Was Tentmaking a Key Factor in Paul’s Phenomenal Missions Success?

While doing some research yesterday, I came across a remarkable essay: “The Vital Role of Tentmaking in Paul’s Mission Strategy.”

This 1997 article was written by Ruth E. Siemens, a former missionary to Latin America and Europe and the founder of Global Opportunities (GO), which promotes tentmaking as a missions strategy.

Many Christians know that the Apostle Paul knew the trade of tentmaking, and that while traveling through Asia Minor and Europe as a missionary, he supplemented his ministry income by plying his trade. But Siemens offers a fascinating and provocative analysis in which she says that tentmaking was a crucial element of Paul’s missions strategy.

Siemens argues that tentmaking was not just a “fall back” source of income for Paul, but rather, that Paul earned almost all of his income from his secular trade. She points to evidence of tentmaking during all three of Paul’s missionary tours. She proposes that Paul refused to request or accept donations when they might have been available to him, preferring to be a tentmaker. She argues that tentmaking was Paul’s strategic way to infiltrate a community, and that it also was a method of evangelism that Paul could reproduce in his converts.

In short, and quite remarkably, I think, Siemens attributes Paul’s phenomenal success in spreading the gospel to several nations in a relatively short period of time largely to Paul’s tentmaking strategy.

Siemens correctly points out that Paul also endorsed and encouraged paid ministers. She says that Paul encouraged established churches to generously support their own pastors. But for missionaries seeking to save lost souls and start new churches in a foreign culture, tentmaking should be the norm, or at least a norm, Siemens contends.

The modern Church does not appreciate the significance of Paul’s tentmaking strategy, she says. Rather, we look down our noses at tentmaking. Because of this, we are failing to effectively utilize what could be a powerful strategy for world missions in the 21st century.

Siemens’ article has stretched my thinking. Here are several excerpts from her 9-page article:

• “I will use the term tentmaker to mean missions-committed Christians who support themselves abroad, and make Jesus Christ known on the job and in their free time. They are in full-time ministry even when they have full-time jobs, because they integrate work and witness. They follow Paul’s model of tentmaking, for the same reasons he did it.”

• “Because we cannot finish evangelizing the world without a massive force of such tentmakers, I am amazed at the lack of attention that is given to Paul’s model.”

• “The collapse of the U.S.S.R. not only freed the Soviet satellite nations, and produced 15 new Soviet republics, but it turned almost all non-unaligned governments to the West. Most of them struggle to implement free market economics, multi-party politics and improved human rights, in order to qualify for scarce international aid. All need tentmakers.”

• “By far the largest demand today is for educators, as it was in the early 1950s when I began my teaching and administration in private, secular schools in Latin America. But in addition to education at all levels, professionals and certified technicians are needed especially in health care, engineering, science and technology, business and finance, agriculture and related fields, and computer science.”

• “It [tentmaking] can reduce the attrition rate of missionaries who do not finish their first term or return for a second one– about 30%. Tentmakers who have learned the language and culture at their own expense are tried and proven candidates for mission agencies.”

• “Paul’s example gives a biblical basis [for tentmaking]. This is desperately needed! The mission community is not even sure whether to accept tentmakers as valid workers. Almost all the magazine articles and book chapters on tentmaking in my considerable collection have one common characteristic. They give a few advantages of tentmaking and end up with a long list of disadvantages. Always the same ones, most of which are not defects of lay ministry, but are based on an inadequate definition, and the restrictions of a hostile society. Regular missionaries cannot do a better job in those countires since they cannot enter at all.”

• “Tentmakers are often made out to be second class. They receive little help or encouragement from their churches or the mission community because these do not understand the tentmaker approach to which the tentmakers are called by the Lord. No wonder so relatively few young people are going as tentmakers …”