourteen, he was allowed to begin studying organ and church music with the minister of music, Edgar Highberger, and soon made his organ debut in church. He received a broad early training substituting as organist and choir director in churches of many denominations.
Mr. Bailey holds a BMus in organ and an MMus in harpsichord from the Eastman School of Music, where he studied organ with David Craighead, harpsichord with Arthur Haas, and church music with J. Melvin Butler. While at Eastman, he won first prize in the Sydney Case Organ Competition.
Mr. Bailey has appeared as a harpsichord concerto soloist with Philadelphia's Tempesta di Mare Baroque Orchestra and on the Philadelphia Bach Festival series, and has played in orchestras and as a chamber musician with various groups in the Philadelphia area. He teaches writing at Bryn Mawr College and tutors writers at the University of Pennsylvania; he has also taught music and writing at Swarthmore College and Montclair State University in New Jersey. He is currently completing his PhD dissertation in music history at Penn, where he was for five years a Benjamin Franklin Fellow. His research on the music and poetry of the fourteenth-century poet-composer Guillaume de Machaut, and on French music from 1350 to 1450 generally, focuses on the way religious and philosophical thought informs musical style. He has presented his work at national and international conferences, and he co-authored an essay on performing fifteenth-century rondeaux which appeared in Binchois Studies from Oxford University Press in 2000. He is a regular on the faculty and staff of the annual Amherst Early Music Summer Festival and Workshop, a two week program held at Connecticut College, and at Amherst Early Music's Winter Weekend Workshop, held each January in Philadelphia.
Parish Administrator
Mrs. Michelle Stawicki
Church Wardens
Mrs. Priya Eddy - Rector's Warden
Mrs. Melodee Fox - Junior Warden
Mr. Dave Dixon - Accounting Warden
Mrs. Judy Lott - Secretary to the VestryChurch Vestry Members
Linda Dellmuth, Laura Dundas, Claire Heinbach, Diane Kern, Susan LaRosa and Nancy Martin