by Gary Taylor
gary@tayloredcomm.com

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I wish I could say I was happy with what we try to call the "tentmaking" movement.

What may be more startling is that I am even less happy with its so-called "tentmakers". And since I’ve been in a small club of its champions, I might as well confess I no longer am so excited over the ideas—including my own—pushed hard by the shapers of what tried so hard to be come an organized and effective movement. Judging from the state of tentmaking as viewed from my experience, we’ve promoted but not performed. Right port, right destination, wrong ship, and wrong set of the sail.

I am now a businessman. Some will still call me a tentmaker. But I now shun that description. Why? With fervent intentions to better serve the vision for tentmaking I’d nourished so long, I made a near-fatal choice in starting my own journey. I chose tentmakers and missionaries as shipmates in my effort to bring creative, fresh means of normalizing the incarnation of Jesus the Christ in the marketplaces of life. I wanted to move from whatever tentmaking was—and wasn’t—to something more enduring and practical and effective—something more biblical.

Too harsh? I am just now barely recovering—three years after launching my own business enterprise. I have lost thousands of dollar in real money along with multiple hundreds of hours fruitlessly trying to serve wonderful, sincere, visionary, but inept missionary tentmakers. This has more meaning if you remember that lost time is lost money and opportunity, especially to an entrepreneur who has mortgaged the ranch, literally

I am not whining, but I certainly am sobered of my naivete. I have nearly lost it all on a mistaken notion that those tentmaker adventurers and visionary spirits I had served alongside for so long would now be my kinsmen. My "Kingdom Company" was designed to provide legitimate, profitable platforms for creative access church planters and national Christian leaders needing economic support. Fellow supported missionaries would be my productive colleagues in a unique business venture right down their alley, partners in ministry and business goals.

What an idea. Serving by working along side those we intend to grasp the Gospel. Then, staying at their side in business and relationships until they embrace it in the ways that will multiply themselves naturally. It might look like the concentric circles true discipleship we’ve talked so much of and seen so little of.

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MEANS VERSUS ENDS

This conclusion will puzzle some who know I have put virtually my life’s blood for 14 years to help shape the "tentmaking" cause. Others who know my iconoclastic and independent nature will find this conviction no surprise. I am sorry if some find my views a challenge, maybe an affront. But, if I yell loudly enough the emperor is without clothes, the reader will be provoked to sort more carefully through the biblical perspectives on how to most naturally give all he has—gifts and warts—to the Great Commission’s unreached component.

I have seen the issues from both sides. Most who read this article will be a ministry professional. I, too, I have been in supported ministry. For 14 of the 24 years most call "ministry," I have been working hard to help forge the unreached peoples paradigm through my special interest, creative access "tentmaking". I co-founded Frontiers and had field leadership posts for seven years. I was co-founder, chairman, and administrative manager at various stages in the US Association of Tentmakers (now, Intent). Today, my own creative access facilitating ministry, Strategic Ventures Network, is in its ninth year.

Now I see things differently. I no longer identify myself as a missionary or a tentmaker. I even fuss over describing myself as in "ministry". Our Christian traditions and current teachings assign it a truly "holier-than-thou" halo not worn by mere laymen whose main ministry is through ministry-enabling checkbooks.

It is at least interesting that I write this in Rome. With my wife, I am enroute to GCOWE ‘97 in Pretoria. I will participate from the Business Executive Track, not a mission leaders' forum. We will have been in South Africa and Zimbabwe for two weeks prior to GCOWE to attend to the most productive of my agents in the hotel/tourism telecommunications system developed by my company. Neither of these agents is a tentmaker. One is a struggling believer, the other, with his wife, a searching pagan.

From my business platform, I’ve discovered an irony. I now see myself a long measure more effective in touching the unreached and the common, everyday lost than in an of my missions management years. To be catchy but accurate, I could say I have moved from tenttalking to actual tentmaking. However, it proved nearly fatal to my business that I began it using as my field agents missionaries who embraced a tent-illusion.

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Maybe I should explain.

If you have ever put all you have on the line, maybe in sports, in ministry, in business, you know the feeling of others not carrying their weight. The sinking feeling is offset by the grit to plunge on toward the goal anyhow, alone and with a revised plan. In two years of establishing a new telecommunications protocol for the hotel and tourism industry worldwide, I lunged with gusto to the thought that in virtually any country expats could be given a platforms of creative access and national Christian leaders would have income for family and service.

So I made those searching for creative access my highest priority. This Kingdom company had as cornerstones expanding the Kingdom of God, to introduce Christ the Savior among the unreached, to touch for Christ all fellow strugglers, and to be a model of godly business virtue for its sake alone. Wouldn’t you think God’s nobles on the frontiers would seize the moment? I did. But "seize," is a verb from another culture. "Receive" is more like it. I found few—but I did find them—who could change the pattern, who could lean into a different and harder plow on new ground. Let’s face it…I found few in the missions pipeline who could work in the normal secular sense of the term. It seemed very few cues remained from pre-missionary work life to guide them into producing for their living and witnessing for their calling.

Here’s the score. I flew to 14 countries, trained over 100 (mostly) ministry enthusiasts, both professional and lay. After expected attrition, I was quick to thrill with others that we had 18 tentmakers and nine nationals with a heart for ministry among the 39 certified agents making the first cut. Not a full year later, and several more thousand dollars and untold email and phone hours later we are making a success of the business.

Our "successes" in ministry are forming a thrilling pattern, but we’d overplay it to suggest we’re shaking the earth. But both these successes are without most of those typically hailed in our churches as "ministry" types. My company’s strategy took a big turn when we counted those who were serious about energetically marketing our product, following policy, meeting performance and even dress standards. For the whole wide planet, our productive agents, our Prime Team, number 11. I two "tentmakers" among them. I’ve a Special Team of part-time and other-focused guys I am willing, even enthused, to support (Kuwait, Saudi, India, Bahrain) because their visa are based on our their rep status with the company and because they are performing, however minimally contributing to the company’s "other" main goal, profitability. Others are in the wings...but their spurs on either team will be hard to earn.

Less frontier missiologically, I see my marketplace as fruitful in unexpected ways. I leave Rome with an old fashion "praise the Lord," seeing our country coordinator, a mature Sicilian owning two restaurants and loving Jesus. He waves us off at the departure lounge with two non-believers for which he has plans…they all need to feed their families since they are not on ministry support, and Giovanni wants to see his compadres come to Christ.

There is the Eastie, a former East German Communist army major, now a Taylor-made capitalist. He just today faxed in his first hotel chain agreement. He is the one that was with me weeks ago near Poland when I got word of my Father’s death. He consoled me. And he reminded me that we hadn’t finished the promised talk about God. If my winning, discipline, and mentoring goes right he will not become a "minister" or "missionary" but earning a living the capitalist entrepreneurial way with an urgency to share with others why and how God saved him.

In South Africa, marketplacing the Gospel has to wrap further around my representative before I can rejoice too much. But I have just found that pattern again. His business partner identified himself as is a believer in response to my soft email evangelism. Responsible for our most prosperous string of hotels by far, it seems the former hotel general manager's request for prayer may be springing from deeper than his hunger for more success in this launching our services. Bringing Carolyn on this trip is not accidental; it’s part of the business perspective that to be most profitable and have the most effect for Christ, we bond as a family where we can.

Among our representatives who have caught the vision for serious profitable business as the most defensible explanation for presence in a restricted access country is one church planter in North Africa. He performs professionally and acts credibly. He uses our business, professional memberships, and his forgivable search for a good golf partners as hooks to Gospel hearings in his rich hotel marketplace full of barren souls.

You can see the reason I startled a friend. I stated that, given a standard, a well-qualified seminary-trained missionary and a crusty but godly man with a vision and real performance-based work experience, I’d race toward the latter whether in my business or in my role as a sometime counselor in church-planting. It’s the marketplace thing again.

I am neither the only nor first corporate mission enterprise. The costly experiments of Gary Ginter encouraged me. The inspirational, instructive and almost-reproducible model of Dwight Nordstrom gave me hope. I moved further into business and I ran across dozens more of non-Western men and women of faith producing various effective models of naturally—even "strategically"—doing the Gospel in their marketplaces. Most of them didn’t know that the organized West had spent uncountable hours and dollars creating a name to go by, however curious and impossible "tentmaking" is to explain from English.

That frustration resulted in a life-changing discovery. I did a fresh survey of how God communicated his will and his Good News to mankind. It unearthed neither the word nor the pattern of "tentmaking". I did find some remarkable personalities who, at the time, were known by a wide variety of trades and professions. Today’s Bible readers know them as the Fathers and Saints of the Faith. Not a TESL instructor, an extended "tourist," a 10-year "student," a "consultant" or a bootstrap "importer-exporter was found among them.

I did find respected men and women who lived for God and stood tall before mankind. While not of their rank, I decided to take up a position alongside Abraham the landowner, Daniel the statesman, Peter the fisherman, the Carpenter, the seller of purple, and Paul the Pharisee/church planter and, yes, occasional repairer of tents.

A refreshing air has settled on my quest to serve Him with my best and His gifts. I have found in them new companions to lighten the frustration and give me hope that my efforts can make a difference in the terribly vast world of unreached souls Jesus died for. I have begun following their threads throughout Scripture. I have restated my own call to service as that of taking the Great New of salvation to the lost through the marketplace. That covers a lot of ground. And it changes what I now do for 18 hours a day but still penetrating barriers to the lost and saving the ranch.

While I may not change many minds, especially those just catching on to this "new" term, "tentmaking" is convenient as a general reference, though it is harmfully imprecise and doesn’t provide us the overarching consistency of what I now enjoy calling "marketplacing the Gospel".

Framing my sense of evangelism and discipleship for the unreached in a marketplace context also moves me to new soul-searching territory. Trying to be effective for the Gospel outside the normally accepted structures for "ministry" requires a new tough look at life’s issues faced by most in the workplace. Production quotas, sales volume, pieces delivered, quality control, professional ethics competitive edge, a testimony of fairness to employees, suppliers, and competitors seldom rule the day for the professional in a frontier missions ministry or even their home offices.

So, is my "beef" only a matter of rephrasing the thinking patterns of evangelicalism? No! It’s time to step back and look to yet another "new paradigm" as the operative reference.

The current one came to us quite normally in the course of Protestant history laced with hierarchical Catholic roots. The church and its leaders wore collars up to their elevated pulpits. The community assigned serious churchmen halos. Even after the uniform changed, the bifurcation of clergy and lay remains, often subtly while informal worship leaders/pastors try hard to elevate the layman as the heart, soul, and hands of the church. Sure, the soil is more fertile but in the developed West it has not yet warmed enough to sprout much.

Pioneer mission efforts seeking fresh inroads and fresh partners at home suffer the most because the very conservative nature of most fervent world evangelization supporters is slow to shift loyalties, let alone serious consideration, from anything off the "successful" traditions of clergy-based missions. With very limited and slow-moving exceptions, the scene in denominations buried in years of their own sub-culture makes this a U-turn happening to the near-blind in the dark.

A Baptist layman may witness like crazy with the electronic Gospel in an evangelistic phone card. In missions he gives heart-rich but uncritically the 95+% who minister wonderfully to the Christianized and the reached.

The new paradigm must be the old one. We world-changers must be more like the ones who changed it first, those Abraham’s and his seed and, later the trade route evangelists that saturated the first century’s citizens with hope and peace the Romans could not bring them. It’s time to return to preparing our young people early in the church cycle of teaching to think like lifelong professional diplomats like Daniel’s and medical Matthew’s, and weathered Peters and the working stiff of Scottish revivals, and the craftsmen/industrialist/pioneer Moravians.

It’s time to channel pre-first career youth and second-career professionals into a pipeline of the world-changers who see winning the world as their part of a short "life which will soon be passed," knowing, "What’s done for Christ will last." Urge them into thinking "strategically" how their gifts, interests, and skills will take them to those where they can serve best using those God-shaped skills for those who need them most. Those skills ought to be useful, marketable, transferable marketplace skills. Oh, "ministry"? Sure, but always in the context of what we all do naturally as a life of faith, not of taking up pulpits and collars to establish contact. And the context of their learning, like the execution of their vision, must be nursed in the bosom of the classic call of Christ’s Church "serve and to save."

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Before I try to change the entire structure of the Church from Sunday school to mission, let me return to my beginning.

I am unhappy with the way "tentmaking" has gone. I was disappointed in the general state of missions before that and wanted to do something about it, thus my stint as a tentmaker activist. But the idea went the wrong way. It settled over the pews as a fiscal concept, more often rescuing the church’s quandary over how to finance expanding and more costly missions without raising much more money. And it became a popular but very unrealistic alternative to those wanting to go but not ask others to help or even send them.

Let’s change our thinking. To preserve the core vision that sprung tentmaking as a term, we missions visionaries and doers must force the strategic issues. Doing what Paul did, earning a living because the church couldn’t/wouldn’t support him or even of partial self-supporting our "ministry" is not the strategic point. That’s logistics. The net strategy must be: "How do we do the Gospel best in such and such a culture?" The answer is not, figure out how to afford to get up close to people until they get the Gospel. But it is ours to figure how can we best connect with them with the Gospel and grow them in the faith.

I say that is best done in the marketplace. This is the place of convergence. It’s the natural place where the yet-not-reached people you are called to are not yet in the church. And you won’t find them in the synagogues, temples, and mosques.

The woman at the well was doing her job and Jesus chanced by. The shepherds were working in the hills. The big fisherman was deep in the tough toil working his fishing boat. Even Nicodemus left holy ground to seek Jesus out.

God intersects our dysfunctional lives outside the temples. The convergence zone for his second millenium followers will still be where men and women spend their time and expend their energies, the workplace. The new paradigm figures out first what is needed in the culture to establish a "normal" life of living faith; not artificial, not transplanted, not always dodging the ultimate question, "Why are you here, really?" I say its side by side, the way Moravian craftsmen did it.

I say its skilled businessmen, professionals, teachers, even skilled teacher-laborers deciding to locate their factory, their (true, professional-based) consulting, teaching, where it makes the most sense…among the most lost. Some could even dare to deliberately (strategically) build a whole new enterprise by developing products and services that will span cultures and accommodate broad sectors of "ministry" goals. We need those willing to dare, to risk it all, and to lean as far into the problem as God will enable them.

I say it’s not "missionaries" to the unreached and inaccessible frontiers of the Gospel, or even missionaries in wolves clothing (extemporaneous entrepreneurs). I say it is those same "called" men and women thrusting the might of their passion for the "classic" mission call, not just the traditional one. Go "where no man has gone" and do it the way it has not been done if you must.

Any such "new" paradigms will falter for their newness until it becomes a movement. It has to start somewhere. I believe "tentmaking" as a concept started and failed for the right reasons. But it did finally get the attention of the church’s "everyman" and even got mission societies doing some new things, mostly on the side and quietly. To escalate to a movement, it has to come from the Father. It already did. We got diverted. Let’s take the spirit which catapulted many into at least considering a life of on-field pioneer ministry and revisit its biblical base. Let’s all take up our position alongside the fathers of our Faith…none of whom received housing allowances and long furloughs. Only one of them repaired tents.

Gary Taylor is president of Taylored Communications, International. TCI is a Kingdom company whose telecommunications products and services in the hotel and travel industry are designed specifically to enable serious marketing professionals a platform for business based access to unreached peoples. Gary was a co-founder of Frontiers, Inc. and the US Association of Tentmakers. He founded and still manages a creative access facilitating ministry, Strategic Ventures Network. He lives with his wife Carolyn on a small cattle ranch in the Rocky Mountains near Colorado Springs, Colorado. Gary's e mail is gary@tayloredcomm.com if you would like to respond to him.

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