About Stage One

Since opening on October 1, 2023, Stage One has hosted dozens of groups and artists and welcomed thousands of people through its doors every year. Five or more small businesses are usually growing in the incubator kitchen at any given time. This is a full building, doing a lot more than one thing. 

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This building started as Asbury United Methodist Church. When Asbury's congregation began looking toward the future after the pandemic, they asked Sycamore Creek Church to take on the building. Sycamore Creek said yes, and then made a choice: instead of keeping the building for church use alone, they remodeled it to give back to the community, as a performing arts center and an incubator kitchen built to platform local artists and entrepreneurs. Peppermint Creek Theatre Company and Ixion Ensemble helped shape what that could look like, and local architecture firm Studio Intrigue turned the vision into a real, working space. 

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Stage One runs on a come-as-you-are culture: curious, creative, and compassionate. That's the same spirit that shapes Sycamore Creek Church itself, LGBTQIA-affirming, committed to racial equity, and built on a belief that artists are today's truth-tellers. Supporting the artists who use this stage isn't a side project for Sycamore Creek. It's central to what the church believes it means to live out its faith in the world.