As students from Moore College joined Sydney churches for their annual Mission Week last month, one team headed north of the border to work with an Anglican parish in Brisbane. They successfully trialled some innovative evangelism strategies while forming a strong relationship with their northern counterparts.

The Rev Andrew Cameron, who lectures in ethics, led a team of students to work with the parish of St Andrew’s, South Brisbane. The mission was the first time that a team from Moore College had worked with an Anglican parish in Brisbane.

Working with the inner-city parish, Mr Cameron says the team members encountered ‘pretty much every belief under the sun’ among the many unchurched people that they met during their nine-day mission.

The church, and particularly the evening congregation made up of mostly university students, was keen to trial creative methods of evangelism. “They were looking for a way to do things differently, and they weren’t entirely comfortable with running an ordinary dialogue meeting,” Mr Cameron said. “So a number of students simply invited a friend to meet one of the team members in coffee shop. Some of those people talked for three or four hours, in quite a degree of depth.”

Mr Cameron says there were some pressures associated with being the first team of Moore College students to work with a church in the Diocese of Brisbane. “But the team handled themselves magnificently in the way the handled people kindly and gently. A lot of those preconceptions melted away.”

He said the trip proved a great encouragement to all. “It’s good to see that God is at work everywhere. No one in our team thinks God’s not at work everywhere, but sometimes it’s easy to forget that,” he said. “It’s good to see that there are God’s people wherever you go, and that it’s possible for us to work together in spreading the gospel.”