Sami Nguyen is a student and communications intern with AFES, and writes here about her experience of National Training Event.

It’s that time of the year when overseas travel, computer game marathons, and casual employment are usually on the agenda for your typical university student. Yet more than 1,200 students have just spent a few hundred dollars and a week of their holidays in Canberra studying the Bible.

National Training Event (NTE) is a yearly conference run by the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (AFES), a large-scale event committed to seeing people “radically transformed into disciples and disciple-makers of all nations for Jesus’ glory”.

From the 7th to 11th of December, students flooded into Exhibition Park In Canberra for the peak annual gathering of evangelical Christian students in Australia and the Pacific. But NTE was much more than a conference. It was several conferences in one; international guests had a parallel program to grow in fellowship; student committees from various Christian groups join together to pray, plan, and share what they have been learning about leadership; post-grads and academics associated with the Simeon Network thought hard and dreamt big; AFES staff refreshed themselves in the Bible and in prayer for one another and even Canberra locals joined in for the Canberra Bible Talks. NTE was a platform for people of all backgrounds.

Former Moore Theological College lecturer (now lecturing at Trinity in Chicago), Con Campbell, gave the main talks centred around the ‘God-Man’, Jesus. The auditorium glowed each night with students having many ‘light-bulb’ moments during Campbell’s talks. Jesus was not just a teacher, but the man through whom everything was created.

Over the course of a week, many godly and capable Bible teachers from Australia laboured to pass on skills of reading and applying the Bible. NTE really is one of the most signficant ‘gymnasiums’ in which to work on the spiritual fitness of our country.

Students are divided into 141 strand groups to undertake a series of practical workshops on how to understand and teach the Bible. In this way, NTE offers a rare opportunity. Not all Christian student groups have access to the wealth of resources and training that larger campus groups have. So the conference helps redress the balance.

Separate strands were run for international students and for those investigating the claims of the Christian faith. During the conference, there were at least five students who made a life-changing decision to become a Christian and at least 40 recommitted their lives to Jesus.

Each day, the main dining hall was buzzing with intense conversation as students shared what they had been challenged by during the course of the week. I roved around and chatted with people who weren’t from Australia to ask how God had been working in their lives. One memorable conversation was speaking to the students and staff workers from Kirisutosha Gakusei Kai (KGK), the Christian university fellowship group based in Japan.

I was able to speak in Japanese to the students and ask them what being a Christian was like in Japan. They said they were able to speak more openly about their Christian faith during university as people were open to discussing such things. I was particularly thankful that they were able to learn alongside us how to teach the Bible to others; I’ve learnt from visiting Japan several times that resources and gospel workers in Japan are very few.

The conference particularly emphasised the gospel is global, as NTE celebrated the unity AFES enjoys with its parent organisation, the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES). We were blessed to be joined by students from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Japan and Indonesia!

What’s more, this global perspective overflowed in generosity. One of the main features of NTE each year is ActNow, a suite of international projects that students can take part in as they respond to God’s generosity to them in Jesus.

Through ActNow this year 453 Zimbabwean students were sponsored to attend similar Christian conferences in 2014. I talked to Tawanda Masango of FOCUS Zimbabwe who was overjoyed at the response. He said that ActNow was “amazing partnership in the gospel”.

$22,000 was also raised to support the work of the IFES campus movement in Slovenia, ZVES. 101 MegaVoice Audio Bible Players were given to communities in Vanuatu. And every IFES group in the world received at least one hand-written letter of encouragement!

Under God’s hand, a lot of exciting things had been achieved through this conference. But best of all, instead of a rapidly-fading ‘conference high’ as everyone returns to the regular rhythm of life, NTE actively sent out students to make disciples. For most participants in the conference, NTE concluded with a short-term mission in partnership with one or more local churches in different parts of Australia. For four or five days after the conference, mission teams joined with local churches to reach their communities and present the Christian faith to them.

It took months of phone calls, e-mails and coffees for NTE to run seamlessly. More than 200 staff and volunteers contributed to the conference, many labouring for much of the year on it. AFES staff often find the conference very costly—some get sick and all are exhausted by the end of it. But the joy of proclaiming Jesus and having students grow in Him brings smiles and joyful hearts both during NTE and afterwards.

Students are already looking forward to next year’s conference, themed ‘Glorious Dust: The Christian Doctrine of Humanity’. And I’m praying it will ignite even more fervour for Jesus to be known and made known.