Insight with Karl Faase

At just fifteen, Noah Brierley watched a video he'd made - a lighthearted challenge asking baristas for 10% off, just to practise getting over the fear of rejection - get reposted by a huge Instagram meme page. The comments were filled with mockery. He messaged them, begging them to take it down. They didn't.
Years later, that same account messaged him again: “congrats on the growth, man.”
It's a small window into the ride Noah has been on since he started posting on TikTok during COVID lockdown as a schoolboy with a side hustle and no plan - a ride that took him to 1.8 million followers by 17, a business managing accounts with a combined reach of around 4 million, and a decision to turn down Oxford University altogether.
About Noah Brierley:
Noah Brierley started building an audience on TikTok as a UK schoolboy during COVID lockdown, documenting side hustles like car washing and reselling on eBay rather than chasing dance trends. By 17 he'd reached 1.8 million followers, and he has since turned that following into a business managing content for clients, with accounts under his company reaching a combined audience of around 4 million. Rather than follow his parents - both Oxford and Cambridge graduates - to university, Noah left college to go all-in on social media full time. 
Key Moments & Highlights:
- Turning “no” into fuel: the door-to-door car-washing mindset that taught Noah to treat every rejection as one step closer to a “yes” - Taking a £20 loan from his younger sister to buy car-washing supplies — and feeling he had to make it back - Deliberately skipping TikTok's dancing trend to build an educational, “document the journey” niche instead - Hitting 80,000 followers at 15 and getting invited to a cinema's opening night — the moment it first “felt real” - Getting mocked by a major Instagram meme page at 15, getting emotional about it, and years later receiving a congratulations message from the same account - The friction at home and school when Noah told his parents and his old teacher he wouldn't be going to university - Helping his dad grow a TikTok account to 100,000 followers within weeks, while Noah was still in school - Learning not to tie his happiness to view counts: “as long as I'd posted a video that day, I was happy” - Marrying Phoebe, his partner since age 11, at 20 and designing their business around the life and family they want - A wild prediction for AI and content creation: kids asking an app to generate a custom animated show on the spot
 
Find Out More
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org
 
Special Thanks To
Excelsia University College
Christian Finance
Vision Christian Media
 

Katy Faust’s own childhood - her parents’ divorce, split households, and years of quietly people-pleasing the new partners - sits behind the things she now advocates for in public. 
In this wide-ranging conversation, she traces that story through her conversion to Christianity, the rage that turned her into an accidental activist against gay marriage and the step to start an anonymous blog that attracted a lot of hate. 
Eventually, her identity was revealed and her greatest fears came true - they went after her family and her church. This is when the elders decided that she should “go big” rather than stop. This was the beginning of her public advocacy - standing against some of the big culture war issues of our day: gay marriage, divorce, abortion, and reproductive technologies on behalf of children.
She is the founder of Them Before Us - an organisation that fights for children’s right to their mother and father in courts, culture and legislatures.
In this interview, Katy shares her hard-won thoughts on marriage, motherhood, and the cost of telling the truth.
About Katy Faust
Katy Faust didn’t set out to become an activist. She was a pastor’s wife and stay-at-home mother when cultural conversations around marriage and family began to shift dramatically. As debates intensified, one question kept surfacing. Who is speaking for the children? That question led Katy to launch an anonymous blog defending the rights of children in marriage and family policy. What began as a small online voice quickly gained traction. Within a few years she was writing for national publications, speaking around the world, and eventually founding the global children’s rights movement Them Before Us. Today, Katy is a leading voice in the conversation about marriage, family, and child-centred policy.
Key Moments & Highlights
- Katy shares her “three staples of a child’s social-emotional diet” - mother’s love, father’s love and stability
- The honest admission that as a child she learned to “people please” the new partners entering her parents’ lives, just to keep them close
- Why it took her four years after becoming a Christian to "love God with all my mind," especially on sexuality and morality
- "I don’t have mums. I have a mother and a father like everybody else" — Katy on why she distinguishes her mother’s partner from her mother
- The moment the gay marriage debate made her angry enough to start writing — and why she published anonymously out of fear for her family
- Being doxxed by a rival blogger who traced her IP address to her husband’s church, flooding it with fake reviews and SEO attacks
- Her church elders’ choice to "go big" rather than ask her to stop, and the trip to Australia — meeting MPs and Millie Fontana — that followed
- Walking onto Lateline with Tony Jones on no sleep, after reading a verse from Deuteronomy, in what became the most-watched clip in ABC history
- Why she started Them Before Us in 2018 to give children formal representation in courts and legislatures, and the "change hearts, change laws" strategy behind it - Inside This Is a Child, the documentary built from her ARC speech and filmed partly in Australia
 
Find Out More
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org
 
Special Thanks To
Excelsia University College
Christian Finance
Vision Christian Media

How do you learn to let go of a dream - one that you have prayed for, hoped for and worked towards for more than a decade?
Sheridan Voysey's story is marked by dreams - some that came to pass, and others that he had to let go of. As he shares his story with Karl, he speaks of his childhood in Queensland, how he started in radio broadcasting and the life he and his wife Merryn built. He then explores the infertility journey they endured, and what it took for them to walk away from a dream and a future they both so desperately longed for. He shares some of the highlights of his career, the low points of his personal life and how God has used both him and Merryn since their move to Oxford (literally, in life-saving ways)!
About Sheridan Voysey
Sheridan Voysey is the author of nine books, a presenter on BBC Radio 2's Pause for Thought, and the founder of the Friendship Lab, a charity tackling adult loneliness. Born in Brisbane to English parents, he spent the 1990s and 2000s building a career in Australian Christian radio, eventually hosting the nationally syndicated Open House on Hope 103.2 Sydney to audiences of around 100,000 listeners a week.
 
Key Moments & Highlights
Growing up the only child of English parents in Brisbane
A secret teenage career as a graffiti artist under cover of night 
His parents' ten-year, ultimately door-slamming break from the Jehovah's Witnesses, sparked by his mother's search for the true identity of Jesus across three different Bibles
A cryptic two-week wait for a letter that led him, almost by accident, to discover the Bible college and the radio station he needed were right next door to each other
Marrying Merryn and the ten years of "expectation, disappointment" that followed - special diets, healing prayer, IVF, and a two-year wait for a foster placement that never came
The devastating Christmas Eve phone call revealing a pregnancy that never was and the decision to leave Australia's "promised land" for an unknown season in Oxford
Five years of quiet grief in the UK, rebuilt around two verses in Ephesians and the realisation that his identity had to be rooted somewhere deeper than his career
Merryn's key involvement with develoiping the worlds second COVID vaccine at the height of the Pandemic
Founding Friendship Lab after a retreat-room conviction that loneliness needed more than another book - it needed a movement to bring the 25% of adults with no close friends down
Find Out More
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org
 
Special Thanks To
Excelsia University College
Christian Finance
Vision Christian Media

Two days after Glen Scrivener prayed a reckless, bravado-filled prayer — “God, if it means knowing you better, then bring on the suffering” — his girlfriend left him, his UK visa was refused, and a long-hidden family secret that would end his parents’ marriage broke into the open, all in the same week.
In this vulnerable and insightful conversation, Glen tells the whole strange, funny and painful story of his life, faith, and ministry, and the times when God came and found him.
From praying a Gethsemane-style prayer every day as a teenager, to a cricket career that fell just short of an Oxford Blue, to a father whose long-hidden affairs shaped Glen’s own image of God, and the years he and his wife Emma spent walking through her life-threatening battle with anorexia — Glen’s life has been marked by one recurring, helpful reminder: I am not Jesus.
Listener note: this episode discusses eating disorders. Please take care while listening.
About Glen Scrivener
Glen Scrivener is the CEO of Speak Life, a UK-based evangelistic ministry with roots stretching back to 1952. Raised in Canberra, Glen studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, where he played cricket at a high level before walking away from a faith he says he’d never really understood as a teenager. He returned to faith in his early twenties through a friend’s simple invitation to read Luke’s gospel, and went on to work at All Souls Langham Place in London and study at Oak Hill Theological College. He is the author of The Air We Breathe and lives in the UK with his wife Emma and their two children.
Key Moments & Highlights
His grandmother, then General Secretary of the NSW Communist Party, walked forward and gave her life to Christ at Billy Graham’s 1959 Sydney crusade 
Speak Life spent 28 years as “an evangelistic organisation with no evangelist” after founder Eric Hutchings died in 1982, until a legacy left in 2010 funded Glen’s role.
As a teenager, Glen prayed to give his life to Jesus “again and again,” checking a bathroom mirror for a halo that never came — a striving he now traces to misreading Gethsemane as a call to copy Jesus rather than be rescued by him.
A hidden family crisis — his father’s repeated affairs, uncovered when Glen was seven — shaped a vision of God as distant and unreachable: “you can knock, knock, knock on heaven’s door, nobody’s home.”
The moment everything flipped: a friend reading Gethsemane with him said, “Glen, you are not Jesus in this passage — you are Peter,” and Glen realised the gospel was Christ’s life given for him, not his life given to Christ.
Two days after praying “God, bring on the suffering” from Philippians 3:10, Glen’s girlfriend left him, his UK visa was refused, and the full extent of his father’s affairs came out — all within the same week.
Glen and his wife Emma walked through her life-threatening battle with anorexia in their early marriage, including twelve years of infertility, before welcoming their daughter Ruby and adopting their son JJ.
Reflecting on his father’s death eighteen months ago, Glen says that despite everything, his dad “handed on to his kids a better inheritance than he had himself.”
Why Glen believes even secular values like human rights and equality are “supernatural” borrowings from the Jesus story — not conclusions nature or reason could reach on their own.
Resources Mentioned
The Air We Breathe — Glen Scrivener
A New Name — Emma Scrivener (memoir on her experience with anorexia)
321 Course — Speak Life’s online gospel course 
 
Find Out More:
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org
 
Special Thanks To:
Excelsia University College
Christian Finance
Vision Christian Media

Justin Brierley is the man who put doubt, dialogue and debate at the centre of Christian broadcasting with his groundbreaking UK radio show, ‘Unbelievable?’
Justin had the idea for this radio show while working for Premiere Christian Radio. He wanted to invite Christians into conversations that would help them in their real lives by showing good dialogue between non-Christians and believers. Little did he know that he would launch the show right as the New Athiest movement was kicking off and his show became a key place where these ideas could be discussed and a Christian alternative presented.
In this conversation, Karl and Justin also discuss why he now believes he's watching something unexpected happen: a quiet, surprising return to faith among a generation raised on New Atheism.
Justin Brierley grew up near Northampton in a charismatic evangelical family, and traces his own faith to a single night at a youth camp at age fifteen - a "road to Damascus" moment friends say they could see in him afterward. At Oxford University he studied politics, philosophy and economics, acted and led evangelistic drama, and met his wife Lucy, who went on to be ordained in ministry. After a graduate posting at Premier Christian Radio, Justin created and hosted 'Unbelievable?' for almost twenty years. He is the author of The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God (2023), and now runs the media company Think Faith, where he hosts a new dialogue show, Uncommon Ground.
Key Moments & Highlights
Justin traces his faith to a single youth-camp night at fifteen - a "road to Damascus" moment that changed how people around him saw him, even though his wife Lucy's own faith journey was a slow, gradual awakening
At Oxford, a friend's crisis of faith — "how do you know this isn't just all in your mind?" — sent Justin looking, for the first time, into the intellectual case for Christianity
Justin met Lucy while acting in a student production of Guys and Dolls, where she was doing his stage makeup and, to her lasting exasperation, he didn't recognise her at the cast party afterward
The couple spent eight months of their honeymoon on a mission station in northern Namibia, teaching in a school and helping build a Sunday school from scratch
The origin story of Unbelievable? — pitched almost as an afterthought to his radio director as a way to help Christians "have better conversations" with the non-Christians in their lives
How a 2012 magazine interview with Mark Driscoll spiralled into a public Twitter storm and became the most downloaded episode Justin ever released
Why Justin now argues the confident "New Atheism" of Dawkins and Hitchens has given way to a quieter reassessment of faith among public intellectuals like Jordan Peterson and Tom Holland
The evidence Justin points to for a genuine, if early, shift: rising Bible sales in the UK, a wave of young men returning to church across Scandinavia, and record numbers of adult converts at France's Easter vigil
What happened when the Bible Society's "Quiet Revival" survey data had to be withdrawn and why Justin still believes something real is happening despite the flawed numbers
Inside Justin's new show, Uncommon Ground, where he opens every episode by asking guests - including Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams - to "steel man" each other's position before they debate
 
Resources Mentioned
The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God - Justin Brierley (book)
https://www.amazon.com.au/Surprising-Rebirth-Belief-God-Christianity/dp/1496466772
Uncommon Ground - Justin Brierley's current show, produced by Think Faith
https://justinbrierley.com/uncommon-ground-podcast/ 
 
Find Out More
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org
 
Special Thanks To
Excelsia University College
Christian Finance
Vision Christian Media

Politics has a way of reducing people to headlines - the speeches, the elections, the controversies, the moments that dominated the nightly news. But behind every public leader is a private person, carrying the weight of decisions, the expectations of millions, and quiet questions about faith, family and purpose.
For Scott Morrison, one of those quiet questions came into devastating focus on a February afternoon in 2020, when a mother named Layla Abdallah stood in front of a television camera - twenty-four hours after losing three of her children to a drug-affected driver - and said: "In my heart I know I forgive him." As Prime Minister, Morrison was already carrying the country through the Black Summer bushfires, and would soon face a global pandemic that tested his leadership like nothing before it. Throughout it all, his Christian faith remained central to who he was - sometimes a source of strength, sometimes drawing intense public attention.
In this conversation, Scott reflects on the experiences that shaped him long before politics, the unseen cost of leadership, and what forgiveness, uncertainty and faith under pressure have taught him about an identity that's never found in a title.
Scott Morrison served as Australia’s 30th Prime Minister from 2018 to 2022, leading the country through the Black Summer bushfires, the COVID-19 pandemic and many other intense and contentious issues. Before politics, he worked as a research economist and later for Bruce Baird, entering Federal Parliament in 2007. Raised in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire in a family shaped by service rather than ambition, Morrison has spoken openly throughout his career about the Christian faith that has underpinned his life and leadership, from a youth camp in Melbourne where he gave his life to the Lord, to the Tuesday-night prayer group he kept running throughout his time as Prime Minister. He is married to Jenny, with two daughters, and today works in business advisory and geopolitics while remaining closely involved with Danny and Leila Abdallah’s 'I Forgive' Foundation.
 
Key Moments & Highlights
- The 2020 Sydney crash that killed four children and how Layla Abdallah's on-camera declaration of forgiveness “within 24 hours” stunned Morrison and the nation
- Growing up as his father's unpaid “electorate secretary,” fielding constituents' phone calls before he was even a teenager
- The fourteen-year fertility journey and ten failed treatments that preceded the births of daughters Abbey and Lily, including “screaming at God in the forest” in Wellington
- Why he's never seen himself as belonging to a political “tribe,” and how Bruce Baird and John Anderson showed him it was possible to be a Christian, a husband and a father, and still succeed in politics.
- The night he became Prime Minister through a contested leadership spill, and Malcolm Turnbull's differing account of events
- Diverting the campaign plane to Tasmania on the eve of the 2019 “miracle election,” and watching both seats come in on the AEC refresh screen.
- Tabling the Royal Commission report into institutional child abuse in 2018, and the moment he shut his office door afterward and wept.
- Watching hospital footage from northern Italy at the start of the pandemic, and why he tuned out “ideological rubbish” about the virus being a threat to liberty
 
Find Out More
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org
 
Special Thanks To
Excelsia University College
Christian Finance
Vision Christian Media

When Stephen Driscoll's laptop started acting up, he asked an AI agent to take a look - twenty minutes later it had tracked down and fixed a problem that had been quietly running in the background for six months. It's a small, almost funny story, but Stephen uses it to make a much bigger point: AI has moved from mimicking us to genuinely acting on its own initiative, and the theological and ethical questions are moving just as fast. In this wide-ranging conversation, Karl Faase and Stephen dig into AI-directed drone strikes, the Pope's recent encyclical, transhumanism, campus culture, and Stephen's own decade-long wrestle with doubt.
 
About Stephen Driscoll: Stephen Driscoll is a university minister and self-described “tech realist” who tries to avoid both blind optimism and fear-driven doomism about artificial intelligence. He won the 2025 Australian Christian Book of the Year Award for his book Made in Our Image: God, Artificial Intelligence and You. Before moving into ministry, Stephen worked on a trading floor in finance, and has been fascinated by AI since his undergraduate years.
 
Get a copy of Stephen Driscoll's book here: Made in Our Image: God, Artificial Intelligence and You 
 
Key Moments & Highlights
Stephen's four-point framework for what modern AI actually is: brain-inspired, trained rather than designed, prediction-based, and radically general-purpose
“Move 37”- the AlphaGo move against world champion Lee Sedol so unconventional it stunned commentators and convinced many that AI could be genuinely creative
How reinforcement learning turns AI from a “debauched” mirror of the whole internet into a corporate “people-pleaser” with a morality borrowed from whichever company built it
The Pope's AI encyclical and its warning, drawn from the Tower of Babel, about the danger of human unity turned toward evil
The unsettling real-world stakes: AI-selected drone strikes, twelve-second human decision windows, and a strike on an Iranian school that killed around 100 children
Why Stephen is less afraid of profit-driven AI companies than of AI controlled by authoritarian governments
A working test for transhumanism: are we moving toward God's created order (like glasses or cochlear implants) or away from it (like losing our embodiment in a metaverse)?
Stephen's own faith story: growing up in an Indonesian immigrant church, drifting through doubt reading the “new atheists” in his twenties, and finding his way back by actually reading the Bible
Walking away from a trading floor career for full-time campus ministry and what convinced him within a week that he'd made the right call
His read on why hostility to Christianity on university campuses peaked around 2022, and why he's now seeing more openness - especially among young men
Find Out More
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org
 
Special Thanks To
Excelsia University College
Christian Finance
Vision Christian Media

"You can have Daniel and Lyndall for five hundred dollars." That’s the sentence Dan Lyons’ mother used when his father tried to gain custody of him and his sister - the price she put on her own children. In this raw and confronting conversation, Dan takes Karl Faase back through years of alcohol-fuelled domestic violence, a mother who turned her own pain into abuse against her son, and the homeless, drug-affected years that followed - before two schoolmates and a four-word prayer changed the course of his life. This is a story about the long, unglamorous work of healing, and what it looks like to lead, parent, and forgive when you never had a template for any of it.
Dan Lyons is the Director of Missional Culture and Leadership at Carinity, the care arm of Queensland Baptists, where he leads a team of pastors and around 100–125 chaplains serving in hospitals, prisons, aged care facilities, and schools across Queensland. He has been married to his wife Anita for 28 years, they have four adult children, and he recently became a grandfather for the first time. Behind that role is a childhood marked by extreme domestic violence and abuse, teenage homelessness, and a decades-long journey of faith and healing - which he shares candidly in this episode.
Listener note: this episode discusses childhood abuse, family violence and suicide. Please take care while listening.
Key Moments & Highlights
Dan’s current role tethering Carinity’s ~2,000 staff and 100+ chaplains back to "the person of Jesus," and what "mission drift" really means for faith-based organisations
Growing up moving across Queensland with his mother and three sisters, and the Friday-night ritual of alcohol-fuelled, rage-filled domestic violence between his mum and her partners
The abuse turned personal: being interrogated, beaten, burned, and stabbed with a fork by his own mother
The one adult - his boss at a butcher shop - who noticed the bruises and dared to intervene
The night Dan finally pushed his mother off him and ran through the rain, hand-in-hand with his sister Lyndall, to find safety with his biological father
His mother’s chilling offer to give up her own children for $500
Becoming homeless at fifteen, sliding into drugs and self-loathing, and a suicide attempt interrupted at the last second
The four-word prayer: "God, please help me" and how two Christian classmates befriended him days later with no idea what he’d been through
A physical, overwhelming encounter with God while reading the Bible for the first time, which Dan marks as the start of thirty years of healing
A prayer-counselling breakthrough years later that helped him recognise where Jesus had actually been present in his worst childhood memories — and his candid advice for anyone currently in an abusive relationship
 
Find Out More
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org
 
Special Thanks To
Excelsia University College
Christian Finance
Vision Christian Media

Tim Kelly grew up on a dairy farm in northern NSW, learning to ride poddy calves at five years old and by his late teens he was riding saddle bronc and bulls professionally, competing at the Calgary Stampede and winning the Saddle Bronc Junior World Championship. But behind the trophies, and the hard-partying rodeo lifestyle was a persistent emptiness Tim couldn't shake. 
In this episode of Insight, Tim shares his journey from rodeo arenas across Australia and Canada to a life-changing encounter at a "million dollar rodeo" in 1982, the fear that nearly ended his career, the devastating breakdown of his marriage, and how faith reshaped his identity, and continues to reshape the lives of the bull riders he now mentors through his own riding schools.
About Tim Kelly
Tim Kelly is a former professional bull and saddle bronc rider from Tenterfield, NSW, who competed internationally through the late 1970s and 80s, including at the Calgary Stampede and Canada's rodeo circuit, and won the Saddle Bronc Junior World Championship. After coming to faith at a major rodeo event in 1982, Tim went on to run bull riding schools for over 40 years, training riders from across Australia while sharing his testimony with the next generation of the sport. He has walked through both the highs of competitive success and the deep personal cost of a marriage breakdown, and now speaks openly about failure, forgiveness, and restoration. Tim is married to Laura and continues to mentor riders and share his story of faith found in an unlikely place.
 
Key Moments & Highlights
- The five-year-old's dream - Growing up in the middle of seven kids - Tim represented Australia at one of the world's biggest rodeos, competing in front of 70,000 people. - After what he calls one of the best rides of his life, Tim was disqualified on a technicality at the "million dollar rodeo" - the moment he decided to find out what other Christian riders "had that he didn't." - Giving his life to Christ — A bikie's testimony at a rodeo chapel service in 1982 became the turning point that led Tim to commit his life to God. - Tim recounts the terrifying accident that later triggered crippling fear, and watching another rider suffer a near-fatal version of the same fall. - How memorising and speaking out verses on fear allowed Tim to get back on a horse and keep riding. - Marriage breakdown and restoration - 40 years of bull riding schools 
 
Find Out More
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org 
 
Special Thanks ToExcelsia University College
Christian Finance 
Vision Christian Media

If life were a film, most of us can point to the moment everything changed. For Graham Clarke, that moment came as a phone call from a radiologist about his wife, Christy - a call that changed everything that came after. In this raw and moving conversation, Graham shares the story of walking with Christy through a terminal cancer diagnosis, parenting three young kids through unimaginable loss, and discovering that faith doesn't mean pretending everything is fine - it means bringing your honest grief to God and waiting for Him to meet you there. This is a conversation about lament, Shalom, single parenting, and the surprising, hard-won hope that things really can be okay again!!
About Graham Clarke
Graham Clarke spent most of his adult life in local church ministry as a senior pastor, most recently having stepped out of that role and looking toward a return to education - his first career, as a PE teacher and school chaplain. Raised in the Uniting Church in Brisbane, Graham met his wife Christy on the set of a Christian children's TV show in his late teens. They married young, had three children, and spent almost a decade leading a church in Geelong before returning to Brisbane.
Key Moments & Takeaways
- Early days and meeting his wife, Christy. - Christy's first breast cancer diagnosis came early and was treated as a full recovery - The phone call from the radiographer became Graham's own "sliding doors" moment - Graham and Christy independently sensed the same words in that moment: "it's gonna be okay" - a promise not about the outcome, but about the presence of God in the midst of it. - Graham unpacks the biblical idea of Shalom - Facing an eleven, ten, and seven-year-old, Graham and Christy chose honesty over shielding their kids. - A pastor's advice - "That's our job. You look after your kids" - freed Graham from having to hold the family's faith and its parenting at once. - Graham reflects candidly on "solo parenting" and the exhausting kindness of a grieving community. - He closes with the spirituality of lament - honesty with God in the middle of pain, and the hopeful expectation that mercy is renewed every morning.
 
Find Out More
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org 
 
Special Thanks ToExcelsia University College
Christian Finance 
Vision Christian Media

He was taken from his family before he could walk, told for years he'd had polio when it was actually malnutrition, and labelled "dumb" by a school system that never diagnosed his dyslexia. Decades later, Rev. Dr. Rex Rigby became the first Indigenous Australian to lead a national denomination.
In this honest conversation, Rex sits down with Karl Faase to talk about childhood abuse, being removed from his family as a toddler, and the shame he carried for years - and how those wounds became the foundation for a life devoted to reconciliation, empathy, and the gospel. Rex shares his story from an abusive home in Holland Park, to a stint as a chef on Brisbane's first luxury yacht, to twelve years as General Superintendent of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, to a doctorate exploring how Western culture has often been tangled up with the gospel message delivered to Indigenous people.
Along the way, he shares hard truths about the church's mixed legacy in Indigenous communities and a hopeful, hard-won vision for what an intercultural church could look like.
 
Rev. Dr. Rex Rigby was the first Indigenous person to serve as national head of a denomination in Australia, spending twelve years as General Superintendent of the Wesleyan Methodist Church - the longest tenure in that role. He is an elder of both the Kamilaroi and Bigambul peoples. Before entering ministry, Rex trained and worked as a chef, including a stint as the first chef aboard Brisbane's first luxury yacht. He holds a doctorate for his thesis "Social Cohesion Through the Eyes of an Indigenous Elder for the Application of the Intercultural Church," and today continues to teach at several Bible colleges.
 
Key Moments & Takeaways
- Rex Rigby was the first Indigenous Australian to lead a national denomination, serving 12 years as General Superintendent of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. - He is an elder of both the Kamilaroi and Bigambul peoples, with ancestral ties on both sides of the Queensland/NSW border. - Removed from his family as a toddler due to abuse and neglect in the home, Rex spent three years in a home for children with disabilities - an experience that left him with a lasting sense of being unloved. - For years Rex was told he'd had polio; it wasn't until his late teens he learned his leg braces were actually the result of childhood malnutrition. - Undiagnosed dyslexia and an unstable home life meant school was a constant struggle - but Rex found his footing as an apprentice chef, eventually cooking for Brisbane's elite and serving as the first chef aboard the city's first luxury yacht. - A deep sense of calling pulled Rex out of the kitchen and into ministry, despite a rocky start in high-demand inner-city pastoral work that nearly burned him out early on. - His doctoral thesis examined how the gospel was often delivered wrapped in Western cultural assumptions - creating unnecessary shame for Indigenous believers. - Rex speaks candidly about the mixed legacy of mission work in Australia, while insisting Indigenous spirituality and Christian faith are not at odds. - He points to empathy and truth-telling as essential to reconciliation, urging people to look past the symptom to understand the cause. - Despite two bouts of cancer and a recent fall, Rex remains hopeful - still teaching, mentoring young Indigenous leaders, and working toward his vision of a genuinely intercultural church.
 
Find Out More
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org 
 
Special Thanks ToExcelsia University College
Christian Finance 
Vision Christian Media

"I live in Africa - waiting is never an issue." That was Melanie Downes' response when a string of technical hiccups left her and her husband Tim sitting patiently in the studio long past schedule. It's a small window into a life shaped by nearly two decades as a missionary in Malawi - a life of nine-hour queues, two-day border crossings, and a faith forged in a place most of us will never see.
In this episode, Karl Faase speaks with Melanie about the road that took a "goofy" Rockhampton girl to a remote Yao village with a two- and four-year-old in tow. She reflects on her father's overnight conversion, her own childhood call to mission, and the enormous cost of obedience during cyclones, a critically ill baby, and the humbling task of asking others to "hold the rope."
Melanie speaks with honesty about being a woman in an Islamic community (where it took eighteen months just to be seen as "not dangerous"), what the Yao have taught her about reading the Bible, and why she and Tim have spent years deliberately working themselves out of a job. It's a conversation about courage, contextual mission, the spirit world, and the quiet power of simply staying.
 
Key Moments & Highlights
- A "wild boy" dad meets Jesus at a crusade and changes almost overnight and a young Melanie watches her whole family transform
- Her own clear moment of call as a little girl
- Growing up around mission in remote Aboriginal communities and deciding, as a teenager, that missionary life was "not for us"
- Backpacking the world after 9/11, landing in Malawi, and falling for the "warm heart of Africa"
- Counting the cost to actually go: a critically ill newborn, Cyclone Larry, financial strain, and grieving parents
- Taking a two- and four-year-old to a Yao village, and the years of language and culture learning that followed
- The challenge of being an Australian woman in an Islamic community
- Why relationship with the women was the "secret weapon" that opened the whole community
- Rethinking the missionary: not "great white saviours," but "accepted outsiders" handing leadership to the local church
- Her two books, Jump and Spirit, the Camino, and the bittersweet homecoming 
 
Find Out More
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org 
 
Special Thanks ToExcelsia University College
Christian Finance 
Vision Christian Media

You've seen the Red Frogs at Schoolies, festivals and uni O-Week - the crew handing out lollies, walking people home, being the calm in the chaos. You might even know that Taylor Swift's team has called them in for support, or that Allen's donates 24 tonnes of frogs to the cause. What you don't see is the story behind one of the people who's helped build it and why he spends his life helping teens!
In this episode, Karl Faase sits down with Steve Davies, whose childhood was, in his own words, a "trainwreck life." Steve speaks with raw honesty about a home marked by violence and fear, the grief of losing the men who made him feel safe, the discovery that his biological father had taken his own life, and the years he spent trying to numb a broken heart. It's also a story of an almost unthinkable forgiveness - of a stepfather, a mother, and ultimately himself! What's remarkable is that it was a Bible courageously thrown across a room that set all of this in motion. This is a powerful conversation about pain, faith, and what it really takes to re-build a life after hurt. 
Listener note: this episode discusses childhood abuse, family violence and suicide. Please take care while listening.
 
Steve Davies is the General Manager of Red Frogs Australia - a national charity working to safeguard a generation by providing peer-to-peer support. He has also worked in business, ministry and politics. 
 
Key moments & highlights
Red Frogs today: 27 years on, from Schoolies and O-Week to concerts - plus the Taylor Swift call and Allen's 24-tonne lolly donation
A childhood of conflict, gambling and never feeling safe
Losing his father, then his beloved "Pop" and retreating into himself
Longing for a dad when everyone else had one
Stepfather Bob: favouritism, rage, violence, and being a "second-class son"
Praying in a cupboard and the dark turn into becoming a bully
Discovering his biological father had died by suicide
Self-destruction at 17, and fleeing to Townsville after a near-fatal fight
A Bible thrown at him, reading Mark then John, and "Father, forgive them"
2am at a church door: "Lord, if you're real…" and a picture of his heart being mended
"I forgive you" - the call to Bob, Bob's conversion, and Steve baptising him
Officiating Bob's funeral; forgiving his mother
His own marriage nearly ending and a dog's death that unlocked a buried memory
How Schoolies went from the "wild west" to far safer, and Red Frogs' work with the QLD Government
Find Out More
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org 
 
Special Thanks ToExcelsia University College
Christian Finance 
Vision Christian Media

In many of our churches, there's an unspoken script: grow up, find someone, get married, have kids. And if that doesn't happen - or hasn't happened yet - it can leave people quietly wondering: Is there something wrong with me? Is this just a waiting room?
Dr Dani Treweek has spent over a decade thinking, writing, and living these questions. In this episode of Insight with Karl Faase, she shares her journey of growing up in Sydney's eastern suburbs, studying at Moore Theological College, and completing a PhD that became the book The Meaning of Singleness.
Along the way, she's wrestled personally and academically with what it truly means to be single in the Christian life.
Whether you're single, married, widowed, divorced, or leading a church community, this conversation has something important to offer. As Dani shares, the Bible's vision for singleness is far more expansive and far more hopeful than most of us have been taught.
 
Key Moments and Takeaways:
- The "disenfranchised grief" of singleness - mourning something you've never had
- The moment in a Moore College ethics lecture that changed how Dani read the Bible
- What Jesus's words in Matthew 22 reveal about the eternal significance of singleness
- How the Reformation accidentally devalued singleness in Protestant churches
- The problems with dating apps and the deeper disembodiment crisis behind them
- What Paul actually means (and doesn't mean) by the so-called "gift of singleness"
- Why the church needs its single members as much as single members need the church 
 
Resources mentioned:
The Meaning of Singleness — Dani Treweek (IVP Academic)
Single Ever After — Dani Treweek (IVP)
Cross Related Ministry
"On Sitting Alone in Church" — article by Dani Treweek 
 
Find Out More
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org 
 
Special Thanks ToExcelsia University College
Christian Finance 
Vision Christian Media

What does it take to raise a good man in a culture that can't decide whether masculinity is a problem to be solved or a strength to be celebrated? In this episode of Insight, Karl Faase sits down with Simon Smart - a teacher, writer and Director of the Centre for Public Christianity (CPX). This is a wide-ranging, deeply personal conversation about boys, bullying, fatherlessness, the manosphere, and what it actually means to be a good man.
Drawing on his own brutal boarding-school years and his book The End of Men, Simon makes the case for a richer, more compassionate model of masculinity - one rooted in the example of Jesus.
Simon Smart is a teacher, writer and the Director of the Centre for Public Christianity (CPX), a media organisation working to promote a thoughtful, generous understanding of the Christian faith in Australian public life. Before CPX, Simon spent a decade teaching English and history in boys' schools, an experience that, alongside his own childhood in a tough country boarding environment, shaped his recent book The End of Men. He lives on Sydney's Northern Beaches with his wife and two adult children, and is, in his own words, "an average but enthusiastic surfer."
 
Key Moments and Takeaways:
Simon's education in masculinity and the moment everything shifted.
His slow road to faith.
An unplanned path to CPX.
The case for writing The End of Men.
Untangling "toxic masculinity."
Fatherlessness and the algorithm.
What actually makes a good man.
 
Find Out More
Olive Tree Media: www.olivetreemedia.com.au
Watch+ Platform: www.olivetreemedia.com.au/watch
Daily Nudge: www.dailynudge.org 
 
Special Thanks ToExcelsia University College
Christian Finance 
Vision Christian Media