Nexus25: With the measure you use …

by Tony Payne

With the measure you use, it will be measured to you, said Jesus.

It's so often like that, isn't it?

What you bring to a thing is very often what you end up getting out of it. The questions and attitudes you have at the outset usually determine how you hear, what you hear, and what you come away with.

So in the following reflections on the Nexus Conference that was held a couple of weeks ago, I must ask the reader to bear with the questions I turned up with. They have been on my mind for some little while, and they no doubt determined why I found the conference to be a vastly encouraging and stimulating day.

The conference was about evangelism, and specifically about our mission to the sprawling, shining, lost city of Sydney. The vibe was something like God's closing words to Jonah: "Should we not have pity on Sydney, that great city in which there are more than five million persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many Anglican churches in decline?"

(continues below)

Phil Colgan caught the necessary emphasis nicely in his morning talk, which I'd summarize as "Keep calm but urgently carry on".

However, the question about mission I particularly turned up with was this: how can we maintain a right belief in the personal witness of the Christian believer while also leaning into the church-based, team-oriented approach to evangelism that many churches are employing today with laudable success?

How, in other words, can we avoid another one of these pendulum-swing, false dichotomies that regularly seem to beset our debates on this topic?

Going back 20 years, the form of the false-choice debate was: is every Christian called on to share the gospel or only the gifted few? (Answer: yes, each in their own way!)

Now the question seems to be: should we teach and inspire every Christian so that the gospel bubbles out of them in daily life or focus our efforts on course-based bring-vitation?

And Nexus helped me see why the answer, once again, is yes.

Chris Braga gave an insightful and stirring talk from 2 Corinthians 4:18 on why faith results in speaking. "I believe, therefore I have spoken", said the Psalmist, and Paul, and everyone who has faith. There's no imperative needed to link trust in the heart with a mouth that overflows in gospel words. As someone who has been speaking and training and writing and publishing on this theme for most of the past 30 years, I had to restrain myself from standing and shouting Hallelujah.

(continued below)

Watch Chris Braga’s address
‘The missing principle of proclamation’.

Chris's message was that the more we fill Christian hearts with faith and confidence in the gospel, the more Christian hearts will overflow in words that point to Jesus. Without the hearts of individuals being warmed by the gospel, evangelism will never catch fire.

But then, Dave Jensen got up and said in the nicest possible way that if we think that training an army of individual evangelists and just letting them loose is an effective strategy for mission, we're kidding ourselves. (Actually, it was not at all in the nicest possible way—it was in the finest tradition of the Aussie four-by-two to the head).

And he was right. Mission is a team sport. If we try to play it like an individual pasttime, then we should not be surprised if it peters out into disappointment.

As Dave pointed out, the churches that are seeing encouraging numbers of people converted treat mission as a team game. They bring non-Christians and Christians together around the word of God for an extended period of time, praying that God would change hearts (the catchphrase of the day: the Word and Prayer and People over Time). It starts with a well-run, socially warm, four or five week course that Christians bring their friends along to, but then (crucially) turns into a Bible study group that runs for months.

These churches are not sending their people out to be solo witnesses in the world, but sending them out to connect with their friends and workmates and family, and to have gospel conversations—sure—but then to bring them to where the other Christians are: to a group-based social structure where non-Christian people can hear and explore and understand the gospel over many months. And it usually takes many months for people who are a long way back gospel-wise to work through all their questions.

In the juxtaposition of these two excellent presentations—Chris's and Dave's—I felt something like clarity begin to dawn.

It's not a choice.

We need Christians inspired, built up in faith, and trained in the confidence to chat to their friends, to pray for their friends, to respond to their friend's questions. We need to light a fire of faith in the hearts of believers so that they speak, and we do that through the gospel itself. Speaking personally, this was my hope and prayer in developing the new Two ways to live training framework of Learn the Gospel and Share the Gospel. These resources are aimed at filling the hearts and minds of Christians with the deep truths of the gospel, and with the confidence to be able to chat about it in the messy conversations of everyday life. They build the faith and confidence that becomes speech. I believe, therefore I speak.

But this is where mission begins not where it ends. Filling Christian hearts with Two ways to live is not a mission strategy, any more than training new army recruits at bootcamp is a battle strategy. It's one thing to train good soldiers. It's another thing to fight together with a coherent war plan.

That's where Dave's team-oriented, course-based strategy comes into its own. It's a blueprint battle plan for working together as a church to get non-Christians into the word with other Christians over time.

In other words, the conference helped me to envisgage how these two axes of Christian mission interconnect and complement each other, both theologically and practically.

There is the daily, messy, interpersonal gospel witness of the believer, based on the theological principle of "I believe therefore I speak". And out of these personal interactions comes a ‘bring-vitation’ to the coordinated, group-based, gospel proclamation that happens in fellowship over time, based on the theological principle of each interdependent part of the body doing its work together, so that the whole body might participate in the mission of Christ.

We want a clear-eyed integration of both of these axes, including wise choices in allocating time and effort and resources in pushing them forward.

And then we can keep praying with trust and hope that God will indeed have mercy on our great city.

Register today for super early bird Nexus26

Mon 16 March 2026

9am - 4:30pm
Village Church Annandale

Nexus25

We’d love top get your feedback on Nexus 25 here.

Check out the photo gallery of Nexus25 here.

Listen back to the Nexus 25 talks here.

Register for Nexus26 here.

Register Nexus26

Check out our past talks

2024: A better way to connect theology and practice

2023: Tremble at his word

2025: God is not done with Sydney

What is Nexus?

Nexus is an evangelical ministry conference, based in Sydney. Our vision is to draw together pastors, trainees, theology students, and other gospel workers to: