A lot of our most amazing stories of the Holy Spirit at work is because people have realized the gifts of God are not there to make the Sunday church experience more exciting.

They're meant to equip us for mission to those people who are a million miles away from Jesus.

Hello everybody. My name is Simon Gilber and this is Inspired. Inspired just aims to counteract so much bad, bad news out there and grimness. And I love getting in a bunch of my mates from all sorts of different walks of life to tell their story of faith of overcoming challenges of how God's been at work in their lives. And I'm really thrilled this week to have Paul Harkle with us.

Hi, Paul.

Hi, Simon. It's great to be with you. Yeah. So Paul and I go back, I'm guessing it's about 15, 20 years when he invited me to see in his church, which is all saints, Woodford, Wells. You've been there a massive 27 years. It's on the sort of London Essex border just inside the M25. And as well as being Vicar there,

a couple of years ago, well, it's probably more than a couple years now, what was it four years since you took over the leadership of that new wine network? When this goes live, I think it'll be

coming up on six actually. Wow. Time flies. So new wine is a really significant network and has been a huge impact in my life and I'm so

grateful for it.

So I'm really looking forward to hearing about significant challenges that you've sort of been

addressing and overcoming with pandemic stuff.

But let's go right back, Paul. So, you know, we're all interested.

Tell us about your background and how you came to faith. Well, I think it's just like a really

typical ordinary English background. So my parents are both teachers. I grew up in a new town

just outside London, a place called Harlow. It's kind of one of those places that was just built after the war to accommodate London

overspill, and it's a little bit soulless in all sorts of ways.

It doesn't really have a centre or a character.

I went to the local comprehensive school, and we went to the local church.

It was just a parish church church which was, I think,

looking back pretty ordinary at the time. Yeah, it was such a very ordinary English background,

really. So was it just by osmosis that you graduate came to faith? When I was born, I think my parents

were probably at that stage lapsed Christians, but they started going back to church. Both of them

had been brought up in the church and probably as a young married couple and moving around

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