Being an Influencer

March 28, 2025

‘Trev, go home. One day I want to be able to say, see that guy who is a well-known engineer, he used to spend time at my slot car track and work for me part-time. I don’t want them to say, see that bum over there, I knew him once.’

I spent much of my time as a teenager at a local pinball parlour and slot car track. The man who owned the establishment took an interest in me and employed me part-time. One night when I wasn’t working but just hanging around, he sent me home with these words.

After I was rather miraculously converted from atheism to Christianity in my 30s, I began to remember many points in my life, like this one, when the words and actions of others influenced me in tiny incremental ways towards the ‘good’. 

Another vividly recalled episode took place in Year 11 science as our class waited for the teacher to arrive. A few of us were talking about death and the average length of life (I have no idea how this came up). A very timid young woman piped up: ‘Noah lived for 950 years’. I nearly fell off my stool with raucous laughter. When I regained my composure, I said ‘Are you serious Gail? You don’t believe that rubbish, do you? That’s so stupid.’ She said nothing in response, she simply became quiet.

I never gave that incident much thought until just weeks after my conversion, decades later. As I pondered how on earth I’d ended up becoming a Christian, my ridiculing of Gail kept coming back to me and I felt a great weight of guilt. So I went looking for her. I eventually tracked her down and apologised. God works in mysterious ways, and it seems he was working through Gail, even as I lived my sinful life unaware of Him. 

As a Christian father, and for many years, educator, I’ve now given a lot of thought to the other side of this equation: how can we shape children’s minds and faith? 

This shaping occurs in the many ‘communities’ of practice children inhabit, whether at home, church, school, or in the wider world. What do they read or watch? Who are their friends? What is rewarded or punished? How does family life model faith? Young minds are continually being shaped every day in thought, attitude, beliefs and hopes, whether we are being intentional about it or not. 

No doubt many parents expect Christian schools, alongside church activities like Sunday school and youth groups, to shape their children in many ways. Other parents assume growing their children’s faith is the family’s role. Still others have a more ‘hands off’ approach, assuming their children will embrace their own values and goals in life as they mature and work things out. 

As a Christian parent I learned very early that if I wanted to have a better idea of what influenced my children, I needed to get involved in their lives. So as my daughters grew up, my wife and I were involved with some of their activities. This included their schools, youth groups, taking them to music lessons, doing Beach Mission with them (up till 15), coaching some of their sporting teams, and regularly volunteering at their schools in various roles. But the influence of parents, as important as it is, is not the full story. We all know the adage it takes a village to raise a child. It might not be quite as simple as this suggests, but churches and Christian schools need to keep in mind that they partner with families to help their students grow in faith. The reality in any school, whether it seeks to shape students in character and faith or not, is that it occurs anyway.[1] Even if the school does nothing to this end deliberately, there is a great deal of ‘invisible shaping’ to which parents (and sometimes teachers) are oblivious. Alongside the formative role of family, youth leaders at church, chaplains at school, sporting coaches, and so on, school teachers, too, can significantly impact their students’ character and faith.

Can school teachers truly ‘shape’ their students? I found it was easier as a primary school teacher, but more difficult as Master of New College (housing university students). When students are young, we have their attention for much longer; at high school and beyond, less so. Perhaps trying to be an ‘influence’ is more realistic than ‘shaping’.  As a starting point for Christian teachers, I think it helps to ask ourselves, what do I know about my students? Our students take on different identities as they live in their different worlds. So gaining insight into the ‘real’ students we see each day is tricky, but very important.

You may never remember a quiet word of encouragement you offered to a student in one of your classes, but it might just have an impact. As I look back over my life, I can see how God was at work shaping me long before I became a Christian. I was not an ideal candidate for conversion. As a pagan high school boy in a tough working-class community, I lived much of my childhood with the challenge of alcoholic parents. At the age of 17 I was to find my mother dead one morning. But my early life also included the encouragement of others outside my family. Many of my memories of these moments involved other students, like Gail—and that was in public state-run schools, not faith-based schools. The influence of others often occurs in rather small and almost invisible ways. In my life, this included my boss at the slot car track, some neighbours and sporting coaches who encouraged me, and a few teachers. 

Remarkably, God can use weak vessels like me and you. In fact, God is at work in our schools, even when we fail as teachers to do much to reveal the truth of Christ. Of course we must never see this as justification for doing little—teachers need to take opportunities to share aspects of their life and faith in the context of schooling whenever possible—but our students are constantly being shaped by the visible and invisible things in their world. And as teachers, we need to take comfort knowing God is in control of our students’ lives, and even of our conversations with them. As my personal experience attests, wherever we are, and no what course our lives take, we are never beyond the grace and mercy of God.

In Pedagogy and Education for Life, I point out that even in our weakness God can use us as teachers for the ‘good’. For education is not merely the school curriculum, but it is ‘the whole of life of a community, and the experience of its members learning to live this life, from the standpoint of a specific end goal’.[2] That end goal is not simply success in schooling, but more importantly, the hope that our students might commit to following Christ.

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