Tentmaking: A Misunderstood Missiological Method

1

Crucial Questions

When I was a boy, my mother read books to me. Lots of them. One of the books that I distinctly remember reading with her was called, Take Another Look . ¹ It was a children’s book full of optical illusions. For example, on one of the pages there was a simple drawing of a man’s head wearing a tall top hat along with the question asking if the hat was taller than its base was wide. At first glance the top hat did appear to be taller than its base was wide because it was an example of what is called the horizontal-vertical illusion first observed by Wilhelm Wundt in 1858. But I did not know that. I just knew that when I first looked at the hat, it looked taller than it did wide. It was an optical illusion, and all the other illusions in the book were designed to function in the same way. The images and lines that appeared on each successive page looked uneven, crooked, or of different lengths at first, but after another closer and more careful look the truth could be discovered.

Some illusions, like the top hat, were more difficult than others. And the book actually encouraged readers to use a ruler if they had any doubts about what they were seeing. Which I did. Of course, once I read through the book and had checked all of the illusions with a second look and a ruler, I knew the truth. I never again had to read the book and wonder if the top hat was taller than its base was wide, because I knew it was not. The two lengths were equal. I had used a ruler to measure and had confirmed that the two lengths were exactly the same.

There are some who have only taken a first look at tentmaking. Perhaps they remember reading somewhere in Acts that Paul made tents during his missionary journeys, but they cannot cite the biblical reference or remember where it was that he engaged in tentmaking. Or maybe they can cite Acts 18:3 and know that this was around the time Paul arrived in Corinth, but they have not given tentmaking any additional thought or reflection. It is an interesting detail, nothing more. The top hat looks taller than it is wide.

Then there are some who have taken another look at tentmaking. They may know their Bibles well and may have performed some in-depth study on Paul and his missionary methods. Some of these second-lookers possess advanced training and education in biblical studies and missiology. They have taken another look at tentmaking because they are interested in it professionally and want to understand why Paul made tents so they can learn from Paul’s example and help explain it to the church.

But tentmaking is like the top hat optical illusion. It requires a second look and a ruler—the ruler of Scripture—in order to see it correctly. The whole ruler. Not just Acts 18:3, but every passage and verse that touches on Paul’s tentmaking and his self-disclosed reasons for working in some of his ministry contexts but not others. You see, even among those who have taken another look at tentmaking and measured it with the ruler of Scripture, most still conclude that the top hat is taller than it is wide. They are not viewing tentmaking correctly. Maybe they are measuring the top hat diagonally, or attempting to find it’s area, I do not know. But for whatever reason, after all the second looks and measuring, the vast majority of the church remains unable to see tentmaking for what it really is.²

The first time I took a second look at tentmaking was several years ago. I found myself responding to God’s call and agreeing to be the lead pastor for a church plant that was enthusiastically supported by my denomination. I was given multiple evaluations and screening interviews, and was found to be an ideal candidate to lead a church plant. I was sent to our denominational church planting training, which lasted one week and took place in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In addition, I elected to take the Global Church Advancement church planting course in Orlando, Florida. A parent church was supplying the majority of the necessary financial support and our local denominational assembly was augmenting that support with several thousands of dollars. The Lord had provided and money was not an issue. I could move forward with the church plant unhindered by secular employment and give my full-time attention to God’s work. Working another job to support myself while planting a church, or tentmaking, never occurred to me.

Conflicting Messages

Before we had finalized our vision and mission statements and long before we held our first worship service I began to hear conflicting messages from various church planting authorities regarding secular employment and church planting. Denominational officials insisted that church planting was full-time work and it would be foolish to attempt to initiate a church plant without a combined salary and benefits package in place for the lead pastor. However, as I began taking another look, and as my reading and research on the topic of church planting deepened, I discovered that the literature was divided. Later in this book, we will examine several contemporary church planting authorities and their understanding of tentmaking in more detail. For now, it is enough to touch on a small sampling of the diverse opinions that I encountered.

One church planting author, Aubrey Malphurs, discouraged his readers from engaging in secular employment while planting a church. Malphurs writes that of all the possible funding sources for church planting, self-employment is the least preferable because it limits the time the planter can give to the new ministry.³ Malphurs’ view was the opinion that most closely corresponded to the advice I was hearing from my own denominational network.

Others were open to the idea of a church planting pastor engaging in bivocational ministry or tentmaking, and based their receptivity on financial reasons. C. Peter Wagner states, Frequently the founding pastor is bivocational or a tentmaker. This is one of the major ways of cutting the costs of new church development, and I highly recommend it.⁴

Some recommended working outside the church and listed both financial and practical reasons. Stuart Murray writes that not only can church plants be freed from the onerous financial commitment of supporting a full-time leader, but adds, Bivocational leadership is not just a cheap option. There are advantages both for the churches who employ them and for the leaders themselves.⁵ One of the advantages that Murray lists is that bivocational ministry makes it easier for churches to avoid the lure of clericalism.⁶ Murray explains, A bivocational leader can give enough time to the church to prevent overcommitment from other members, but not so much that participants become passengers.⁷

Still others insist on some type of secular work for church planting pastors, but clearly communicate that the decision should not in any way be determined by the church’s finances. Steve Sjogren and Rob Lewin write, You desperately need to get into the community. You need to work no matter what your financial backing looks like. We encourage you to work outside the church until your plant reaches two hundred in weekend attendance.⁸ Sjogren and Lewin’s support for bivocational work is rooted in the belief that church planters must engage in bivocational ministry in order to generate the right perceptions and understandings among unbelievers in the community as well as among church plant attendees. For example, Sjogren and Lewin propose, Taking an outside job creates an understanding in the church that you aren’t there as their free therapist. It also creates an environment in which really emotionally sick people won’t have you to lean on all the time, so they will find someone else.⁹

Yet another author believed that as long as there was a call to plant a church, support sources were relatively immaterial to the church planting endeavor. Ed Stetzer writes, A secular job can also supply funding for the church planter . . . Finances are not the determining factor in God’s will; God is the determining factor in God’s will. If God expresses a call, the planter must help make a way where there is no other way—by working at bivocational employment.¹⁰ If we were to adopt Stetzer’s understanding, bivocational ministry becomes a type of battering ram utilized by church planters who find it necessary to forcefully break through the gates of insufficient funds.

In retrospect, I can clearly see one commonality that all church planting voices shared regardless of their stance on whether or not pastors should work at a secular job while planting a church. No one considered the possibility that tentmaking is a church planting missiological method to be used purposefully and selectively based on the unique needs of each particular ministry context, as modeled for us in Scripture by Paul.

Cloud of Confusion

There seemed to be a dark gray cloud of confusion perpetually drifting over tentmaking that made it difficult, or rather impossible, for the church to see and agree on what tentmaking was and what to do with it. I began questioning why the church planting literature was so divided on this issue of secular employment and self-support for church planting pastors. I also found it peculiar that many of the church planting sources cited the Apostle Paul’s missionary methods as a template to be followed for contemporary church planting, but failed to include any guided discussion of self-support under the banner of apostolic missionary methods. Instead, when tentmaking was mentioned, it was largely the author’s opinion or experience that influenced what they wrote regarding how to properly utilize and apply tentmaking.

As we will see, and as outlandish as it may sound, many church planting authors completely ignore the topic of Paul’s self-support. When it is included in the church planting literature, authors will often acknowledge that Paul made tents to support himself, but then they stop referencing Paul for the remainder of the discussion. They fail to follow up and develop contemporary theories and practices for self-support within church planting ministry contexts based on how Paul chose to implement self-support as revealed to us in Scripture. Why is that?

It turns out that there are an embarrassing amount of questions generated by the conflicting and often bewildering voices within the corpus of church planting and tentmaking literature. But that is not the only challenge created by the confusing haze. Tentmaking also has to deal with the openly negative stereotypes that have become associated with this apostolic practice.

Tentmaking has to overcome the image it conjures up in the secular world and, to an increasing extent, the church. The phrase bivocational minister usually brings to mind an image of a retired or relatively uneducated pastor serving a church that is rural, small, dying, or all three. Perhaps someone with limited formal training, licensed by a local church but not ordained by a denomination that requires an MDiv degree, is working at a full-time non-ministry job while simultaneously serving a church that is limping along and cannot afford a real pastor.

Dennis Bickers, who is a bivocational minister himself, writes, The churches we lead are often smaller churches with few resources. Many of them have plateaued or are in decline. A large number of us serve with little or no formal theological training. Bivocational ministry is looked at by some as ‘second-class’ ministry performed by people who don’t have the gifts to serve a larger church.¹¹ Bickers certainly has painted a bleak and unappealing picture. Many seminary graduates may not even consider bivocational ministry because of this stigma. Positions that require some form of tentmaking are often viewed as consolation prizes for candidates who have been passed over by more desirable churches.

How did we get here?¹² If the Apostle Paul utilized tentmaking and self-support in his ministry, why do so many in the church treat it like some sort of malady to be avoided?

Yet tentmaking is not avoided everywhere. For the most part, it appears that tentmaking has been relegated to missionary practice in places other than the United States. For example, some missiologists have taken tentmaking seriously when working oversees in cross-cultural contexts and especially in closed- or limited-access countries.¹³ Consequently, tentmaking has been deemed acceptable, and in some cases preferred, within an overseas cross-cultural missionary placement but it is largely ignored in North American church planting contexts. Again, why is that? But even proponents of tentmaking as a missiological strategy to gain entrance into politically closed-off countries have their critics. Rundle and Steffen are two Christian mission-minded leaders, and they oppose using tentmaking as an entry tool into restricted nations. They state:

One model that has little to commend it is the missionary in disguise approach. This is one that uses a business merely as a cover for people who quite frankly have little interest in business except for its usefulness as an entry strategy into countries that are off-limits to traditional missionaries.¹⁴

Elsewhere they write, Why would people feel that they need to fake their way into a country? and, . . . many Christians now recognize that this ‘ends-justifying-the-means’ approach to ministry is dishonest and a poor witness.¹⁵

Thankfully, there has been a growing interest in the writings of Roland Allen. Allen was an Anglican priest who lived around the turn of the twentieth century and a staunch advocate for the use of all of Paul’s missionary methods, including tentmaking. Allen viewed Paul’s tentmaking as a crucial component of his overall missiological strategy, as well as a timeless biblically prescriptive method for contemporary missiology with theological underpinnings. Allen writes these comments regarding Paul’s tentmaking, The finance of St. Paul’s journeys is treated as an interesting detail of ancient history, not as though it had anything to do with his success as a preacher of the Gospel. St. Paul himself does not so treat it.¹⁶ Because Allen stands out as a pioneering thinker who sought to view and understand tentmaking and self-support through a thoroughly biblical lens, we will spend some time unpacking his writings in later chapters.

In the end, when I began to take another look, I discovered that there were several crucial questions surrounding tentmaking and bivocational ministry that demanded answers. If the church wants to sweep away the swirling clouds of confusion and look down on tentmaking through clear sunny skies, then these questions must be answered: Was Paul’s use of tentmaking during his missionary work intentional or pragmatic? Did he give any thought to it, or was it simply an expedient choice that he turned to when he needed money? Is tentmaking desirable for contemporary church plants, or is it a practice to be avoided when possible? Is it strategically and missiologically irrelevant? Should bivocational ministry be limited to contexts such as small rural dying churches or oversees missions? Is the relatively recent concept of Business as Mission really the same thing as biblical tentmaking? Are tentmaking and bivocational ministry synonymous? And perhaps the most important question of all, why is the church so resistive to following in the footsteps of arguably the greatest missionary of all time? Grab your ruler, because we are about to take another look at tentmaking.

1

. Carini, Take Another Look.

2. Rather than define tentmaking at this point in the book, I invite the reader to follow along as I build a biblical case for a correct understanding and definition of tentmaking. For those that want that information up front, you may jump ahead to chapter 12. However, I believe it will be much more satisfying to complete the journey from chapter 1 to chapter 11 before reading my definition. If you are completely unfamiliar with the concept of tentmaking, please understand that it does not refer to making literal tents. Typically, within the church, tentmaking is used to describe the practice of a minister or missionary who engages in some sort of secular employment in order to support themselves or augment their existing support while engaging in ministry. It is called tentmaking because, at times, Paul labored as a tentmaker (see Acts

18:3

) during his missionary journeys.

3

. Malphurs, Planting Growing Churches,

52

.

4

. Wagner, Church Planting,

72

.

5

. Murray, Church Planting,

224

.

6

. Murray, Church Planting, 224

.

7

. Murray, Church Planting,

224

–

25

.

8

. Sjogren and Lewin, Community of Kindness,

172

–

73

.

9

. Sjogren and Lewin, Community of Kindness,

173

.

10

. Stetzer, Planting Missional Churches,

226

. This is the exact same quote that appears in the

2016

edition of Planting Missional Churches. Stetzer and Im, Planting Missional Churches,

170

–

71

.

11

. Bickers, Bivocational Pastor,

8

.

12

. A limited review of tentmaking in church history will be covered in chapter

7

, and additional reasons for the church’s departure from apostolic practice will be offered in chapter

11

.

13

. For example, Ruth E. Siemens views Paul’s tentmaking, among other things, as, a complete pioneering strategy for hostile environments. Siemens, Vital Role,

129

.

14

. Rundle and Steffen, Great Commission Companies,

26

.

15

. Rundle and Steffen, Great Commission Companies,

26

–

27

.

16

. Allen, Missionary Methods,

49

.

2

A Purposeful Choice

In order to answer the crucial questions surrounding tentmaking, we will have to start at the beginning. That means we will have to do our best to explore the origins of Paul’s tentmaking. It also means that we will have to examine all of the commonly recognized methods of support available to first-century itinerant speakers. But most importantly, we will need to reach some conclusions about why Paul chose to support himself, or make tents, rather than accept payment in some ministry contexts, but not others.

Tentmaking Origins

Luke tells us that the Apostle Paul was a tentmaker, but he does not reveal when, where, or why Paul learned this trade.¹⁷ One belief is that Paul learned tentmaking when he was a student of Gamaliel as part of a rabbinic code that combined Torah study with a trade. Those who fall into this camp cite the Mishnah which states, Excellent is the study of the Law together with worldly occupation.¹⁸ There are additional rabbinic sayings that strongly discourage receiving wages or income from teaching the Torah and so appear to complement the argument that Paul was following rabbinic practice. For example, Hillel stated, He that makes worldly use of the crown shall perish.¹⁹ The suggestion that Paul made tents in order to avoid charging fees for preaching and teaching from the Bible because he wanted to honor Jewish customs is a popular one. But the idea of Paul allowing his life choices to be governed by rabbinical traditions and teachings seems unlikely. It is difficult to accept the idea of Paul honoring a Jewish custom when he so tenaciously argued against the spiritual usefulness of returning to Pharisaical traditions and works of the law. The book of Galatians comes to mind, as does Colossians 2:16–23. Furthermore, the NT records Paul uncompromisingly stating that teachers and preachers of the gospel should receive pay for their work.²⁰

In contrast to the popular Torah and trade theory, Ronald Hock argues that the ideal of combining Torah and a trade is difficult to establish much earlier than the middle of the second century AD, that is, long after Paul.²¹ Hock buttresses his statement with research indicating that the ideal of combining Torah and trade did not surface until 140–170 AD in response to the economic crises arising from the Jewish wars.²² There is some attestation of rabbis who worked during the period between 70 and 125 AD, but their work appears, states Hock, to have been more a consequence of their economic status than of their rabbinic self-understanding.²³ Hock concludes: To sum up, the widespread view that Paul first learned and practiced his trade of tentmaking while a student of Gamaliel and so in conformity with a rabbinic ideal turns out, on examination, to be difficult to maintain.²⁴

The most likely alternative to the anachronistic Torah and trade theory is that Paul learned tentmaking from his father. The practice of sons learning the trades of their fathers was widespread in both Jewish and Greco-Roman culture. Regarding first-century Jewish practice, Packer and Tenney state, It was also the father’s responsibility to teach his sons a trade or craft. For example, if the father was a potter, he taught that skill to his sons. One of the Jewish sages affirmed that ‘he who does not teach his son a useful trade is bringing him up to be a thief.’²⁵

F.F. Bruce flirts with the proposal that Paul’s Roman citizenship was linked to his family trade of tentmaking. We know from Acts 22:28 that Paul was a Roman citizen by birth. This meant that his father and family were already Roman citizens. In order to explain how a Jewish family from Tarsus had been granted Roman citizenship, Bruce writes:

Presumably Paul’s father, grandfather or even great-grandfather had rendered some outstanding service to the Roman cause. It has been suggested, for example, that a firm of tent-makers could have been very useful to a fighting proconsul.²⁶

Paul’s Support Choice Options

The practice of self-support was rare, but it was not something that Paul invented. Paul was a missionary, but his itinerant ministry of proclaiming the gospel and planting churches resembled, at least in terms of public speaking, the philosophers that also traveled from city to city in the first century. Many of these public speakers charged fees or lived under the patronage of a wealthy host; however, there is evidence that at least some of them supported themselves by working. Hock writes, Philosophers who worked to support themselves, even for short periods of time, were relatively few, with the Stoic Cleanthes, who worked as a gardener and a miller, the most frequently cited example.²⁷ The Cynic Dio Chrysostom labored as a gardener and at other unskilled jobs.²⁸ Cleanthes lived from approximately 330 to 230 BC, suggesting that self-supporting public speakers had been around for several hundred years before Paul. Dio Chrysostom lived from approximately 40 to 120 AD and can be considered a contemporary of Paul. As a result, it can be concluded that, although not widespread, there were other public and professional speakers who practiced self-support by working.

Paul’s contemporary philosophers usually chose other methods of obtaining wages and provisions before they turned to self-support. There were four primary means professional orators and philosophers used to secure funding and financial support.²⁹ The first means of support for itinerant philosophers was to charge fees:

The practice of charging fees...was popularized by Sophists, with Protagoras of Abdera credited with taking the lead and with many other sophists—Gorgias, Hippias, Prodicus, Antiphon, Euthydemus, Evenus, and Isocrates—following suit. Fees were charged either by the lecture or for a course of study, and given the high fees charged by many Sophists—one-hundred minas for a course of study under Protagoras and Gorgias—we should not be surprised that many Sophists became wealthy, with Protagoras’ and Gorgias’ wealth becoming proverbial.³⁰

Another method of support for itinerant philosophers and other public speakers was to live off of a wealthy patron. Hock writes:

Entering a household . . . usually involved living in the patron’s house, attending his banquets, and traveling with him. The responsibility of the philosopher, however, was to provide instruction for his patron’s son(s), or simply to give counsel and so serve as the patron’s resident intellectual. In either case, the philosopher, as part of a household, received a salary . . . or gifts from his patron.³¹

The third method of support that first-century philosophers, and ostensibly Paul, could have turned to was begging. Hock states, Never as popular as charging fees or entering a household, begging was in fact closely identified with Cynic philosophers.³²

The fourth and final option was working. Out of all of the above-mentioned options, working was viewed as the least favorable choice. Hock comments: Philosophers clearly preferred charging fees or entering a household. Begging appealed only to homeless and shameless Cynics. Working was the least popular option.³³

Paul did accept support from some churches and fellow believers as we will see later, yet we know from the NT that Paul