A few years ago, a Christian decided to do missionary work in a restricted-access country as a "tentmaker." However, authorities soon kicked him out after the government demanded evidence that he was actually engaging in the business specified on his visa. Since he viewed the job merely as his ticket into the country, he had no such evidence.

Later, this missionary returned to set up a legitimate small enterprise. But he also continued to receive money from churches and individuals as his primary means of support. A suspicious colleague in the country discovered that the Christian was really a missionary, thus generating even more resistance to him and his message.'

"Magic bullet" misfires

Tentmaking, or doing missionary ministry while working in a nonreligious occupation, has become increasingly popular among Western missions agencies and churches. Self-supporting tentmakers, taking as their model the tentmaking apostle Paul in Acts 18:3, are said to be able to enter restricted access countries closed to traditional missionaries in the Muslim world and elsewhere. At the same time, they have been touted as able to bypass the difficult, time-consuming, and uncertain process of raising financial support from reluctant or overcommitted churches and individuals.

Too often in recent years, however, this missions "magic bullet" has misfired, sometimes hitting devoted supporters of the approach squarely in the foot. Between the boldface letters of hype, increasing numbers of astute observers in churches and missions agencies have become aware of tentmakers overseas wracked with guilt because of their double identity, or sent home broken and defeated thanks to a lack of training in spiritual or cross-cultural ministry, or an inability to balance the demands of their secular job with their spiritual ministry.

New maturity

Today the movement is gaining a new maturity that promises to allow it to fulfill some of its promises and complement the older, more established missions movement. "Ten years ago, tentmaking was a novelty," stated Ted Yamamori, president of Food for the Hungry, a relief and development agency, and a coordinator of the Tentmaker Track at the international Lausanne II missions congress in Manila in 1989. "Nowadays more people are talking about tentmaking. It's more organized, and networking is going on worldwide." Indeed, in March 1994, 70 strategists from 17 nations met in the northern Thailand city of Chiang Mai to form the Tentmakers International Exchange (TIE), which had been planned since Lausanne II.

"There is a strong and growing interest in tentmaking," said .; William Taylor, who heads the Missions Commission of the World Evangelical Fellowship, an international umbrella organization representing over 150 national evangelical groups. "The ...' most common version in the West is the engineer or teacher serving in a restricted access country. This variety is seen in Asia particularly, less so in Africa and Latin America. But another category is the Filipino contract worker, and there are about 500,000 of these working in other countries. The Philippine Missionary Association has set the goal to train 2,000 evangelical contract workers as conscious tentmaking missionaries. This is a truly strategic and brave force that is particularly impacting; the tough Muslim Arab nations."'

Christians from around the world are sticking their necks out in tentmaking roles. While employed by the National Conservatory of Music in Tetuan, Morocco, Salvadoran violinist and orchestra conductor Gilberto Orellana saw 14 Moroccan Muslims receive Christ during the two and a half years he and his family were in the "closed" North African state. Authorities eventually jailed Orellana, convicted him of proselytizing, and sentenced him to a year in prison before expelling him from the country.

Kingdom professionals

Perhaps responding to the ethical quandaries faced by tentmakers who use the strategy merely as a means to enter otherwise closed countries, leaders of the US member of the TIE network, called Intent, advocate a broader understanding of the tentmaker role. Intent (formerly the US Association of Tentmakers) is a network of about 50 agencies and 100 to 120 individuals. Gary Ginter, a member of Intent's board, prefers the term "kingdom professional" to "tentmaker."

"We feel that tentmaking has come to be thought of primarily as a financial strategy, and we don't think that it is," Ginter said. "The issue is much more one of the people of God using the gifts of God . . . for the works of God. Tentmaking, properly understood, in our mind, is the marketplace ministry of effective Christians in cross-cultural contexts. And to the extent you move away from that, you begin to tread on thin ice."

Mobilization efforts

Intent organizes conferences to spread its message and enhance the networking of tentmaker-minded mission leaders, churches, and strategists. "Within the next 10 or 15 years, the greatest percentage of people will be going out (as missionaries) in this way," asserted Carol Davis of Intent. "But there are very few agencies that are really open. Most of them have tried it and feel it doesn't work."

WEC International's Jim Raymo is one mission executive who raises questions. Raymo, who wrote the 1997 book Marching to a Different Drummer, shared some of his concerns in an article in Evangelical Missions Quarterly. "Many unreached areas of the world cannot accommodate tentmakers, and tentmakers often have little time and energy to do evangelism and church planting anyway," he said.'

Actually, there are no comprehensive statistics showing how many tentmakers exist, not to mention success or failure rates. Universal agreement on the precise definition of tentmaking is elusive, as each group nurtures its favorite nuances. Nevertheless, interest in tentmaking by US Protestant agencies, although minor when compared to the traditional supportraising missionary, continues to grow. Yamamori, author of the 1993 book on the need for humanitarian tentmakers, Penetrating Missions' Final Frontiers, says the recent interest in the 10/40 Window "has really accentuated the need for tentmaking."

According to the Mission Handbook, the number of US tentmakers has increased from 1,040 in 1992 to 3,220 in 1999. By contrast, the number of traditional cross-cultural missionaries (short- and long-term) declined from 50,550 to about 43,000 over the same period. While the relatively few agencies that use tentmaking tend to view it as a supplemental rather than a primary strategy, openness to working with organizations such as Intent is on the rise.

"Frankly, as an organization, we keep trying to say, `What's our niche?"' said Dave Brown of The Evangelical Alliance.. Mission (Wheaton, Illinois). "I think we're going to have to. increasingly say, `How can we partner? How can we set up these: networks and work together?"'

Skeletons in the desert

Brown added that many in the missions community still view,", tentmaking as "a financial ploy of people who don't have the guts to do deputation." They are also rightly concerned, he said, with "the skeletons lying out in the desert of people who have gone out there and they didn't know what they were doing and they weren't connected with anybody."

Some of the strongest interest in the strategy comes from churches looking to unleash their laity for world missions in cost-effective and creative ways. To help them avoid some of the common pitfalls, in 1993 the World Evangelical Fellowship published a manual (since updated) for churches with tentmaking candidates, Working Your Way to the Nations: A Guide to Effective Tentmaking.

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