One of the world´s largest evangelical networks puts tentmaking in focus when it gathers 300 leaders for a worldwide consultation in India next week. One whole day of the four-day conference program will center on tentmaking and marketplace ministry.

“Tentmaking has not been given so much space since the Lausanne Conference in Manila in 1989,” rejoices Berit Helgoy Kloster. She is the senior associate for tentmaking in the worldwide Lausanne Movement that hosts the leadership consultation in India. For four decades she has worked to promote tentmaking both in her home nation, Norway, and through various international networks. Many times she has felt that she has been working against strong headwinds.  Now she senses that something new is happening.

Waking up

“The emphasis given to tentmaking and marketplace ministry at the conference in India shows that people are beginning to wake up and see the strategic importance of tentmakers in the worldwide mission force. Tentmakers can go everywhere, including to nations and places where traditional missionaries do not have access,” says Kloster to TMBrief.

The leaders attending next week’s conference in India will work on following up the Cape Town Commitment that was made by the Lausanne movement at a worldwide conference in South Africa in the fall of 2010. At that conference more than 4000 Christians from all over the world came together to form a document that could give direction to the global mission work. Tentmaking is mentioned in several paragraphs in the text. 

Focus on tentmaking

“Christians in many skills, trades, businesses and professions can often go to places where traditional church planters and evangelists may not. What these ‘tentmakers’ and business people do in the workplace must be valued as an aspect of the ministry of local churches,” states the Cape Town Commitment before it goes on to urge church and mission leaders to focus on tentmaking through the following paragraphs:

“We urge church leaders to understand the strategic impact of ministry in the workplace and to mobilize, equip and send out their church members as missionaries into the workplace, both in their own local communities and in countries that are closed to traditional forms of gospel witness. We urge mission leaders to integrate ‘tentmakers’ fully into the global missional strategy.”