When I was a language student in Taiwan, I remember a Japanese classmate telling me, “When people hear you’re a teacher, don’t they bow a little?” I laughed and said, “When Americans hear I’m a teacher, they say, ‘Why??’”
What is your why for going into education? Is it a favorite teacher who made you want to have the same impact on students? Is it a subject matter that you love and want to inspire students to love, too? Is teaching the family job, the natural choice when you come from a long line of Lutheran educators? Or is it a complete surprise to you and others that you’ve ended up a teacher?
Whether you’ve wanted to teach since you were a kid or are surprised to find yourself here, it is not an accident you ended up in education. Could it be God put you in this career so that you would be equipped to share the Gospel with students who every day walk into a Christian school somewhere around the world and hear about Jesus for the very first time?
What if this is why you’re a teacher?
On Fish Island in Cambodia – in the midst of a country that’s only 3% Christian – you can drive up to a beautiful property called Stronghold Cambodia and hear 50+ young children singing praise to Jesus, dozens who will come back for Sunday worship and many who are sharing Jesus with their families and having hard conversations with their parents about being baptized.
And yet – one of their classrooms stands empty and local children sit on a waiting list because they are short a missionary teacher.
In Taiwan, one of the biggest Lutheran schools in the world sits in the middle of a rural county with more gods than people. Every day 2000 middle and high schoolers – not to mention the kindergarten and elementary students who meet on another part of the campus (pictured above) – hear about a God who loves them and came to serve them, a God who doesn’t demand offerings and inspire fear like the idols that surround them, but a God who took on flesh for their salvation. Only perhaps 2% of these students are Christian coming into the school, but 10% are believers when they leave, and each year many more students come back to campus, 5 or 10 years removed from graduation, eager to tell their high school Bible teachers that they have now been baptized!
And yet – this year there was talk of staffing religion classes with non-Christians because they don’t have enough missionary teachers.
In Hong Kong, 22,000 students attend Lutheran schools, a group of students who are only perhaps 10% Christian but who know that in Lutheran schools they will receive a good education and perhaps get to learn English from a native speaker. These students learn in school that their worth does not come from the achievement or earning potential that define so much of this global financial hub but instead from Christ Jesus who gave His life for their salvation.
And yet – many of these schools are lacking missionary teachers to share the Gospel with students and other teachers who don’t yet know Jesus.
Is this why God called you into teaching? I don’t know for sure. But it might be… Why don’t you ask Him?
