The EU’s Annual Conference, or AnCon, is fast approaching. If you have ever been to AnCon you will know that it is packed full of main sessions, seminars, electives, group discussions, sport, major life decisions and very little sleep. How do you prepare for something like that? For the engineering faculty it looks a little bit like prayer, planning, recruiting, and refining.

Our first priority is and should always be prayer. AnCon only is what it is because of the providence of God over many years and so prayer is the highest priority in the lead-up to AnCon 2024. The engineering committee and I have been remembering the engineering faculty before God, asking him to bring the right people to AnCon and work to change their hearts, minds, and lives as a result of their experience. We pray that some of the students in our group who are investigating Christianity would come to a saving faith in Jesus at AnCon, and that those who are already following Jesus would be strengthened in their faith and encouraged to submit every part of their lives to the lordship of Jesus. We also pray that God would be raising up people from AnCon 2024 for vocational ministry and to go to the Less Reached and Less Resourced in Australia and beyond.

Next up, we have been planning for all the activities and events that the engineering faculty will be involved with at AnCon. In an exciting development, the engineering and design students will be joining together for a shared community time every day of the conference. Each day we will gather to get to know each other better, to focus on the EU’s 2030 vision, and to hear from our LRLR worker-in-residence, Gordon. I remember when Gordon was my LRLR worker-in-residence back when I was an engineering student at AnCon. In fact I found a picture of the engineering faculty at AnCon 2018 with myself, Gordon, and then howie now senior staff member Sylv Barry in it! How time flies! We’re incredibly excited for this time together, but there’s plenty of work behind the scenes to make that possible. We’ve had hours of meetings to finalise our schedule, to decide on how we’re making the space our own, and to plan out various activities for our engineering and design students to get to know each other better during our time together.

But there’s far more to AnCon than just our community time, and the engineering faculty is more than just our committee. There are many other roles that engineering students will play at AnCon 2024 and that means we’re recruiting. Prayer and Reflection groups are student-led spaces for discussing what students have been learning and experiencing at AnCon, to apply it to their lives, and to bring this before God in prayer. This year there are twelve engineering students stepping up to lead P&R groups for the over 30 engineers attending the conference. Not only that, but engineers will be operating the cameras and AV systems which are essential for AnCon main sessions, requiring another dozen or so volunteers. One of the outcomes of having all this AV support at AnCon is that the main session talks are recorded and available online via the EU podcast. Did you know that you can listen to the AnCon main session talks dating all the way back to 2009 on the podcast? Maybe you could give one of those a listen to get into AnCon mode before joining us for our graduates and supporters night!

Finally, there’s my specific preparation for the engineering faculty’s seminars to run parallel with the main sessions. Across three seminars I will be leading the engineers through Mark chapters 14 to 16 as we explore the Passion Narrative in Mark’s gospel. Seminars are a chance for students to dig deep into God’s word and to immerse themselves in the events of Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection. I had the opportunity at the end of June to get together with Annie, Emily, Sarah and Brian to run through our seminar material together and share our feedback. The AnCon seminars are a challenge to be sure, but it is a joy to be challenged as part of my training in ministry and to share this challenge with such wonderful co-workers in the Gospel.

There’s a lot that goes into AnCon, even just for one faculty, but I know that it is effort well spent. My experiences at AnCon as an engineering student were nothing short of transformative in my life and faith. It was at AnCon that I was seriously challenged to place every part of my life under the Lordship of Christ Jesus. It was at AnCon that I started to grasp the desperate need for the Gospel among the Less Reached. It was at AnCon that I started to ask myself the hard questions about whether I could say “Here am I, Lord, send me” in response to the need for full-time gospel workers. It’s my prayer that God would be doing similar works in the hearts of many engineering students at AnCon in 2024, and that makes all the preparations worth all the effort and all the prayer they entail.

Will you join me in praying for the ministry of AnCon for both engineers and the EU as a whole?

– Alex Norris, Howard Guinness Project 2024-2025