As the start of the uni year looms, each of our faculty committees met over the past week to plan out their ministries for 2026. Hear from each of our faculties below to get some insight into the exciting year ahead!
While the mountaintops of Blackheath topped only a chilly 19 degrees outside, inside the DEngo committee was firing up new friendships and cooking up courageous ideas. Please pray that our entirely new committee—senior staff, Howie, Fac Leaders, and members alike—would learn quickly and love deeply. Pray with us that our buddy system to welcome first years, care packages to deepen community, and storytelling evangelism plan to share Jesus’ love might foster revival amongst DEngo students.
The Arts and Social Work (ASW) faculty met for two days in the family home of one of our students on committee.
We spent the two days planning, preparing and praying for the ministry in ASW for the year ahead. From here, all things will flow for the rest of the year, so it’s exciting that we were able to tackle so much planning, and enjoy spending time getting to know each other as a committee.
On Faculty Planning Days, our committee spent lots of time connecting through silly icebreakers, yapping over food prep, and sharing stories over yummy meals. As we stayed in the mountains over the weekend, it was also a great opportunity to visit a local church on Sunday and meet the community!
We are very excited to see what the rest of this year brings us and how God will use us to build up His Kingdom. Pray for our team this year as we plan and encourage our vibrant education community to nurture a prayerful heart for the gospel and its reach to all!
The SciVet committee went to the holiday house of our faculty’s Howie (if you’re able to offer something like this for one of the nine different planning days that happen each February, it would be a great way to practically support the ministry!)
This year, every student in our committee is new! Our two new faculty leaders are also both second years (who did a gap year after school), so overall, we have a young but very enthusiastic group! Please pray for bonding, unity and prayerfully bold plans.
It was so encouraging to spend a weekend with a brand new faculty committee, staffworker, and Howie, prayerfully planning!
Among many other things, we’re keen to start up an evangelistic ‘GO team’ within the faculty to reach students in Business and Law. We also have a plan to post “Ribbons for Revival” around campus, and encourage the faculty to pray for revival whenever they spot one. Pray with us for a revival among BizLaw students at USYD!
The EPS (EU Postgrads & Staff) committee went away to the exotic…Darlington side of main campus!
We know of lots of Christians who are either researching and/or working at the university, but haven’t been able to get involved with EPS. So, we spent lots of time praying and thinking about how to encourage them to get involved with other Christian research students, academics, and university staff.
The university also has lots of PhD students from around the world; we’ve spent time exploring what we can do as a faculty to become more welcoming, in order to reach more believing and non-believing international students.
As the euFOCUS Team gathered in Blackheath, Senior Students Susie & Nael led with energy and clarity. Inspired by Jesus’ servant leadership (Mark 10), we grew to understand one another more to serve lovingly and effectively together, planning to prayerfully reach and grow USYD’s 40,000 international students in Christ. Student-staff partnership was encouragingly strong as students interrogated & adopted a staff idea for a new weekly dinner for locals to help non-Christian internationals investigate Jesus.
