Bob Andrew is the eldest of three kids within a family with a Presbyterian father and Anglican mother. Given the Scottish roots of his dad's family who came to New Zealand in the early 1900's, Bob grew up with the Knox variant of Presbyterianism rather than the Calvinist. On his mother's side, his ancestors were N.Z. missionaries in the 1830's, even before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, and his oldest uncle was an Anglican clergyman.

Bob went to University a year younger than most, having skipped a grade in primary school, and he spent his first student year at Trinity College, the Methodist seminary that also took in non-seminary students to fill their rooms. Bob's involvement in church while at University was mainly taking part in musical theatre put on by the students! By the time he was in graduate school working on a Ph.D. in expert systems for steel-making, he had stopped going to church all together, but when he emigrated to the U.S. in 1972 that all changed. He settled in Houston, TX and became part of a household at the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer where he sang in their choir and as Junior Warden did many carpentry projects (office remodeling, playground construction, Montessori rooms remodeling).

In 1982 Bob, wife Diane and two young kids Meagan and Colin moved to Woodland Park, CO with the Community of Celebration for a year, then back to New Zealand when the crude oil energy price slump wiped out the kind of projects Bob had worked on for the previous decade in Texas. After two years teaching Chemical Engineering Design at University of Auckland, Mobil hired Bob as I.T. Supervisor of  a new synthetic fuels plant in Motonui, NZ. The family attended St. Mary's in the regional center New Plymouth, the oldest stone church in New Zealand. Right before returning to Princeton, NJ to work at Mobil R&D, Bob in his vestry role oversaw agreement on design details for a new $400,000 center attached to St. Mary's .

Bob & Diane's time in the Princeton area was busy with his global engineering work and Diane's degree in Music Education at Westminster Choir College, and Bob transferred with Mobil to the D.C. area in 1995 to head up a two-year global intranet project in Environment, Health & Safety. After getting out of Mobil in 1998 to avoid having to move yet again (would have been Venezuela or Indonesia - not good places for teenagers), Bob got into consulting work, civic association and on Vestry at Grace Episcopal Church where he co-lead an "Appreciative Inquiry" process of re-visioning

Bob & Diane are now part of the core group looking to establish Church of the Sojourners in Columbia Heights as a satellite congregation within the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, as well as being faithful to the social justice tradition of Sojourners. Diane leads worship, and Bob is web-master for our domain www.sojournerschurch.org. His professional work specializes in collaboration and geospatial technology consulting, part-time at School of Public Service.