Barnabas Keynote: Nicholas Harris
By Nicholas Harris, Head of School for Berean Christian High School, and former NFL Punter
Managing Partner Brian Dowd introduced Nick Harris - “Nick actually has twelve years of experience punting in the NFL with the Lions, Jaguars, and Bengals. Before that, he was an All-American at Cal. Now Nick has his Master of Divinity, he’s the Head of School at Berean Christian High School in Walnut Creek, and not only that, Nick is a Barnabas partner in the Bay Area. Nick is going to give us the win.”
Good morning, everyone!
As Brian said, I’m a member of Barnabas Bay Area, and it’s been about two years now. Whenever that group gets together quarterly, I always walk into the room and realize that God has His people everywhere. I call Barnabas ‘the meeting of the Christian minds.’ Where else, other than a Christian high school, do Christians from various churches and different cities get together on a Tuesday morning to use their minds and their experience to help local ministries and international ministries? When I come into a room like this, I realize God has His people everywhere, in different businesses, different cities, and different neighborhoods. We’re all in disguise in our careers, but we’re Christians. We’re there to be salt and light for the Lord, rubbing shoulders with people who don’t know Him and making a difference for the Kingdom of God.
Mark Twain once said, ‘If you can make your vocation a vacation, you’ll never work a day in your life.’ If there’s something you love waking up in the morning to go and do, it never really feels like work. I’ve had two vocation-vacations in my life. The first one was in an NFL locker room.
The Biggest Loser
As Brian said, I played for the Bengals, the Detroit Lions, and the Jaguars. Most of my career was in Detroit. My claim to fame is actually a claim to shame, because it turns out that in twelve years I was one of the biggest losers in the history of the NFL. There’s a website called StatMuse that tracks every imaginable sports statistic. A buddy of mine showed it to me and said, ‘You know, if you search for players who played one hundred or more NFL games and had the lowest winning percentage, you come up number thirteen.’ Well, a hundred games is only six or seven years in the league, and I played for twelve. So I said, ‘What if you search players who played ten or more seasons?’ At that point, I came up number three.
The guy in front of me was a teammate of mine named James Hall, and he was a big loser too. Number two was Archie Manning before he had two Hall of Fame sons. Number three was yours truly with a twenty-six percent winning percentage. I was also on the 2008 Detroit Lions team that became the first team in NFL history not to win a single game. So yes, statistically, I lost a lot of football games.
But it was still a blast, because I realized God has His people everywhere, even in NFL locker rooms. An NFL locker room gives you a front-row seat to one of the most interesting life experiments you could ever watch. You give a twenty-one- or twenty-two-year-old young man fame and fortune overnight, and then you watch what happens. Sometimes it goes okay. Many times those guys crash and burn. There’s a philosopher who once said that the loneliest moment in life is when you achieve what you thought would deliver the ultimate, and it lets you down. I’m here to tell you that the NFL lets a lot of young men down. They get everything they dreamed of, and it’s still not enough.
I saw my career on the field as losing a lot of games, but off the field, I got to be there when those guys hit rock bottom. I got to share the Gospel and point them to the One who could actually fill the giant hole in their lives. What a blast that was.
Life After The Locker Room
Toward the end of my career, everybody knew it was probably my last year. My pastor, who was a very wise man, gave me a mentor named John Vanbiesbrouck. John was a Hall of Fame NHL goalie who had transitioned from hockey into business. John had me read a book called Halftime. Raise your hand if you’ve read that book. Look around the room. They all have gray hair or they’re bald. I think I was the youngest guy ever to read it.
The premise of the book is that there comes a point in life where you’ve achieved success. You’ve built a career, raised a family, launched kids into the world, and then something shifts. You start asking how your life can become significant. And for Christians, we understand significance as significance for the Kingdom of God.
At the end of the book, there was an inventory: What do you know? What do you love? What are your talents, skills, and abilities? How could you repurpose them into a second career for significance? So there I was at the end of my NFL career asking myself those questions. What do I know? I know football. I love sports. I love coaching. I love theology. I love the Word of God. There used to be a place called Barnes & Noble, and whenever I walked in there, I went straight to the theology section. So I put all those things together, and at the end of the exercise I wrote: ‘Teach and coach at a Christian high school.’
Then I closed the book, put it on the shelf, and went to seminary. Those four years were some of the richest years of my life. I wish every Christian could go to seminary, not necessarily to become a pastor, but simply to learn about God and immerse themselves in His Word.
Toward the end of seminary, I started asking the Lord what He wanted me to do next. One day I looked up at the shelf, saw that old copy of Halftime, pulled it down, opened it up to the back page, and saw what I had written years earlier: ‘Teach and coach at a Christian high school.’ At that point I thought, ‘Lord, I think You’re talking to me.’
I Didn’t Have To Look Very Far
As it turns out, there was a Christian high school five blocks from my house: Berean Christian High School. I used to jog past it all the time. I went online and noticed they even had another former NFL player coaching football there, so I walked into the school and applied to become a substitute teacher. The day I turned in my application, a Bible teacher resigned. The opening was for church history.
The principal looked at me and basically said, ‘You have a Master of Divinity, you want to coach football, and you want to teach Bible. What just happened here?’ I immediately said yes. I went into that classroom and spent an entire semester teaching church history to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, and I absolutely fell in love with it. I went home and told my wife, ‘This is what I’m going to do for the next thirty years. This is what God has called me to do.’
A few years later, the principal walked into my room and said, ‘I’m retiring next year. Since the day you walked into this school, I knew you were supposed to be the next Head of School.’ Today I’m entering year eight as Head of School at Berean.
Recently, we joined the Walnut Creek Chamber of Commerce, and I attended a new members event where everyone gave a thirty-second introduction about their organization. I stood up and said, ‘My name is Nick Harris, and I serve as the Head of School at Berean Christian High School, a school that’s been in Walnut Creek for fifty-seven years. I think it’s safe to say we are the only member of the Chamber of Commerce that gets excited about losing twenty-five percent of our customers every year.’
It took them a second. But we don’t call them customers. We call them image bearers. And we get excited when they graduate because that’s why we exist: to help parents launch kids into the world for the glory of God.
Key Question: Who Is Going To Be Sitting In These Seats?
I want to ask you a question this morning: Who’s going to be sitting in these seats fifteen years from now? Twenty years from now? Who are going to be the Christian business leaders helping ministries, solving problems, and advancing the Kingdom after we’re gone? Because if we don’t do our jobs as parents, pastors, educators, and mentors, we are perpetually one generation away from Christianity disappearing in our area.
The world our kids are going into is radically different than the world we grew up in. Ten years ago, educational technology was a status symbol. Parents wanted schools with iPads and Chromebooks. Now it’s almost a status symbol to send your kids to a school without them because we know how destructive constant screens can be.
There was an article years ago where Steve Jobs was asked how much his own children loved the iPad. He said, ‘My kids don’t have one.’ He knew how addictive the technology could become.
And now we’ve entered the age of artificial intelligence. I remember the first time I used ChatGPT. I had it write a newsletter article to our school parents. At the bottom I added a note saying, ‘Everything above this paragraph was written by a robot.’ A few months later, one of our teachers accused a student of using ChatGPT to write an entire paper. Every day these tools get more advanced. It feels like we’ve opened Pandora’s box and we don’t know what’s coming next.
So at our school we’ve been asking a foundational question: What will human beings still need to know and be able to do no matter how much technology changes?
We call those things the Four Cs: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.
The Four C’s
Students must learn how to think deeply. They must learn how to communicate truth clearly and winsomely. They must know how to collaborate with others because God designed us for community. And they must become creative problem-solvers capable of addressing challenges we can’t even foresee yet.
But Christian education goes even deeper than that. There’s a hierarchy of learning. At the bottom is memorization: facts, figures, terms, definitions. At the top is synthesis: taking information from multiple sources and creating something new. But in Christian education, there’s something even beyond synthesis. It’s embodiment. You don’t just learn information. You become something because of it.
Romans 12 says we are transformed by the renewing of our minds. That’s what Christian education is ultimately about.
And honestly, when I look around this room at Barnabas gatherings, I realize we’re actually doing all four of those things together. We gather together to think critically about real problems. We communicate ideas. We collaborate across churches, businesses, and ministries. And together we creatively solve problems for the Kingdom of God.
That’s why I love Barnabas. It truly is the meeting of Christian minds. Thank you!
About The Author: Nicholas Harris
Nicholas Harris serves as the Head of School at Berean Christian High School in Walnut Creek, California. Before entering Christian education, he spent twelve seasons in the National Football League as a punter for the Cincinnati Bengals, Detroit Lions, and Jacksonville Jaguars. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, Harris was a consensus All-American and still holds NCAA records for career punting yardage and attempts.
After retiring from professional football, Harris turned his focus to ministry and education, earning a Master of Divinity and teaching Bible and theology before becoming Head of School in 2019. He is currently completing his Doctor of Ministry in Educational Leadership at Moody Bible Institute.
At Berean Christian, Harris leads a thriving academic and spiritual community devoted to developing lifelong followers of Jesus Christ. Drawing from both his NFL career and his work in Christian education, he speaks about excellence, leadership, and equipping the next generation of Christians to influence the world for Christ.