danny’s space

A few of us went to Ashfield station in the morning to hand out leaflets containing a short Christmas quiz, with the idea of getting people to see how little they actually knew about Christmas. I was unfortunately too tired to go but heard encouraging reports from the people that did - about how people were genuinely interested and how for some it seemed to be the highlight of an otherwise routine day.

After a quick debrief and team meeting, the doorknocking started. We went around in guy/girl pairs to the parish around St John’s Ashfield, letting people know about the Christmas events that the church was holding. Doorknocking was obviously a pretty scary thing to do, but after the first few houses it got slightly easier. Quite a valuable suggestion came from Katay in our morning briefing, which was to use the question “So, have you had much to do with church things in the past?” to let people talk about their experiences after the initial pamphlet plug.

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Half our strand group presented talks on the resurrection on Wednesday morning. The other half (which included me) were either too tired or too confused to write a talk and so shared what interesting or confused things we learnt. Good illustrations that were used included paralleling our seats in Heaven with tickets to a game, and looking at Jesus’ resurrection as the coolest thing any superhero could do. The strand group leader also left us with some parting words, about the fact that death undercuts everything that we do in life (cf Ecclesiastes) but that the work in the Lord will not end up in futility (1 Cor 15:58). People fear death, and this fear is overcome by Christ. Our life is safeguarded in Christ, so we have our life to give to him and those around us.

Then a very short morning tea which involved walking across the ANU campus to the main hall for the last talk from Chin about how God always knew that people could not obey all his Laws, and how he provided a way out through blood sacrifices - this is truly the meeting of justice and mercy. Thanks to Christ, who is the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, we can now come to God. We were challenged to analyse our lives and be convicted in the areas we were still struggling with.

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Tuesday was a pretty challenging day.

In the morning, Gibbo spoke about God’s household and the mutual, genuine love that all Christians should have for each other. As Romans 12 says, love between people of God’s family should be genuine, mutual, practical, deeply felt, humble, and forgiving. We were created to be like God, and his goal for us is to become more like his Son each day (Romans 8). I think all of us were highly rebuked in terms of having feigned love for those around us. We are called to be like Christ and so we should love like he loved. This needs to be practiced at church and beyond church - we should relate with tenderness, compassion and other-centerdness, sharing our time and taking the initiative to love others.

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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’.

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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.

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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!