danny’s space

On Monday we learnt heaps in strand group, saw the sights of Canberra (yeah, not that many really..), and were challenged about the church by Gibbo.

In the morning we had 3 great hours of strand group, where ideas and thoughts started to come together to form a more coherent picture. Interesting questions that were posed include: ‘If Jesus has a body, where is he?’, ‘When did Adam and Eve die?’, and ‘In what sense is death an enemy?’. The answers went something like ‘He has been exalted as God and therefore is not subjected to time and space limitations’, ‘Spiritually died when they ate the fruit, and physically died later’, and ‘Death is against what God created us to be - it prevents God’s purpose for creation being worked out in us’.

(Read on …)

Unfortunately I started NTE one day late because of a really tiring week leading up to the conference thanks to 21st’s and other late nights. After falling asleep during the strand groups (the Bible study training sessions) and the main talks, I realised that coming late was a bad idea and coming tired was even worse.

I missed the initial talks from both speakers, about the Church and from Deuteronomy, and arrived in Canberra around 10:30 after driving up with Nathan (the tall one from Ruse!). I’m heaps thankful that he came up with me in the morning otherwise I’d probably be in a morgue somewhere. We had a good chat about lots of things, like ministry and our futures. The 4-hour drive up was probably the most we had ever talked even though we went to high school together, and it was fantastic seeing how connected people in Christ are with each other.

(Read on …)

The Australian Fellowship for Evangelical Students ran their annual National Training Event (NTE) over the last week or so, from December 3 - 11 in Canberra. The topic of the conference was on the Fellowship of the King, a play on the hobbits no less, talking about God’s church and the role we play in it. The training part of the conference also had seminars and strand groups where we learnt how to do various practical ministry things as well as teach from the Bible. There were also talks from Deuteronomy.

The training part of NTE was fantastic. This year, there were more than 1000 people from university campuses around Australia (including some Fijians), and seeing the diversity and concomitant unity of Christ’s people was greatly encouraging. Chatting to people from around Australia was great as you could get an insight into how other people did things and still be able to see that we were all one and the same in Christ. Seeing that many students gathered together in a hall signing together, learning together, and praying together was awesome too.

On the Wednesday of NTE, everyone farewelled Canberra to head off to their various mission locations, to help out a church somewhere in Australia. The training part of NTE was fantastic - the mission was even better! The two Sydney Uni mission teams went to churches in Belmore and Ashfield. The team that I was with went to St John’s Anglican Church in Ashfield, where the head EU staffworker, Andrew Katay, is the senior minister. Compared to last year’s NTE mission, the EU teams this year were huge, which was a great encouragement and a testament to God’s provision, meaning we were able to really help the church at Ashfield with its outreach and kids ministries. Our team did various things like running a kids club based on the Chronicles of Narnia, doorknocked the area, leafletted at Ashfield station, and helped with stalls at the local mall and markets. Building relationships between the church and the people of Ashfield was an important goal. I think both the congregation there, Katay’s family, and our whole team were greatly encouraged by each other to continue working for God’s people in his grace.

One post won’t do NTE justice, so I’ll do multiple posts of what I remember of each day, with photos of course. NTE is a fantastic practical ministry training opportunity that no one should miss. Next year’s NTE is in Canberra again from 2 - 10 December 2006 featuring talks by Phillip Jensen and Lindsay Brown - be there!

It’s been a while since my last post, mostly because I’m way too lazy to actually type something up because I know it’ll take me ages, but that doesn’t really do people justice so I finally decided to post. Quite a lot has happened.

Chronologically first is Kao’s 21st. He had it last Sunday night at the Monkey Bar in Chatswood. That was fun, we got there a few hours early to hire some helium gas cylinders to pump up balloons and looked like chinese terrorists lugging around these tanks in Chatswood Westfield. We had to take a tank back to the shop because something was going wrong, and the shop assistant nearly exploded our eardrums and half of Westfield when he released the pressurised gas without any nozzle on the output hole thing - more about this on Chap’s blog. We snuck in some O’galo burgers for dinner before the party started because we were starving. The party went pretty well, seemed like most people had a good time, especially Kao. The speeches ran well, heard from his uni IT g33k friends, Nerd Con, and also Kao himself. He thanked everyone individually which was a nice gesture (but dangerous in case you forget someone). Then we crashed his place afterwards and had some hardcore Gamecube gaming action with Mario Party. Happy 21st Kao, good stuff actually having a party on your real birthday! Unfortunately Chap and I were too forgetful to bring our cameras.

The next day Sara finally finished her exams after 4 long weeks, hooray! We had dinner at the Eastwood Jap suhsi bar place - their teriyaki chicken is so good! Then we went to Sam’s MTS supporters’ evening at St Paul’s Carlingford in the evening, heard about how he was to embark on a 2 year ‘experience’ of full-time ministry. It was great seeing Sam’s family and friends there to support him - we’ll be praying for you Sam! Even though you’re deserting ND after so many years.

Then more bumming around for a few days, had a good bludge with the 180FM leaders on Wednesday night at Levina’s place playing Risk after a short leaders’ meeting at church which I spied on (unsucessfully because people saw me). Well I guess that’s what happens when you sit next to them. Andrew gave a good training seminar thing on leaders being servants with the role of leaders, but fundamentally everyone being a servant anyway. Risk isn’t the best team-building game I must admit, especially for those who really get into the game and take it a bit too seriously. But it was fun anyway, nobody won obviously because we wanted to finish and still get some sleep.

Thursday night we went to Temasek in Parra for dinner with church friends. It was fun as usual, although being Taiwanese (go Taiwan!) I didn’t understand most of the stuff they said in Cantonese. I guess that’s what you get for going to a primarily Honkie church. The food was great most people thought. I thought it was too spicy to be good - I like tasting the flavours of my food instead of tasting my tastebuds go psycho and fire off random signals because of the chilli or curry hotness. Then gelato afterwards (great for cooling down the stomach) at a nearby Lello’s which had a nice cosy second story area where we sat for a few hours and chatted. Walking around in Parra at night is scary stuff - lots of homie-looking guys with beefed up vroom vroom cars who are obviously compensating for something.

The next day I found out that Mozilla had finally released FireFox 1.5, so naturally I downloaded it. It runs pretty well, has built in tab-dragging support which is nice. Unfortunately some extensions didn’t work with the new version but updates were available for most. No gripes so far about 1.5.

Then yesterday night was Xing’s 21st at Castle Hill RSL. I was meant to pick him up at his place in Northmead at 6:30 but unfortunately I left late and also the GPS got me lost. I don’t know why, but the GPS seemed to think his address was 100 numbers away from where it actually was, and being on a main road, looping back to his place took ages. Can’t trust technology. Need to double check the physical location all the time, especially on big roads. So we got to the venue around 10 minutes before guests were scheduled to arrive - sorry Xing! We quickly set up his pansy-coloured tinsel and a few tables, the projector, etc. The party ran quite smoothly for something that wasn’t that fully planned out. Chap brought along Singstar which was great, Xing’s curry actuarial friends had a blast. The food was great, lots of oily stuff like quiches and spring rolls and deep friend fish thingies. The venue was pretty nice as well, we got a pretty decent room with the adjacent outside bar area as well. The service was excellent - the people there were so helpful in absolutely everything like getting furniture, finding a projector, finding cables and a TV for Singstar, cake preparation, everything. Speeches went pretty well too, with a few of Xing’s work buddies kicking it off with funny anecdotes about his antics at work. Then the typical Nerd Con speech about his fashion sense, gayness, safe driving, nerdiness, etc.

In all the night went pretty well, and Xing seemed to have heaps of fun and was very pleased. Chris got into a good conversation with Becca, showing her Two ways to live which is great - I don’t know how people just get into conversations like that. I sat down at the table when he was at the second diagram. Xing’s friend Khaled was also there, and him being a Muslim and me being a Christian, we had a great chat with Nathan (a Christian) as well about the Muslim and Christian beliefs. I think we all learnt a lot which is the important thing. Don’t bag out what you don’t understand. Joe and I went to Xing’s place after the party to bum around and we had a good chat about lots of things like worldviews and people and uni and work and things like that. We chatted until 5am in the morning after which we looked outside and saw the sun out again and thought it was about time to head off. Happy 21st Xing!

Anyway, NTE has started already this morning, but I’m heading down a day late because I’d be way too buggered to make the trip to Canberra. Too many late nights recently from all the 21sts and whatnot. But it’ll be fun this year I think. 1000+ students from around Australia, a few from Fiji and stuff as well. It’ll be on ‘The Church’ which was the EU Annual Conference topic, so we’ll learn more about it. The EU delegation to NTE this year is better as well, much larger than the dismal effort in 2004. Two mission teams, one to Belmore and one to Ashfield. It promises to be a great time!

Just found out off Chap’s blog that our pastor, Andrew Hong, has his own MSN webspace! That’s pretty cool. I wonder which uni lecturers have blogs, and whether or not they bag out their students on them.

Wow, that was a long blog.