Redeemer Chapel Welcome Hub

Our Saviour Lutheran Church, partnering with Redeemer Lutheran College, is launching an appeal to help the College by providing an upgrade to Redeemer Chapel. There are special benefits for the College which are beyond present College building capacity – benefits for community, for student life, for parents, for worship, and for the continuing involvement of students and family long past the school years.

Welcome Hub Appeal

Dear Redeemer families,

For almost three decades Redeemer Lutheran College has been blessed in many ways, particularly with the partnership we share with Our Saviour Lutheran Church, based at Redeemer Chapel. Over the last 30 years many families have shared involvement in these communities and have benefitted from this partnership.

Our Saviour provides many programs and services to Redeemer families with regards spiritual nurturing and youth activities. Additionally, Our Saviour and Redeemer share facilities and a pastor.

As we approach a fourth decade in partnership, Our Saviour and Redeemer recognise that various design aspects of the Chapel can no longer fully cater to the needs of either community. Therefore, the Welcome Hub initiative of Our Saviour to expand the chapel kitchen and amenities, and significantly increase the covered area, will mean that all families and visitors for both institutions will again benefit from Our Saviour and Redeemer working together.

I commend the Welcome Hub Appeal to the families of Redeemer as a project most worthy of our support.

Sincerely

Mr David Radke
Principal

  Welcome Hub Appeal Donation Form

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Redeemer - Our College and Our Community

Redeemer is more than our College – it is our community. Many of us came as strangers, and found welcome and faith. It’s been happening for 30 years, and each year the number who join increases.

Term by term, day by day, we come and go, meet and talk.

We become friends – students, parents, teachers, grandparents, helpers.

We celebrate achievements, praise God for milestones, build life-long companions. And we keep on coming... for weddings, baptisms, reunions. Sometimes we come sadly for tragedies, or joyfully as supporters.

Redeemer is our community – a place of welcome for the school years, and a place that builds us for a lifetime.

Widening the Welcome

In 2010 Our Saviour Lutheran Church will help Redeemer to ensure that the College continues to be a place of welcome and community. We all want a place wide enough for our ever-growing student and family population, as well as those involved over the last 30 years.

Redeemer Chapel - The Key to Welcome and Community

Redeemer Chapel, the heartbeat of Redeemer’s community life and the ‘front door’ zone for newcomers, is the key place to help provide a comfortable welcome to all.

The Chapel was opened 10 years ago with room to seat the whole College at that time. Its function has grown. It is now not only a worship place; it is the entry way to the College grounds and the meeting place for all who come and go, or stay for events. But the Chapel facilities are inadequate for this. It has almost no toilet amenities, a very limited kitchen, and inadequate shelter for outdoor community life.

The lack of restrooms creates quiet embarrassments for young families, Junior schoolers, and those with health needs. And our hosting capacity is limited to small numbers, effectively excluding many, and restricting events.

The Appeal of a New Welcome Hub

The Our Saviour plan to upgrade the Redeemer College entry area has been named the ‘Welcome Hub’. It is inspired as much by future opportunity as present need. Safe caring community is hard to find. Children no longer play in their streets, neighbours live behind high fences, and in-home isolation is normal. It’s a sad and serious loss. Schools in Australia are among the few places which can change this.

Redeemer College keenly seeks Christian community life as well as the Christian education of each student.

The plan for a welcome hub expands the way for students, parents, staff, old scholars and friends to come together and share their lives in diverse ways.

Think of the New Possibilities:

• Safe, sheltered coffee and talk zone before and after school;
• Student shelter coming, going, and waiting each day;
• Youth community events, café style;
• Expanded Sunday Night Live café and youth worship for students, old scholars and outreach;
• Open days – for new parents, grandparents, sports promotions, mission projects;
• Redeemer Fair, upgraded Coffee Shop zone;
• New opportunities for family ministries such as Play group, parent gatherings, local Youth leader meeting place etc.
• ‘Halfway’ events (outside church/college buildings) where hesitant community members and youth can make initial contact;
• Partnering Christian events for all churches;
• ‘Change the World’ awareness events with the wider community;
  

The ‘Welcome Hub’ will make tomorrow a time for the benefits of community life at Redeemer College to go on, to go out, and to stay welcoming.

The Plan

The Welcome Hub plan will extend the existing Chapel kitchen (three times the current size), provide a toilet block (four female, three male), build a storeroom for outdoor furniture, and give a large covered area from the new kitchen to the College Administration building.

This new ‘Hub’ will effectively lift the Chapel amenities and shelter so that several hundred can be involved at the Chapel entrance, with food service, band space, PA, projection screens and toilet facilities. The kitchen will suit as a coffee shop. The sheltered areas will provide shade and shelter for hundreds of students or others, including lunch time activities, arrival/departure traffic, plus a ‘stop, sit and talk over coffee’ zone for parents.

Helping to Make it Happen in 2010

After more than a year of planning, consultation and prayer we have an action path for building extensions. We are ready to gather our resources and do it, with your help.

We are asking everyone to make an investment in the people already getting involved and those yet to join us – by providing a Welcome Hub big enough to include them. The cost is estimated at $530,000*, and the hope is to have it done in 2010**.
 

The components of support are:

1. A monetary pledge to provide a tax deductible gift in time for 30th June tax year end.
2. A pledge for annual giving for 2 or more years with regular tax benefits...
3. Involvement in events to celebrate and share the project; and to lift the interest of a wider circle of supporters whilst enjoying fun ways to contribute to funds.
4. Building up our funds supply (ear-marked deposits) for a loan to cover the unpaid costs through the Lutheran Layperson’s League – our internal bank offering depositors 4½ % interest, guaranteed security, and easy access to funds.
5. Prayer and promotion
   

*  $530,000 includes the bathroom and kitchen complex, equivalent to the facilities of 4 homes, and a large arch cover larger than a house. Add up those costs and the figure becomes understandable. **  Subject to approvals for loans and building details.

A Word from Principal - David Radke

Redeemer’s wonderful Chapel has served the College and Our Saviour Lutheran Church for a decade. The Chapel is not only a spiritual focal point for both communities; it is a highly utilised facility for mass gatherings of all kinds, and to this end it is one of the College’s greatest assets. In partnership, Our Saviour Lutheran Church and Redeemer seek to enhance the Chapel’s serviceability so that its benefit to both communities in the future is as outstanding as it has been in the past decade.

This project provides for better catering facilities, with the installation of a much larger kitchen as well as expanded amenities with the provision of an additional seven toilets. A further aspect of the project is to provide an extensive under-cover area between the Chapel and the College administration building. This project will substantially benefit the youth ministries of both Our Saviour Lutheran Church and the College. It will likewise benefit Redeemer’s promotional and community-building programs such as Grandparents’ Days and Awareness Day. Our Saviour Lutheran Church will oversee an appeal for this project throughout Term 2, and take responsibility for any construction loan that may be required. Our Saviour will launch the appeal with an Appeal Dinner at Fitzy's Loganholme on Saturday 22 May. I commend this project for your support.

Mr David Radke, Principal

From Pastor Robin Stelzer - Our Saviour Congregation

Some places have the capacity to help change lives. They are places of grace – a hub of life where relationships form, welcome is shared, hospitality is generous, and care is comforting. Redeemer Chapel is such a place, growing faith and touching thousands of lives again and again over many years. The number keeps growing – more students, more families, more youth, more worshippers, and now more infants, young families and older grandparents, greater health issues.

The Redeemer Chapel Hub Appeal is a commitment to catch up with that growth. Only by extending facilities will the grace reach and include all of us, as well as those yet to come. Your generous help will grow this place of grace – the Welcome Hub of Redeemer Lutheran College.

Pastor Robin Stelzer, Our Saviour Lutheran Church

More infomation about Our Saviour Lutheran Church: www.oslc.org.au