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Inspire SeriesGaps are bridged by the unity that churches offer.just one example. I think there is also a reputational problem with the Church and it hasn’t always been able to effectively communicate that it is there to serve the community and do good. It has been perceived as maybe money grabbing or too self-righteous. We hope people can take another look, because there are some beautiful things going on in churches. Over these five orsix years we have grown from 400 to now nearly 800 regular adults, youth and children. There is something that people are grabbing hold of and I suspect there are many people on the North Shore who do privately believe in the basic Christian way of thinking, but are disconnected from Church. We would love to re-engage with them because there is something really valuableabout hanging out with other likeminded people and building community.How important is community? Very. One of the things Christ brought into the world was not just a relationship with God but new relationships with each other. So you find in churches that rich and poor, Anglo and Asian, young and old all come together with a sense of family. At its best, the Church is a beautiful leveller; you can be at a morning tea where you have a senior lawyer or judge serving tea to a teenager at the local high school. Gaps are bridged by the unity that churches offer.Can anybody come?Anybody can come, that is what we want to get across to people. Especially because we are offering a Community Centre, anyone can come without feeling like they are obliged to attend a church service. They can come here for an art competition, a toddler's group, or to learn English asa second language – withoutit being creepy or spiritual or whatever. We just hope they will get to realise that church folk are just normal folk with all the same hang-ups and disappointments that everyone else has. At St Andrew’s we regularly have people who don’t actually believe yet. They are intrigued and want to learn more, they like the intellectual stimulation, they think the music is pretty good and the sense of community is great. But they are not yet believers– we are totally cool with that. We want to be a place where a serious believer can be sitting side by side with a doubter and it’s not a problem. One doesn’t judge the other.Where do you see the centre in ten years?If we keep tracking the way we are, we will be a community centrewhere people can come for professional counselling, second language education, a café, play groups with play equipment, adult seminars as well as church services. We hope to have 2,000 people regularly benefiting from us and in that 2,000 I hope that many of them are people who aren’t sure if they believe but find enough here to keep coming and learning more. That for me would be a delight.Can I ask about this documentary you are working on?We are about to head over to Rome, Greece, and Israel toshoot the history scenes for a documentary, "How the Church is Better and Worse Than You Ever Imagined." It’s an account of the terrible things that the Church has done in world history – the Crusades and the Inquisitions – but also the beautiful things the Church has given the West that we hardly ever talk about. It will explore the origins of charity,the beginnings of education,the universities and hospitals.All of these originated from the Church. It’s not a documentary that says, look how great the Church is. It’s a documentary that says the Church has done terrible things and beautiful things. But when it does terrible things, it’s departing from its master Christ, and when it is doing the beautiful things, it’s actually doing what Jesus said to do.We have interviewed 40 of the world’s leading professors from around the world already, and we are currently shooting historical scenes around the Mediterranean and Europe. There are three presenters, of which I am the nerdy historian. We finish filming in about March and we aim to have it out on Netflix and one of the commercial TV stations just before Christmas next year.30 LIVING LOCAL SUMMER 2016/17 “Dream, Inspire, Grow” www.livinglocalguide.com.au