Using Influence in the Name of Jesus: Interview with Dr. David Taylor

How do you define leadership? Leadership can be difficult to define because it is exercised in many ways to achieve diverse goals. But going back almost a century to the first publication of Dale Carnegie’s bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People, influence often appears as central to many definitions of leadership. Whether that’s persuading investors to support a start-up, attracting customers to buy your products and services, or inspiring team members to act with character and courage in the face of difficult decisions, leadership involves the conscious act of influencing others.

At the De Pree Center for Leadership, while we agree that leadership involves influence, we think it matters how leaders use influence. In our research, we discovered that flourishing leaders are committed followers of Jesus who consistently seek the best for others. But what would it look like to use influence as followers of Jesus for the sake of others? Are Christian leaders really called to use influence in the name of Jesus?

In this interview, professor, Anglican priest, and author Dr. David Taylor provides a theological imagination for how to use influence in the name of Jesus. Dr. Taylor is the Associate Professor for Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary.

How do you understand your work and your sense of call?

Professionally, I have three callings: one as a theologian, the other as a priest, and a third as an author. At Fuller, I teach systematic theology, in addition to several other courses on the arts, and I really love doing that work. But I’m also an Anglican priest, and I told my bishop a few years ago that I wanted my ordination to the priesthood to inconvenience my academic work, which is to say, to actually require something of me rather than simply be a certificate that hangs on the wall. I want my pastoral calling to ground and inform not merely the content of my work but how I work as an academic. My third calling is as an author. I’ve written nine books and am currently working on my tenth book, which is on the vocation of artists.

One of the results of having these three callings is that it has upended my ideas of efficiency. I have had this mental picture over the years of life as a series of building blocks. Each year I get to put one block on the building of one of my callings, and I can only do one block a year. With these multiple callings, it means that I have to choose which calling to build up. In practice, to keep the metaphor going, it means I’m building rather short buildings, especially in comparison to my peers, who have been focused on a single professional calling and thus have had a chance to build one rather tall building. Over the years, this slow-building work has at times caused me to feel somewhat insecure. I’m building such small buildings, at such a slow pace, and, as I live in a comparison economy, it can cause me to feel like I’m perpetually behind, and always a late-bloomer.

But now, in my 50s, I find that these three callings are weaving something really beautiful in me, something that I could not have imagined in my 20s, but that God has been shepherding all along. I’m not, in fact, behind. I’m just on time, where God would have me, as this amphibious creature of multiple callings.

How did you come to be interested in the topic of influence? Can you unpack the basics of your theology of influence?

I was asked by my friend Brian Brown to speak at his company’s annual conference. Brian is the Founder and CEO of Masterworks, a company that helps grow nonprofits and ministries by radically reimagining fundraising so more people can experience the hope of Jesus. The conference was for the leaders of the organizations they serve, and the topic for that year was influence.

For the talk, I sketched out a theology of influence that drew on the life and work of Eugene Peterson. On the face of it, he’s an unlikely candidate for a case study in exemplar influence. Eugene received mediocre grades in college, went to the only seminary he knew existed, and got rejected by Princeton for their PhD program. He didn’t publish his first book until he was 42 years old and he never made a “40 under 40” Most Influential Pastor list. It was not until he was in his early 60s, with the publication of The Message, that he exercised the kind of influence that gets noticed by sociologists and celebrity magazines.

But Eugene moved through the world in a way that embodied his understanding of the gospel, whether he was a young pastor of a small church, a best-selling author, or having a conversation about the Psalms with Bono. There was a consistency to how Eugene exercised influence across the whole of his life. To exercise influence in the name of Jesus, as I observed it in Eugene’s life, was to exercise influence in a way that was personal, particular, and patient.

To exercise influence in the name of Jesus, as I observed it in Eugene’s life, was to exercise influence in a way that was personal, particular, and patient.

First, influence must be personal and, as such, must resist the temptation to treat people as things. In his early years as a pastor, Eugene found himself pressured to lead his church in a way that relied on strategies for growth drawn from MBA programs. He found that way of being a pastor deeply demoralizing, because it ended up reducing people to numbers. It also became a source of tremendous temptation for him, because he knew, if left to his own devices, he could play the numbers game and make it big. If you perceive people as things, you can accomplish a great deal with them, because they’re just numbers to shove into strategies and push across spreadsheets.

But if they’re persons, with agency, with dignity, along with a host of complicated stories, then you can’t just put them in a neat factory line like widgets in the hopes that you’ll produce faithful disciples of Jesus. You have to pay attention to who they are, to the story that they’re living, to the story that God would have for them. It’s an inefficient way of influencing them but also a gospel way of doing things.

Second, influence must see each person as particular rather than reducing them to generic categories. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with certain things being generic. Scientists use generic categories, and businesses look for generic patterns that inform their products and services. But if we take all persons, all families, all communities, all groups, and mash them together into generic and homogeneous units, then we end up dehumanizing them. They lose their God-given particularity. A good leader, however, not only respects their irreducible particularity but also trusts that God’s work of sanctification occurs through, not despite, that uniquely beautiful quality of each person.

Third, influence needs to be patient and thus must resist the temptation to manipulate people. Leaders, like Eugene, are often unusually gifted communicators, which means that they possess the skills to “use” people to achieve their goals. But the ministry that Jesus models for us is an eminently patient one, Eugene felt. This doesn’t mean that we can’t care about efficiency, effectiveness, or productivity, or the need to fix problems and course-correct. These things matter within God’s economy. But if we only care about the “bottom line” and if we believe that leadership is synonymous with business-driven ideas of maximal utility and prodigious productivity, then patience will be seen as an obstacle to be removed at all costs. The patient leader, Eugene believed, will lead with purpose but also with open hands. Such a leader will empower others, while also holding lightly their need to control every last detail. Such a leader will welcome the surprising work of the Holy Spirit to guide us in new directions and even interrupt our best-laid plans, for the sake of something we could neither have planned nor imagined in advance.

Such a leader will welcome the surprising work of the Holy Spirit to guide us in new directions and even interrupt our best-laid plans, for the sake of something we could neither have planned nor imagined in advance.

Our current theme is seeking the best for others. Your theology of influence shows that this requires viewing them as particular people with full lives, hopes, and disappointments. Otherwise, we risk treating people as objects and manipulating them for our benefit. Can you give some examples of how this has played out in your life or where you have seen this done well?

What comes first to mind is the work of promoting a book. I have never felt terribly comfortable with this aspect of writing. I often feel self-conscious because I don’t like anything that gets close to grandstanding or manipulation.

I’ve learned a great deal from other writers, like Andy Crouch, who’ve reminded me that because God has called me to write a book, I can derive a great deal of joy in the work of sharing my book with others, my eventual readers. I want others to buy it, because I sincerely believe that it can do good in the world. I can deploy every skill I have to influence folks to consider buying it, because I believe God might bless them in the reading of it.

I think of book promotion in the same way that a chef might bring me a plate of food at a restaurant. What the chef has made is meant to be, not just eaten, but also enjoyed. The chef says, “Taste it. It’s good, no?” One day, I might taste it and say, “Yes, it is good!” It’s a dish that gives me great pleasure to eat and I’ll happily pay to eat it again. But on another day or with another dish, I might say, “No thanks, that’s not for me.” In both cases, the chef has offered a dish that was made in love and meant to be shared with joy, and because the offer is a genuine one, rather than a manipulative one, I am free to say yes or no. That’s what Lewis Hyde might call a gift economy.

At the moment, I’m writing a book with Brazos Press on the calling of artists, To Set the World Aflame: How Artists Bear Witness to the Fullness of Creation, due out August 2026. I’d love to use whatever influence I have to help pastors and ministry leaders, not just artists and art-lovers, embrace the message of this book. I want this book to give them a vision for how artists and the work that they make are central to the world that God has made. But I wish also to be open-handed with the book. There’s a love for the making and a love for the other person that all come into play when using influence in a way that seeks the best for others.

There’s a love for the making and a love for the other person that all come into play when using influence in a way that seeks the best for others.

Your theology of influence is not only concerned with dehumanizing others, but also ourselves. I also hear a high value on discernment and reflection. Attending to how our actions impact others and ourselves. What are some helpful practices you have cultivated to recognize God’s presence in your work and the impact of your decisions on yourself and others?

By nature, I am wired to be future-oriented. I’m always thinking about the next thing or the next project I’d like to achieve, which means that it’s been very difficult for me to be present. That struggle isn’t good for my marriage; it’s not good for my children or for my friendships; and it’s not good for me, either.

After my wife challenged me to pay more careful attention to her rather than treating her as someone who was along for the ride of my exciting life, I have adopted three practices that have helped un-make certain ingrained habits in me. It’s not that I’m no longer future-oriented. But in adopting these practices, I’ve become more present-oriented and therefore more fully and truly who God has made me to be.

My first practice is to call it quits earlier in the day rather than to work up until the very last moment. If I work 8 to 5 with lunch somewhere in the mix, I try to call it quits around 4:45. This serves as a reminder that my worth doesn’t lie in my maximal utility. If there’s something I have to do and I work until 5, that’s fine, no problem. But in stopping my work early, I remind myself that I am not my work. My work matters because God has entrusted it to me, but I am not reducible to my abilities to be maximally (and exhaustively) productive in my work.

The second thing I do, with respect specifically to my teaching work, is that I don’t email after hours or on the weekends. I don’t want my family to experience me as always mentally absent, always showing up at the last moment, always dashing into my office in order to answer an email because it feels urgent or satisfying. It’s a practice that helps me be fully present to both my family and my students. From 8 to 5, Monday to Friday, I tell my students, I’m all yours. If you write me on Saturday morning, I will write you first thing Monday morning. In this online world, in which the pressure to be perpetually available is enormous and the irritation at another person being absent for any length of time is instinctual, it’s important for me to maintain my health as a human being by having these sharp boundaries. I’m not a machine; I’m a human being. It’s important, too, for me to model this to my students.

The third thing that I’ve done—and I’ve done this better and better over the years of my marriage—is that I always check in with my wife about a travel opportunity, and we decide together whether it is a good decision. Is it good for my calling? Is it good for us as a family? There’s always a speaking fee that I can earn, which is helpful, but if it’s not good for our family, then the answer is no. In the early years of our marriage, I chaffed against this seeming restriction on my autonomy. In time, however, it’s become one of the greatest sources of freedom for me personally and of goodness to my marriage.

How do you think influence changes across stages of life and leadership? Or to make it personal, how has your own sense of influence changed across some of these stages?

In my own life, I think of the first stage as the stage of information. It was the stage of my life that involved lots of energy and passion, building new things, accumulating information, and seeing everything that I did as a stepping stone to something else.

The second stage I’ve called the stage of knowledge. Things at this stage have gone slower, and I’ve become more-shrewd as well as more-deliberate at this stage. I’ve taken the information from the first stage and synthesized it into knowledge. At this stage of life, I begin to see that less truly is more.

This third stage, which I’m on the threshold of crossing, is about wisdom. It is a quieter stage. I am more at home in my own skin, more able to say no to things that are not primary to my calling, without fretting or feeling badly about it, because I have a clearer sense of what God has called me to do. It’s not that I’m no longer researching, writing, teaching, speaking, preaching, etc. I am, very much so. It’s that I’m doing these things with a more settled and non-anxious purposefulness. I know what God has not called me to do, and that’s a good thing.

About David Taylor
David Taylor is a theologian, author, speaker, priest, and director of initiatives in art and faith. Associate Professor of Theology & Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, he has lectured widely on the arts, from Thailand to South Africa. He has written for The Washington Post, Image Journal, Theology Today, Worship, Religion News Service, Christianity Today, and Books & Culture, among others. He lives on 21 acres east of Austin with his wife Phaedra, a visual artist and gardener, and his daughter Blythe and son Sebastian.