Jay said to me, why don't you come to the speaker's corner, see what we do?

So four weeks later I turned up and there was Jay with two ladders and I went, why have you got two ladders?

He went, well, Andy, I'm going to stand on one and preach and you're going to stand on the other and preach. I thought, Jay, you said, come and see what we do. You went, oh, best fuse up a ladder. I went, I've never preached on the street before.

He went, it's easy.

I said, I've never talked to Muslims before.

Oh, they're easy.

Both those things utterly wildly wrong.

The Muslims there are torn. preached on the street before he went it's easy I said I've never talked to Muslims before

oh they're easy both those things utterly wildly wrong the Muslims there tore me to pieces it

was an absolute road crash but it gave me a bug to get into this because I thought you know

I need to get some answers they've asked really good questions and that drove me to kind

of reading to try and find answers the questions they'd asked.

Welcome, everybody. This is Simon Gilbeau with Inspired. Inspired, if you're new to us,

it's all about meeting different mates of mine from all sorts of different journeys and life experiences and hopefully in an hour's time leaving inspired because the factors were relentlessly bombarded by negativity and bad news and stuff that induces fear and cynicism. So this completely counteracts that and I've got no doubt that you're going to be inspired because we've got with us Andy Bannister. Welcome Andy. Simon, it's great to be on the show. I love by the way, I love the whole vision. You know, we live in a cynical, fearful age, so let's just fight back. And I love the work that you're doing on this show to just push back against that. Yeah, thanks, mate. So our path first cross, actually, during lockdown when I was doing this book. And I wanted to get you to write the chapter because you hold a PhD in Islamic studies. So it's a chapter on Islam. Anyway, that book never came to fruition.

But I was glad to come across you then and then we met subsequently at Jay John's Evangelist Conference.

I love what you do. I listen to you. Whenever you come out with a podcast, you do, well, you do two podcasts, don't you?

So one with Solas, which is your main job. You're the director of Solas Center for Public Christianity. And then the other one is Poll of the Gaps. We had on Aaron Edwards, who's your partner in crime on that one, a few months ago, and he gave us a great hour. And yeah, so if you guys, if you're interested, well, just mention Polar the Gaps, go for now. Yeah, so there's two, yes, so part of the gaps, we'll talk about so last in a minute, but part of the Gaps was actually a lockdown thing that Aaron and I and Anna, we had a third presenter, guy called Michael Lotz back then, we were all bored during lockdown, climbing up the walls. We started having these Zoom conversations where we were discussing theology and culture and the gospel and big ideas. And then I forget which one of us was like,

we should try this as a podcast. And we did. We thought we'd have a go because, you know, again,

lots of spare time during lockdown. And I think we thought that we might get like 10 listeners

because we had no idea what we were doing.

I mean, literally none.

And, you know, here we are three years on, something like that.

...