This week I had the priv­i­lege of join­ing six hun­dred oth­ers from a Chris­t­ian stu­dent group at Syd­ney Uni­ver­sity for part of a week-long con­fer­ence. I was meant to be there the whole week, and was pretty dis­ap­pointed to find myself stuck in bed for a cou­ple of days after “flu-like symp­toms” descended on me Sun­day evening! Still, made it up on Wednes­day in time for the sec­ond half of the week. Rowan Kemp gave some great talks, explain­ing from the Bible who God is & why the Trin­ity is essen­tial for under­stand­ing Him, how Chris­tians are given a “deposit” or guar­an­tee from God now as a sure sign of what is to come, and what “Spir­i­tual gifts” are and their use­ful­ness not just to indi­vid­u­als, but for the whole of God’s church. And plenty of other stuff, I’m sure!

I’d orig­i­nally been going to help out lead­ing a Focus (Inter­na­tional Stu­dent) small group but for obvi­ous rea­sons (i.e. the whole not arriv­ing til Wednes­day thing) this didn’t work out. Yin and Michael led the review group (based around the talk con­tent) until on Thurs­day Yin got sick and, as many of the stu­dents had gone home (they were only attend­ing part time), we com­bined the two Focus review groups into one. Phil and Anna served this group by explor­ing some of Christianity’s promises and claims: pray that God will use the mate­r­ial this group went over to con­tinue to stir thoughts and point peo­ple to Christ as King and Saviour.

On Thurs­day night, Rowan shared a vision for the next 50 – 70 years of the lives of Chris­t­ian peo­ple in that room, where by sus­tained prayer for many dif­fer­ent min­istries God might take the lives of many there for His pur­poses and glory through­out the world. It’s an excit­ing dream and one I want to prayer­fully pur­sue for the rest of my life, thank­ing God for those who are pas­sion­ate about so many dif­fer­ent ways He gives us to serve and ask­ing that we could do so more com­pletely because of the Spirit now in us, mak­ing us more like Jesus.