A MESSAGE FROM THE REV. J.C. AUSTIN: THE NEXT STEP OF THIS JOURNEY
Friends, as we enter the new year, I am very excited about the opportunities that are before us as a congregation!
Specifically, I am delighted that our efforts at the strategic 
redevelopment of our church campus are bearing such fruit. Next Wednesday, January 17, at our next Community Meeting, we have the opportunity to see the first glimpses of that fruit, as the Mission Strategy Steering Committee, along with our consultants at Collabo, will be unveiling three initial concept designs for the future of our campus.
I want to stress that these are very much initial draft concepts, not final products in any way. In fact, that is the whole point of the Community Meeting: to gather feedback from both church members and the larger community in reaction to these initial concepts, then go back to the drawing board and revise those concepts accordingly.
This will also be done through the input of a second survey, which I urge you all to complete and encourage any neighbors you know to do the same, both those in the immediate vicinity of the church and neighbors in Bethlehem more broadly. That said, these initial concepts are some different ways of actualizing the goals of the project and the feedback that we already have in hand, both in terms of desires and concerns. The survey will be available after January 17.
This Community Meeting is intentionally designed as an Open House, not a presentation. That means that you can come at any time in the 6-8 p.m. window and explore the three initial concepts at three separate stations in Fellowship Hall, moving at your own pace among the three of them and providing whatever feedback occurs to you in terms of what you like and what you don’t like about each given concept.
We are communicating this to the larger community as well, but it is likely that many of them will still show up right at 6 p.m. So, we want to urge you, as the members of the church, to arrive at 7 p.m. to help cut down on the size of the initial “rush” to engage the concepts. There will be members of the Steering Committee around the Open House and at the three concept “stations” to try and help answer questions.
This work is arguably the most important mission initiative of our congregation right now, so I urge you to make a special effort to attend if you are in any way able to do so. Your input is crucial to us making this a true mission of the congregation, and it is taken very seriously in the design process, as you will be able to see even in the initial drafts. Even if you cannot attend, please make sure you complete the survey once it is posted. I hope to see as many of you as possible next Wednesday!
Grace and Peace,
J.C.