Kore UK Q&A
Matt & Juls Hollidge are the creative & dynamic duo behind Kore– the ultra creative website and community that says it’s vision is “…to explore the heart and roots of our faith and to discover what the Kingdom of God looks like in our world”
From the moment I first met the guys last year, I felt that they were people who I could really CONNECT with.
There were a lot of shared points of reference, mutual friends and mentor figures in our shared journey, so because of that synchronicity we’ve formed a fast and hopefully long lasting friendship.
Matt & Juls are just great people to be around.
Recently, I asked them a few questions:
Q: So, guys….tell me a little about how you guys hooked up? What’s was it that brought you together?
J: God! I vowed never to marry an Englishman (I’m Northern Irish) or an arty type and Matt is the extreme of both.
M: Well, being the ‘extreme of Englishness’, I swept her off her feet at a festival. I like to think I was debonair and gentlemanly but Juls’ (more truthful) recollection of me is more ‘clumsy and nervous’.
J: No comment.
Q: Can you let us know a little about your faith journey before the idea for KORE was birthed?
M: In a nutshell… we both became Christians when we were young but grew up in very different worlds. I come from the melting pot of cultures that is East London, where the Baptist church I grew up in was 80% African/Caribbean and my school was 90% Bengali/Pakistani. I had the great privilege of spending time with different missional and urban communities from there and further afield. It taught me to love culture, diversity and people.
J: I guess depth and definition best sum up my journey, working out what faith looks like and asking lots of questions. Growing up in Northern Ireland I lived life with a great bunch of passionate folk who helped me develop a hunger for more and a desire for authenticity, justice and great craic!
Bring our journeys/personalities together and you get a desire for something creative, unpackaged, rooted in community, exploring faith at its Kore (see what we did there).
Q: So,”Kore“…what’s it all about?
J: Despite people spending hours working out an acrostic (sorry) the ‘K’ was mainly an arty design decision (you can guess whose idea that was).
M: *hands up*
J: Officially we’re a creative agency that runs a website and consultancy (and has fingers in a few other smaller pies). For the “official” overview you can check out the about page on our site and play with our aims and values.
Unofficially we see Kore as a catalyst that works in the fluidity of faith and culture. We use creativity and questions to help capture what is essentially at the very core (sorry) and to imagine what it looks like when faith and culture properly engage. Our aim isn’t to provide people with solutions, more to activate thought, questions and provide creative tools to move forward.
M: What she said!
J: We developed the website as a hub for creative resources, ideas, thought and discussion. We wanted to provide a platform for collaboration and conversation that engaged with a cultural context (it’s why community is so important to us). The consultancy is a growing entity in itself helping others to explore creativity, imagination, strategy and cultural engagement.
M: What she said!
Q: You are a married couple working together on a single project. How do you divide the roles, and what are the joys and challenges?
M: If we only had a pound for every time someone asked us how we managed to work together. * Seriously though, we really enjoy it, we’ve had to learn lessons through it but we’ve found that our married relationship teaches us things that enhance our work relationship and vice versa.
It also helps that we take very different roles and drive different things. Juls has a legal background, a real gift of communication and although she may not always admit it, a creative spirit. She has the incredible ability to discover and clarify the roots of something, which lends itself perfectly to much of our consultancy, writing, development, scripting, editing etc. She is always asking questions, which may one day drive me insane, but always keeps us learning.
J: Matt has this unbelievable imagination that knows no bounds and he eats, lives and breathes creativity. He is a gifted creator and has a million ideas before breakfast. He feeds Kore with innovation, design, geek-chic and big dreams! Kore is blessed greatly by his networking skills and notorious ‘out of the blue’ emails that result in partnerships, friendships and new resources.
M: Kore is also so much bigger than us, there are countless people around the world who give their time, resources, skills, ideas and energy, collaborating with us and helping to nurture the ever-growing community that surrounds what we’re doing. We may not all be in one office, in the same country, with one language but we love the vibrancy of being a decentralised organisation and the opportunities that come with it.
Q: Unlike many ministries, or expressions of social action, I’ve noticed that you two are conspicuously absent from the online profile. We don’t see your smiling faces on any of the material and I’m not sure if your names even appear on the site. Was this a conscious decision, and if so, why?
J: We made a conscious decision when we started Kore not to build it around us, simply because it’s bigger than us. Obviously we openly tell people what we do and what our part in Kore is otherwise you would have just blown our cover in this interview!
M: We also recognise that Kore is a shared space and a global community of people collaborating together to inspire, challenge and change. We’d love for that to stand on its own merit without the need for faces or names, though of course we give credit where credit’s due. We may face challenges because of this and may never get a book deal but we’re willing to take that risk.
J: …and seriously though, have you seen my husband’s face? 
Q: You recently spent some time in the US; what did you guys get up to when you were there?
M: Truth be told, some of it was holiday but the reason for going was to connect with some people/organisations and explore a couple of projects that we’ll potentially be driving forward over the next 18 months. We’re keen to look at new ways we can explore the Bible in digital space and opportunities to reinforce positive behaviour through social media. Whilst we were out there we were blessed by the hospitality and local knowledge of International Arts Movement, photographer Brian Kelly, Foursquare, an ideator (what a job title), a phenomenal information architect and some other wonderful people who gave their time to us. We also managed to eat our way through most of Manhattan and Michigan!
Q: Where do you see KORE heading in the future?
J: Honestly who knows! We’d love to see Kore play a part in helping more people to collaborate, using creativity and imagination to foster change, innovation, understanding and community. No doubt our future will involve many more partnerships and an expansion of the community who feed into Kore. Personally though I’ll be asking many more questions and Matt…filling notebooks with ideas probably!
*I asked them afterwards: they’d have £16
…and if you didn’t check the links in the US trip run down, it’s really worth visiting them.
Love the interview, Johnny. As always, very interesting and stimulating.
“I like to think I was debonair and gentlemanly but Juls’ (more truthful) recollection of me is more ‘clumsy and nervous’.”
… funny, but that’s how almost all couples think
The other part in the interview that personally resonated with me was how a husband-wife team works on a single idea and makes it successful. My sweetheart and I have already been mooting on a bunch of ideas – and that’s something we want to get into one day.
Juls and Matt’s answer to that question was superbly insightful!
They really are a great couple – lovely people.