Different stages. Same thread.

At around seventeen, a close friend asked me to be involved in something that came to be known as Disability Education '94. We visited schools across Hawke's Bay and spoke with kids about living with things like cerebral palsy, spina bifida and muscular dystrophy. We told our stories and let the kids ask questions about our daily lives. All of them. Nothing was off limits.

It was inside that experience that I truly began to grasp the power of honest communication in community life. A room full of ten-year-olds cannot be fooled. If you're being straight with them, they know. If you're not, they know that too. Everything on this website is coloured by that fact.

Since then I've filled a lot of roles that all revolve around communication and community. Lay preacher. Youth worker. Educator for the Human Rights Commission, presenting the Tu Tikanga workshop. And eventually creator of Community Investigation, the workshop I've run for community organisations across the region and am now opening up to businesses. Different stages. Same thread.

You can probably see a theme developing. I've always loved not just communication but the creative process, whether that's physically making something or just the idea of putting an idea in somebody else's mind. That's where radio comes in. When I was younger, the heroes of my world were entertainers and DJs. My mornings were breakfast radio, and I was inspired by their wit, their take on the world, and the place they held in people's lives. I studied media with a focus on radio and broadcasting in New Plymouth, and I've been involved in community radio in one form or another for more than thirty years.

Lights, camera, action. I've always enjoyed watching something you're part of come to life, and outside the workshop room nowhere is that more tangible than on stage. You connect with a cast and crew over a page, and within two months that page has become something you helped make and other people get to enjoy. Over the last twenty years or so I've been lucky enough to be in a lot of shows with theatre groups across Hawke's Bay.

I was raised in a family that was all about service and community. One of the challenges you face with an identifier like cerebral palsy is finding ways to express yourself in connections that aren't related to that identifier. After I became a Christian at about eighteen, my father casually asked: now that you've found this faith, how do you choose to live it out? At that age I had no idea. About ten years later, between projects, I remembered him saying he thought I'd make a good justice of the peace or celebrant. So in 2009 I registered, and I've had the great privilege of helping people celebrate their relationships ever since.

One idea that keeps being affirmed in my life is the value and power of communication, and as a byproduct of that, of being listened to. One of my more recent undertakings is volunteering with Samaritans New Zealand. It's the same thread again: someone speaking honestly, and someone actually listening.

I have been a born-again Christian for over thirty years and have made my spiritual home in various churches in that time. To say my faith journey in relation to the church has been interesting is an understatement. Currently I serve as a preacher in the parish of greater Hastings. My faith has shaped everything else you'll find on this site: how I approach community, how I listen to people, and why I believe honest communication matters as much as it does.

Read Gray's sermons