Chip Lunch

A guy on a building site said it about Nico after knowing him for four weeks: he really lives it. Not as a compliment you'd fish for. Just something a 16-year-old apprentice said out loud because it was obvious.

Part 2 of Nico's Chip Lunch conversation picks up where Part 1 left off: with a Dutch migrant couple who arrived in Sydney in 1982 with no car, no connections, and a faith that had never really been tested because it had never really been doubted. What followed was forty-plus years of God's hand showing up in the details.

There's the house in Gymea that they bought from the estate of a fellow Dutchman, with a Ritmeister cigar tin on the table and a shelf in the corner that read "Jesus lives" in Dutch. The title deed that came back forty years later stamped with a Netherlands bank. The factory job that came through a man from church. The church that came through a teacher at the local school. None of it planned. All of it connected.

Nico also talks about what it actually looks like to share faith without making it a performance: the McDonald's arches he drew on a piece of timber to explain the two crosses at Calvary, the truck driver in a Dutch TV show who asked a reporter why he wasn't driving a truck, and why he'd rather do it than talk any day of the week.

He and Frederika ran kids holiday club at Miranda Community Church for years. They've been at MCC for over thirty years. And when asked what he'd tell his younger Christian self, he genuinely can't think of anything. Because he never doubted it. Not once.

Stories of Jesus Changing Everything. This is Chip Lunch.

Nico has been in Australia for 44 years. He got married in August, skipped the honeymoon, packed everything into boxes, and landed in Sydney on the 15 October 1982. He's never looked back, and he'll tell you it was God's hand the whole way.

Joel and Braden sit down with Nico for a wide-ranging conversation that's part history lesson, part immigration story, part quiet testimony. He takes takes them through growing up in the Netherlands, where faith was woven into school, street, and daily life in ways that are almost unimaginable now.

He explains the difference between patat and friet, why Dutch chips come with mayonnaise as the default, what Petit Oorlog, actually are, and how the whole thing traces back to Belgian and French debates that nobody has fully resolved. He talks about growing up in a village of 15,000 people with chickens and rabbits in the backyard, cycling 150 kilometres across a flat country to visit his uncle, and doing his civil engineering exams in fog so thick you couldn't see the telegraph pole across the road.

He also talks about faith, not as a dramatic turning point, but as something that was simply always there. A Bible reading to start the school day. A Protestant church at one end of the village, a Catholic one at the other. The quiet sense of knowing that certain things weren't for him, without always being able to say exactly why.

And then, at 26, a tea towel from Australia on top of a secondhand spin dryer — and a decision that would change everything.

This is Part 1 of Nico's story.

Joel and Brayden pull producer Hudson out from behind the desk and onto the couch for a catch-up episode that goes deeper than anyone planned. What starts with fast food chip rankings and AI in marketing gradually becomes one of the most honest conversations the show has had about the everyday struggle of the Christian walk.

Joel shares what it's like to coach an under-12s football team and realise mid-season that his pre-game anxiety has nothing to do with the boys and everything to do with his own identity and idols. Hudson opens up about noticing his temper for the first time, not just on the sporting field but in quieter corners of life too, and what it's meant to let God reveal something he didn't know he needed to work on. They all reflect on the pull toward self-reliance and the resistance that shows up right before prayer, even when you know that praying is exactly what you need.

Woven through all of it is a thread from Habakkuk, the prophet who brings his biggest frustrations not to other people but directly to God, and waits there. The guys wrestle with what it means to wait actively rather than passively, to take your laments to the one person who can actually do something about them, and to keep showing up to church even when the week has been ordinary or hard.

This is the kind of episode that reminds you you're not the only one still figuring it out.

Kezia grew up as a pastor's kid in a church full of elderly people, then she went to KYCK in Year & and thought: there are people my age who believe this.

Kezia joins Joel and Ethan for a conversation that's funny, fresh, and surprisingly wise for someone still figuring out what comes next. She talks about growing up in a congregation where she was surrounded by grandparent-aged friends, learning to love reading despite her dyslexia, and the Instagram reel that made her cry after a breakup and feel, for the first time, like God was speaking directly to her.

She also shares one of the most creative frameworks for understanding the fruit of the spirit ever heard on this podcast — each fruit assigned to a different fruit, each year of life shaped by a different virtue — and the journey of slowly realising that ADHD, dysgraphia and anxiety don't define her. God does.

From a Fiji mission trip that overwhelmed and reshaped her, to church streaming during COVID, to interior design at TAFE and a job at Betty's Burgers at the airport, Kezia has learnt that God doesn't let anything go to waste. Not the hard seasons, not the uncertain ones, not even the ones where she had no idea what she was doing.

Erin doesn't have all the answers. She's not a deep diver, not an academic, not someone who can study her way through the hard questions. What she has instead is a childlike trust in a God who she knows is real, who she knows is there, and who she knows has it — even when she doesn't understand.

Part 2 of Erin's Chip Lunch conversation picks up where Part 1 left off. After years of drifting in and out of church, Erin and her husband Chris found their way to Soul Revival: first to Kirrawee with her brother Pete, then to the small and eclectic Cronulla gathering. They stayed because Chris said something that stuck: maybe God put them there because the church needed them as much as they needed the church.

Erin talks about what it's actually like to commit to a small church — the challenges, the deep relationships it creates, and the unexpected gift of raising two boys in a community where the adults treat them like real people in an intergenerational community. She talks about her brother Pete's longtime friendship with Matt Redmond, an old 1860s church building her family spent years restoring in the country, a husband who grounds her, and a dog named after Frank Sinatra.

And when we ask what she'd tell her younger Christian self: just trust. Be open with God. You don't have to have all the answers. It's not a cop out, that's faith.

Erin never had a lightning bolt moment. No dramatic conversion, no single day she can point to and say, "that's when everything changed." What she has instead is something just as compelling: a winding, honest, up-and-down story of a faith that kept finding her, even when she wasn't looking for it.

In Part 1 of her Chip Lunch conversation, Erin joins Joel and Brayden from the Cronulla gathering and takes them through a life that's moved between worlds: the Shire and a small country town called Taralga, Port Hacking High and Goulburn High, Sunday school at Sylvania Uniting and a tiny Presbyterian church with under ten elderly attendees. Through all of it, faith was always in the background, sometimes loud, sometimes almost soft.

Erin talks about what it's like to grow up Christian without ever really deciding to be one, the moment in her early 20s when she finally sat down and chose it for herself, and the harder season that followed: when she actively tried to walk away from God and found she couldn't, because deep down she still believed.

There's also the school bus from Taralga to Goulburn, the country pub she worked at from age 15, a chemistry exam she stayed for exactly 20 minutes, and a career that stumbled its way from Donut King to HR through a series of open doors she didn't engineer but met a number of Christians along the way.

Erin puts it simply at the end: no big moments, just a God who keeps going ahead and clearing the path.

Part 2 is coming...

In his first year as principal at Shire Christian School, David was diagnosed with leukemia. He had a three-year-old son, a daughter in primary school, a wife in her 30s, and a faith he'd spent years building on paper. None of that made the hospital bed easier.

Part 2 of David's Chip Lunch conversation picks up where Part 1 left off — and it goes somewhere unexpected. Before the leukemia, there's the story of how David met his wife through a devotion on the early church martyr Polycarp, helped start Soul Revival out of a cockroach-infested garage, and was part of the "house band" in Belvedere Blues — a jazz-flavoured R&B band playing to thousands of teenagers in the grunge era.

Then comes the diagnosis. David talks honestly about what it's like when a theoretical theology of suffering meets the reality of your own mortality — the loss of control, the anger, the questions, and the slow, hard work of trusting a sovereign God who he believes ordained every step, including the hard ones. His brother Peter was a bone marrow match. The transplant worked. He's still here.

Now in his fifth year as Principal for the second time, what he calls being the fifth and eighth principal of the same school, David reflects on 34 years at Shire Christian School, what it means to lead an institution you love, and the one thing he'd tell his younger Christian self: it's about the people. When it's not about the people, it's still about the people.

Part 1 of David Stonestreet's story sees us learn how he grew up Catholic, attended mass every Sunday, and knew the Bible had always been there, he just hadn't really read it. Then in Year 11, he and a friend started flipping through the New Testament over landline phone calls from Gosford to the North Shore, pointing each other to verses they were finding for the first time. What they were stumbling into, David now knows, was the Holy Spirit at work.

In Part 1 of his Chip Lunch conversation, David — musician, music teacher, and early Soul Revival adjacent — takes Joel and Brayden through his faith journey. From a charismatic Catholic youth group to a pseudo-Christian cult that nearly swallowed him whole, to sitting alone in his bedroom in Gosford and finally understanding what it meant to be born again without losing himself, David's story is rich, honest, and full of unexpected turns.

Along the way there's a Central Coast childhood of dam swims, dragster bikes, and neighbourhood cricket; four Catholic schools; a detour through electrical engineering before music teaching won out; and a serious reckoning with what it actually costs to walk away from a strong cultural and family faith to follow Jesus somewhere new.

David also breaks down the difference between playing what's written and playing around the chords, and why that distinction matters.

Kim has spent over 30 years quietly serving at Miranda Congregational Church: organising, caring, showing up. She's the kind of person who makes things run without needing the credit. And on this episode of Chip Lunch, she finally gets to sit in the chair and tell her story.

It's a story shaped by a hardworking dad who didn't believe in sleeping in, a mum who dragged the family to church late every Sunday rather than not go at all, and a faith that was tested, confirmed, and quietly held through all of it.

Kim grew up in Sylvania: moving bricks on school holidays, peeling potatoes for the deep freezer, and navigating life as a twin who always seemed to attract the kids nobody else made time for. She came to faith through confirmation classes, answering yes to a question that had stumped her for years. She found her people in a youth group of older Christians who drove her home, prayed for her HSC, and gave her a safe place when home felt complicated.

From there, Kim took a job she didn't fully understand, got thrown into Beach Mission completely unprepared, and kept saying yes to things long before she felt ready

Joel and Brayden also get Kim's perspective on the combination of MCC and Soul Revival, what it means after 30 years to gain a bigger Christian family, and why she thinks the best thing about it is simply more people to love and be loved by.

What does it actually look like to carry your faith into a secular workplace? In this episode of Chip Lunch, Joel and Tim sit down with Aurelia — a law student, globetrotter, and follower of Jesus.

Aurelia unpacks what it means to bring God into the everyday rhythms of a legal career. From chatting about church with fellow clerks to gently opting out of party culture without being preachy, she shares how normalising faith in the workplace starts with genuine friendship and small, consistent acts of love.

Aurelia takes us on a whirlwind tour of her past year: a two-week summer intensive at Cambridge (with a cheeky sneak into Trinity College), a presentation submitted 15 minutes late after an all-nighter and a bout of food poisoning — that she still delivered the same day — and a solo adventure through Iceland, Paris, Amsterdam, and Rotterdam, where she tracked down her late grandfather's childhood home without using Google Maps.

The highlight of the episode might be the six months Aurelia spent living alone in London, studying transnational law at King's College — a dream she'd quietly held since she was 17 years old. She gets real about the beauty and the loneliness of solo living, the discipline of meal prep, turning 22 without her family, and learning that her dog had passed away mid-birthday drinks.

Aurelia's faith is the through-line. She found a church in London within weeks, took her first communion from a shared cup at a tiny English-speaking congregation in Amsterdam, and kept asking people if she could pray for them, whether she was a clerk in Sydney or a student in the UK.