It has only been a couple of days since I returned home from NTE 2024, and now I’m faced with the challenge of distilling an intense 4 days into only a few hundred words.

How do I describe the atmosphere of over 1200 students prayerfully seeking to be grown in their faith and witness together? How do I convey the joy of seeing a new brother in Christ share his story of meeting Jesus and his commitment to seeing others meet Jesus as well? This short article may not be capable of giving you the full NTE experience, but my prayer is that it will encourage you to thank God for what he has done at NTE and fuel your prayers for the many students who attended.

NTE is the National Training Event run each year by the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (AFES to its friends). As the name implies, it’s an opportunity for students from across Australia to gather together and be trained to better handle God’s word as they seek to share it with others. It’s also a time for students to hear God’s word taught in main sessions, and to be encouraged to prayerfully consider how God might use them to build his kingdom across the world.

NTE ran in the regions this year as 7 separate conferences, with over 2500 students in attendance in total. This meant that we had the joy of meeting students from across the Sydney and Illawarra region up at KCC under the theme “The Edge of Eternity”.

The real meat of NTE is found in its training strands, with 7 or 8 to choose from depending on students’ level of experience and language ability. The 5 core strands take students through exegesis (understanding a passage), biblical theology (understanding a passage in light of the whole Bible’s story), systematic theology (tracing topics and themes through the Bible), ethics, and teaching whole books of the Bible in a series of talks.  I had the joy of co-leading a group of 15 students through the exegesis process in Strand 1.

What does that look like? It looks like spending 13 hours in Colossians 1:15-23 as we read, discussed, and reflected on God’s word together, and hearing each and every student give a short talk on the passage at the end. It also involves many sheets of paper, plenty of pens, and a mountain of sugar!

I came away from my strand group deeply encouraged as I saw their excitement in learning how to handle the Bible well, their joy in finding that there was so much in God’s word, and to hear their talks was wonderful. I can’t possibly share everything that happened in my group, but here are three brief stories to help you thank God for NTE.

P* was one of the students in my group, who became a Christian this year through the Meet Jesus mission at the University of Wollongong. When it came time to write his talk, P chose to write his talk for an audience of his Hindu friends so that they would meet Jesus as well. His first-ever Bible talk beautifully showed how Jesus is the only one worth worshipping and the only one worth following.

L* is a student at UNSW and was leaving to go on a campus mission right after NTE. He wrote his talk specifically for the residents at an aged care home where they would be visiting and where he would be speaking. That’s quite a lot of trust to put in a student who only had 2 talks under his belt before NTE! The trust was very well-placed as his talk was excellent, and it was a joy to see his care for people that he had yet to meet and his desire that they would cling to Jesus.

D* is another student from Wollongong, and he was writing to encourage one of his mates who has recently become a Christian. His talk was truly outstanding, with a wonderful grasp of how Paul’s logic should change our lives. If you ever hear me speaking on Colossians 1 and I show you a diagram of Jesus’ relationship to creation and redemption, then you’ll have D to thank for that.

Those are only three of the 1200+ students who came to NTE in the Sydney and Illawarra Region, and God has been at work in all of them in some way.

Would you pray that the Spirit would be powerfully at work in everyone who came to NTE, growing them in their faith and witness?

Another key encouragement for me was to see the sheer number of students engaging with the global mission electives and the ministry and mission expo which ran throughout NTE.

Would you pray that God would raise up many more workers for his harvest field?

– Alex Norris, Howard Guinness Project 2024-2025