A Boy and His God: Nick Bothe on Reconciliation, Sending Out, and Not Losing the Fire

A Boy and His God

Halfway through Nick Bothe's conversation on the podcast, he says something almost in passing that I haven't been able to put down. Describing his prayer life, his whole relationship with God, he says: "I'm just a boy and his God."

He's thirty. He pastors young adults at Elevation Church. He's married, a new father, fiery in the pulpit, wise — as Pedro put it — beyond his years. And the centre of all of it is that small, disarming image. Not a strategist and his platform. Not a leader and his network. A boy and his God.

I think that's the whole episode, really. Everything else is just that one thing worked out in different rooms of his life.

Proud before he'd done anything

Nick grew up without his dad. His parents' marriage broke apart when his sister was a baby, and somewhere around eighteen he learned things that hardened into genuine anger. He swore his father off — the kind of vow a young man makes and means. His dad wasn't at his wedding.

But the part of his story that stopped me was something that happened at nineteen. In a moment of encounter, having laid his whole life down for God and aching, like so many fatherless young men do, to make a father proud, Nick heard God say: I'm proud of you. Not for anything he'd achieved. He hadn't really started yet. And he draws the line straight to Jesus at his baptism — the heavens opening, "this is my Son, whom I love," before a single miracle, a single sermon, a single thing done to earn it.

I felt that one personally, because the word proud carries a lot of weight for me too. So many of us are running a race to hear something that, it turns out, was already spoken over us at the start.

The two-year forgiveness

What Nick did with that fathering from God is the most powerful thing in the conversation. Around twenty-six, in the same season he was getting married and becoming a man, he felt God ask him to reconnect with the father he'd written off. His honest reply was basically: that's not even an option.

But he's careful here, and I appreciated his honesty. Forgiveness wasn't a single prayer. It was two years of getting up again and again and saying, "I actually don't forgive him — but Jesus, I forgive my dad," until it became true. Eventually he took a ferry across Sydney Harbour to meet a man he hadn't really sat with in over a decade. There was a buffer present, a stiff coffee, a trip to the zoo, and finally a three- or four-hour conversation in a living room where years of pain got put on the table. Both of them, he realised, had been living as the victim of the same story. They agreed they couldn't change the past, but they could move forward.

He's quick to add a caveat that matters: he's not saying every relationship must be reconciled, and where there's abuse, sometimes the loving thing is distance. But in his case, he felt God say I'm going to redeem this and put the devil to shame for all the years he stole. And now his father — once a worship leader who'd turned fully atheist after the court case — holds Nick's baby daughter. A decade ago that was unthinkable. That's the God Nick preaches: the one always on the redemption path.

The little things

When Pedro asked about dating and purity — half-jokingly calling it his "selfish question" — Nick didn't moralise. He reframed it. Purity isn't about being dirty and needing to scrub up; purity is Jesus, the life God actually calls us into. And the discipline, he says, lives in the details. He and Johanna kept boundaries that sound almost quaint now: not alone in the same house, home by a sensible hour, living visibly above reproach.

His warning was the line I'll keep: the devil doesn't move from zero to a hundred. He's a frog in a slowly boiling pot. Don't compromise on the little things. One degree off course doesn't feel like much in the moment, but hold that heading long enough and you land somewhere you never meant to go. As someone who's spent years on a jiu-jitsu mat learning that a few degrees changes everything, that one landed for me.

Hungry, not bored

There's a section on this generation I keep recommending to people. Nick reckons youth ministry used to fight a boredom epidemic — bigger games, bigger giveaways, anything to hold attention. That war is over. Kids today aren't bored; they're over-stimulated, over-entertained, and quietly starving. What they're hunting for is something real: real love, real community, real presence. They couldn't always name it — they just feel empty or lonely — but it means this generation is poised. They're looking, as I put it to him, for the answer to a question they don't even know they're asking.

Sent out, not gathered in

When the conversation came round to the question we ask every guest — what does the Gold Coast need? — Nick's answer was simple and convicting: believers who believe the gospel and then do it. Not Sunday spectators who love the message and go home unchanged, but the house built on the rock, which Jesus said is the one who hears and applies.

He kept returning to two words he called revolutionary for church strategy: sent out. We're forever trying to get people to come in, and praise God for that — but the church was made to go out. His dream is almost embarrassingly simple. What if every believer talked to one person every day? Not to convert them — just to see them. Buy a coffee. Pray for the person on crutches. Ask a stranger what they believe, or whether their parents had a faith. One question, he says, has opened more real conversations than he can count.

We did the maths together, half-laughing, on what would happen if the Gold Coast's small slice of churchgoers actually each reached a few people for a single week. The numbers run away from you fast. But his deeper point wasn't a campaign. Jesus, he reminded us, never handed us a method — He handed us a Spirit and said go. Your church might do it one way, mine another. The only failure is hearing how good it sounds and never doing it.

I came away from this one thinking about that little phrase again. A boy and his God. Nick is building a ministry, raising a family, carrying real fire for this city — and underneath all of it is a thirty-year-old who still just wants to be alone with the Lord on a cloud. His voice memo to his future self was four words long: don't lose that passion. At forty, at fifty, don't lose it.

I hope he never does. And I hope I don't either.

Brought to you by the Full Gospel Apostolic Centre (FGAC).