RADIO HOST KATH
PRAISE BE! THE DJ IS TUNING IN TO HER TRUE VOCATION
‘My new life as a priest’
For 10 years, Wellingtonians have been waking up to the trademark warmth and humour of Kath Bier on
The Breeze’s morning show.
The bubbly mum-of-two, together with her co-host Steve Joll, has entertained, joked and disc-jockeyed her way into listeners’ hearts as they’ve wiped the sleep from their eyes, poured their first cups of coffee and negotiated their way through the morning rush hour.
But after almost 30 years on air, Kath is now hanging up her headphones and following a very different calling.
“About five years ago, I had a really weird thing happen.
I felt God call me into being an ordained priest,” says the veteran broadcaster.
The process takes five years and is deliberately intense in order to weed out those who were called by ego rather than God. Now, just months away from being ordained, Kath says she was years into her training before she was 100% confident in her decision.
“Right down to the last probably six months of that whole five-year process, I was thinking, ‘I really don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be a priest.’
“But then, just at the very last little bit of that process, I was like, ‘This is such a call and I so want this. This is exactly what God is calling me to do.’”
Kath was raised by Christian parents, but they never forced Kath or her siblings to go to church. They wanted their children to find God on their own. Part of what drew Kath to Christianity was how amazing her parents are.
“Anyone who meets my parents just falls in love with them. They’re just such beautiful people. So for us kids, we were all like, ‘If that’s what life can look like, I want that.’”
That doesn’t mean her road to religion hasn’t been bumpy. Like many teenagers, there was a period when Kath was not interested in church at all. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t leave it behind.
“I had some rough teenage and young adult years. But I always heard God whispering my name, and it would be like, ‘Turn around, turn around, turn around.’ So one day I turned around and I was like, ‘Oh, life is just so much better.’”
It was a different kind of calling that made Kath pursue a career in radio. As a little girl, she loved helping her dad in his workshop. The radio was their constant companion while they worked, and Kath became fascinated with the DJ talking to her through the airwaves.
“He had the radio on all day, every day. And I thought that the man on the radio was actually talking to me. And then I remember going to my friend’s house and they had the radio on, and it was the same guy. And I was like, ‘Wow, he’s actually following me around.’”
She immediately knew she wanted to be just like that man: “Somebody who could talk to you, and you felt like you knew them and that they knew you.” Her job never felt more important than during the level 4 lockdown last year.
“We decided early on, before we went into lockdown, that we wouldn’t mention the word COVID or coronavirus, or pandemic.”
At the time, she and her colleagues worried they were making a mistake by not talking about the topic on everyone’s minds. But in hindsight, they know they provided a muchneeded haven for their listeners.
“It was the best decision because people would come to us to just get a break, to feel normal. All those silly little things that we would normally talk about, we just kept talking about. The friendships that we forged in that time just got even deeper; it was quite amazing.”
Don’t expect to see Kath standing in the pulpit giving a sermon anytime soon. The 46-year-old sees her ministry as more community-based rather than being the head of a church. So she is stepping away from her dream job hosting The Breeze Wellington morning show to do the branding and communications for the Wellington City Mission.
With her new nine-to-five job, for the first time in a decade Kath will get to be a part of the morning routine with her husband Mark, 46, and their two sons Jesse, 16, and Gus,
13 – a fact not lost on her eldest boy.
“The other day my 16-year-old son was eating this big bowl of cornflakes, and he looks up at me and he goes, ‘Mum, my whole life I haven’t seen you in the mornings.’ And he said it in a way that he wasn’t upset that that’s how his life was, but, like, ‘How cool is this? I’m going to see you in the mornings!’”
Gus, however, had some serious concerns about what the new schedule meant for dinner time.
“His only worry was who was going to cook dinner. I explained to him that this is how other families operate… we’ll find a way of having dinner cooked!”