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Stories of Jesus Changing Everything

  1. Oct 22

    Surely there's more than this [Nicola's story]

    In Part 1, Nicola left us on a cliffhanger — hanging in the dark inside a Himalayan crevasse. Part 2 picks up exactly there. And then goes further back, to find out how a girl from Madang ended up on the side of a mountain in the first place. After her first engagement ended, Nicola went rock climbing. Then Nepal. Then, after completing her nursing degree, she moved to Nepal for a year to live with a Kiwi expedition company owner she'd met there. All she did for twelve months was climb. She summited Shishapangma, one of the world's fourteen 8,000-metre peaks. She says it now causes her health problems. She says the view from the top was worth it. But the episode title doesn't come from mountaineering. It comes from a marriage. Nicola was in her first marriage — to a man she'd met adventuring, an atheist, the son of atheists — when she found herself sitting in a joyless house, not yet a Christian, and thought: if there is a God, surely there's more than this. There was. It just took a while longer to find it. This episode covers the rest of the road: a year of solo travel through Europe (and a reunion with her parents at a 5-star hotel in Venice, arriving filthy off an overnight train). Deciding, at 31, to do nursing. The new grads program at Sydney Children's Hospital, then the PICU and NICU. Meeting Scott — through helicopter transport training, both going through separations. Coming to Soul Revival expecting hymn books and robes and finding a warehouse in Kirrawee. Then doing Christianity Explored with Jai. The question that kept nagging: if there's a God, why do babies still die? And the day on the drive home, after a terrible shift, when she found herself mid-conversation with Jesus and burst into tears. Stories of Jesus Changing Everything.

  2. Oct 15

    God protected me [Nicola's story]

    Nicola grew up in Papua New Guinea, fourth-generation PNG-born Chinese, raised in Madang on the northeast coast. At twelve she boarded a plane to Sydney and started high school at PLC Pymble, thousands of kilometres from her family. It was boarding school she loved, she says — the lifelong friendships, the freedom within structure, the PNG girls who all stuck together. But it left her, perhaps, without the anchoring her parents would have provided. She'd find that out in her twenties. Those years were turbulent by her own admission. Failed economics at Sydney Uni. A stint at secretarial college. Honours in textile technology, then four rough years in the fashion industry; screaming bosses, impossible margins, Sunday dread. An engagement that ended. Through it all, something she describes simply as not knowing what she wanted. She was wild. She was searching. She just didn't have a name for what she was looking for. Eventually she landed in nursing, neonatal and paediatric intensive care, and never looked back. She now believes God led her there. The stress is real, she says, but the purpose makes it different. You're working towards something. A baby going home. A family staying whole. Enter Scott. A Christian. Early in their relationship, he asked about her values, her upbringing, what she believed; and quietly, consistently, brought every conversation back to God. She started going to church. Two years passed. Things started to shift. The turning point came in two moments. The first was a Good Friday sermon where Tim asked whether the congregation believed Jesus had died and been resurrected. Sitting in the pew, Nicola thought: yes, I actually do believe that. The second came weeks later on a bad day at work, driving home, she found herself mid-conversation with Jesus before she even realised she was praying. "It dawned on me then," she says. "I am a Christian. And then I burst out crying." But the episode title doesn't just point to faith. In her twenties, Nicola went high-altitude mountaineering. She fell into a crevasse in the Himalayas — hanging in darkness for 45 minutes before her team hauled her out. She got blown off a summit in New Zealand by 150km/h winds and slid down the mountain with two others, three ice screws popping before the last one held. She probably should have died, she says. She didn't. She thinks she knows why. Recently confirmed at Soul Revival, Nicola joins Joel and Tim to trace the long road God walked with her — from Madang to Pymble to a crevasse to a car on the highway. Stories of Jesus Changing Everything.

  3. Oct 1

    Built On Grace, Not Perfection [Rob's story]

    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.

  4. Sep 24

    Taught to Question, Chose to Believe [Rob's story]

    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.

  5. Sep 17

    Finding my people [Lenore's story]

    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

  6. Sep 10

    No other option [Lenore's story]

    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.

  7. Aug 27

    Refined by fire [Alhana's story]

    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.

  8. Jul 23

    Faith over feelings [Dave Jensen's story]

    Dave Jensen grew up as the Archbishop of Sydney's son in Newtown, surrounded by Greeks and Vietnamese and punk music and heroin. He knew what genuine Christianity looked like because everyone around him had it. He just didn't have it himself. He got a girl pregnant, married young, joined the army, had two kids, got divorced at 22, and spent the rest of his twenties in Townsville and Darwin; drinking, fighting, lying and womanising in a way that would be extraordinary if it weren't, as he puts it, just par for the course in the infantry. He called himself a Christian the whole time and would have been terrified to say otherwise. Then one hungover morning in Darwin, he opened his twin sister's laptop and a John Piper sermon clip started playing. He watched it. Then another. Then spent hours watching sermons and called his army chaplain mate Tim, who told him plainly — Dave, your name is a byword for scumbag. And then took him to Romans 5. That was it. He fell asleep in tears praying and woke up a Christian. The first thing that changed was that he loved Jesus Christ. He didn't care before. Now he did. Recorded at Soul Revival's annual Week Away camp at Waterslea, Joel and Brayden sit with Dave, now the evangelism director at ENC for a wide-ranging, funny, honest and deeply encouraging conversation. They cover his Newtown childhood, army life, what it actually costs to preach well, how he met his wife Sam, raising four boys on the Central Coast, and what he'd tell his younger Christian self. His answer: be kind to yourself. The pathway forward isn't self-loathing. It's repentance and faith, over and over, grounded in the love of Christ. Stories of Jesus Changing Everything. This is Chip Lunch.

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About

Stories of Jesus Changing Everything

Information

  • Creator
    Soul Revival Church
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    227
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Soul Revival Church
  • Show Website
    Chip Lunch

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