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Tentmaking—doing missionary ministry while working in a "nonreligious" occupation—has been billed as the magic bullet of Western missions in the past decade. Self-supporting tentmakers, taking a cue from the tentmaking apostle Paul (Acts 18:3), could enter countries closed to traditional missionaries, particularly in the Muslim world. At the same time, they could bypass the difficult, time-consuming, and uncertain process of raising financial support from reluctant or overcommitted churches and individuals.

Yet too often the magic bullet has misfired, sometimes hitting devoted supporters of the approach squarely in the foot. Some tentmakers have been wracked with guilt because of their double identity, or sent home broken and defeated because of 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.

Despite the setbacks, the movement is gaining a maturity that promises to enhance its effectiveness and allow tentmaking to fulfill some of its promises and complement the older, more established missions movement.

"Ten years ago, tentmaking was a novelty," says Ted Yamamori, president of Food for the Hungry, a relief-and-development agency in Scottsdale, Arizona. "Nowadays it's more organized, and networking is going on worldwide."

Last year, 70 strategists from 17 nations met in Thailand to form the Tentmakers International Exchange (TIE), which had been planned since the Lausanne II missions conference in Manila in 1989.

"There is a strong and growing interest in tentmaking," says William Taylor of Austin, Texas, head of the missions commission of World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF), an international umbrella organization representing national evangelical groups. "The most common version in the West is the engineer or teacher serving in a restricted—access country."

The Filipino Missionary Association is using another model: training 2,000 evangelical contract workers as tentmaking missionaries. "This is a truly strategic and brave force that is particularly impacting the Muslim Arab nations," Taylor says.

LIVING WITH RISKS: Christians are taking risks in tentmaking roles. While employed for two and a half years by the National Conservatory of Music in Tetuan, Morocco, Salvadoran orchestra conductor Gilberto Orellana helped convert 14 Moroccan Muslims to Christ. Then Orellana was jailed, convicted of proselytizing, and sentenced to a year in prison before being expelled in January.

In 1993, a New Zealander and three Americans working for an export-management company—and serving as tentmakers for the Mesa, Arizona-based Frontiers—were imprisoned in Cairo and later deported for proselytizing.

Perhaps responding to the ethical quandaries of tentmakers who use the strategy merely as a means to enter otherwise closed countries, leaders of Intent, composed of 50 U.S. agencies in the tie network, advocate a broader understanding of the tentmaker role. Gary Ginter, a member of Intent's board, prefers the term "kingdom professional" to "tentmaker."

"Tentmaking has come to be thought of primarily as a financial strategy, and we don't think that it is," Ginter says. "The issue is much more one of the people of God using the gifts of God … for the works of God."

Intent, formerly the U.S. Association of Tentmakers, based in Colorado Springs, has organized several conferences to spread its message and enhance the networking of tentmaker-minded mission leaders, churches, and strategists.

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November 13 1995, Vol. 39, No. 13