Tentmaking is as old as Acts 18, but somehow it remains a foreign concept to most evangelicals. Here is a video from the International Mission Board that is worth four minutes of your time. Nothing fancy or flashy here. Just a simple call and a transferable skill to a different marketplace. Could such stewardship of vocation and disciple making become the expectation, whether in Spain or the United States?
Pastors, let’s cast such a vision to our people that they may work their way to the nations. If we continue teaching the traditional model as the expectation or the real way to go to the field, then most of our people will continue assuming their vocations have no use in missions. They will continue believing if they are to go, then they must quit work, get a seminary degree (sometimes), raise financial support (unless supported by an agency), embrace the occupation and title of missionary, and come home every few years to raise additional financial support.
Why can’t we challenge parents to raise their children with a tentmaker’s DNA? Why not encourage and expect college students to get marketable degrees and obtain marketable skills?
Why should the traditional model–a good model to continue for the few–be our default when we could establish a new expectation to steward the many?
More than a job from IMB on Vimeo.
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Thanks JD. There is a disconnect in our society between’secular’ and ‘spiritual’ that is hard to overcome – tentmaking is so unusual to our culture that we can’t even fathom how we could be part of missions, without becoming as you say a ‘paid missionary’.
beautiful. and common sense!
as a church planter with an organization using the “traditional” model, a frustration is not only the churches and pastors who don’t get this vision of tentmaking, but also the organizations that don’t get it, can’t accommodate it, and thus won’t allow it. most missionaries are desperately looking for teammates but assume the only suitable teammates are those willing to raise 100% support.
meanwhile, i imagine tentmakers could benefit from the support, training, experience, and some of the infrastructure that organizations offer. couldn’t we find a way to work side by side?
You are correct, Drewe. It is hard to overcome.
Thanks, Nathan. Yes, we must find a way to work side-by-side.
About five years ago our mission, Crossworld decided that it was time to invite people working in the marketplace into missions, to go as believers in their vocation. We are totally in agreement! Our children have said they would not want to go as missionaries the traditional way. If we were starting out, we wouldn’t go the traditional way either, for exactly the reasons given in the video.
Thanks.
Thanks for sharing, Karen. Good words.