Chip Lunch

Rob is the first to tell you he's a hypocrite. He'll get annoyed at his kids for leaving the toilet seat up, and then realise it was him. He'll lose his cool working from home and snap at whoever walks through the door, and then feel the conviction of it. He tells his kids constantly: I'm a hypocrite. Not as an excuse to stay that way, but because he thinks modelling the ongoing, messy, unfinished nature of faith is important. In Part 2 of his Chip Lunch conversation, Rob picks up with the story of how he and Kate got together — through shared church community, scripture mornings, a lot of time at the Pad, and a brief break during which Rob discovered it was definitely Kate he was in love with, and not just love itself. They married at Parramatta, had two kids, and eventually made the decision Rob had carried for years: to move overseas and be used wherever the need was. The need turned out to be Qatar. Rob talks about what four years in the Middle East actually looked like; the family unit it built, the cultural lessons it taught his kids, and their youngest being born there. He also reflects honestly on coming home, re-engaging with church and community, and the way fatherhood keeps exposing things in him that God is still working on. Through all of it, the through-line is grace — not the polished, sorted, has-it-together version of Christianity, but the kind that acknowledges the log in your own eye, says sorry properly, and trusts that God has a reason for the stuff-ups too. When asked what he'd tell his younger Christian self, Rob says: nothing. God had a reason for all of it.

Rob was not the kind of kid who accepted things at face value. He asked questions. He pushed back. He wanted to understand why, whether it was in the classroom, at home, or eventually, at church. So when Christianity came into his orbit, he didn't just slide into it. He interrogated it. Joel and Brayden sit down for part 1 with Rob: engineer, husband, dad, and more, for a conversation that covers a sceptical upbringing, an intellectual path to faith, the doubts that have stayed with him, and why he keeps choosing to believe anyway. Rob talks about growing up in a household where questions were encouraged and certainty was earned, the moment faith stopped being something inherited and started being something he had to decide about for himself. He also talks about marriage, fatherhood, an engineering career. There's honesty here about the moments faith has felt hard, not just intellectually, but personally. And he keeps coming back to the same conclusion: this is true, and it's worth building a life on.

After years of serving at C3 church: running microphones, doing admin, helping with kids, Lenore found herself at a crossroads. The community she had built her adult life around was changing, the distance from home was starting to wear, and a friend kept mentioning a church in the Shire. She came to Soul Revival not knowing what to expect and found something she hadn't quite experienced before: a community where the teaching was deep, the people were genuine, and she felt, almost immediately, like she belonged. She reflects on thirty-plus years of serving in church and what sustained service actually looks like. Not the highlight moments, but the ordinary weeks of showing up, doing the thing, and trusting that it matters. Because it does. When asked what she'd tell her younger Christian self, Lenore's answer is characteristically honest: trust the process. The long obedience in the same direction. The life built quietly, faithfully, one ordinary week at a time. Stories of Jesus Changing Everything

Lenore grew up in Bankstown, rode the East Hills Baptist Church bus to Sunday school as a kid, got bullied at school, and found her safe place in an organisation some have never heard of: Girls Brigade. It became a constant through surgeries, hard seasons and big life changes. Sixty-nine years after Girls Brigade started at East Hills Baptist, Lenore is still there. In Part 1 of her Chip Lunch conversation, Joel and Brayden hear about a childhood shaped by life on the Georges River, a faith that was always present but took time to become truly hers, two surgeries in year 12, and a university degree that started in teaching, pivoted to business, and was interrupted by a week in Ghana at an international Girls Brigade gathering where she attended a four-hour church service, tried cow's feet, and had cold bucket showers. Lenore talks honestly about the gap between going to camp as a teenager and giving your life to Christ, and then going back to school and not really living it out, and the moment in her early twenties when she sat down with a pastor over several weeks and was asked the hard questions. That was when the faith she'd grown up with became genuinely her own. When Joel asks what made her think Christianity was the right one, given she'd been exposed to many other religions and worldviews at school and university, her answer is simple: it never felt like there was another option. Stories of Jesus Changing Everything. This is Chip Lunch.

When Alhana was last on Chip Lunch five years ago, she had just started full-time at JB Hi-Fi and was finding her feet. A lot has happened since then. In those five years: she stepped into a management role too early and burnt out, spent eighteen months largely absent from the Saturday night community she loved, got diagnosed with PMOS, PMDD and chronic nerve pain from shingles at twenty-five (the old person's disease) changed degrees multiple times, and eventually, on something close to a whim, applied for a Bachelor of Social Work at Wollongong. Got an offer four days later. Started studying. Six months in and it was the first time she wasn't sick of it Through all of it, God kept showing up in ways Alhana is only now able to see clearly. A management conversation that became the catalyst to step back. A month of Monday-to-Friday shifts that got her back to church on Saturday nights. A new person sitting alone at a table who needed someone to make her feel welcome, which turned out to be exactly what Alhana needed too. Alhana talks about the stubbornness that kept her away from community longer than she should have been, the pride woven through her work ethic that she's still untangling, the gift of finally being vulnerable, with people and with God, and why going through the fire, while awful, has made her better at everything she actually cares about. She's still a little bit on fire, she says. But she's coming through.