A man being honoured for his interfaith work says it began with vivid dreams and a desire to connect with others.

Rev. Bill Millar may have retired from his pastoral position at Knox United Church in Central Park, but he still finds himself slipping into preaching mode. Sitting inside his home, Millard has been hard at work on his OpenOut podcast, talking about experiencing faith with people from a multitude of cultural backgrounds.

"I think it is about believing in the deep humanity of everyone and that deep humanity is the soul," Millar says. "It is what I believe faith is all about."

This podcast, as well as his more than a decade with Knox, is being acknowledged with an award from Lt.-Gov. Janice Filmon, the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for the Advancement of Interreligious Understanding.

''I feel oddly like (I have) a bad case of imposter syndrome," the reverend says. 

He says others have been working in the interfaith field more many years, saying he feels like he is receiving it on behalf of the community.

Millar says in the two years before he began working with the church he returned from, he had many dreams about connecting with the Muslim community.

"These dreams were so exquisitely beautiful that I would actually wake up crying and then I said maybe this is the work for me, is to be involved in interfaith."

While he tried to find a way to do this work, Millar struggled until he began working with Knox.

"It wasn't until a couple of years into that that the link between those dreams and that reality started to come forward."

He began extending a neighbourly hand to Knox's Somali neighbours. The Irishman found many commonalities with them, including mysticism. One of Millar's notable moments of interfaith connections was holding a picnic after 9/11 between the church and a mosque.

That neighbourly hand continued to reach out to Central Park, using the church's facilities to do so.

"The key thing was simply opening to the people around you," Millar says. "We are the stewards; we are the caretakers. We offer this space, which is God's space, which is sacred space, which is community space, to be used by the community in whatever way they want."

Millar believes the future of the church is with Indigenous people and newcomers. When Miller began his 14 years with Knox, most of the congregation was older, white people. Now, he says it is 85 per cent newcomers, which closely resembled ever-changing the Central Park neighbourhood.

As the years continued, the church's community expanded to people in Central Park with many different religious backgrounds, not only their church's four walls. Millar says this was difficult for some to understand.

"The people who are not participants in the Christian worshiping community really were part of the Knox ministry and mission in life," he says. "Which as time was difficult for, especially folks in the broader church, to sometimes understand what that was all about."

Millar says his interfaith work has strengthened his deep faith.

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