tentmaker

Five years of tentmaking in China

/ Guest Contributor

reflections on a rich journey
 – a story from Scandinavia

My husband and I spent five years in China, with the purpose of serving God there. Of course, China is a place where traditional mission work is not possible and where limitations are many. So before we went, we read as much as we could and followed a one-year course focused on tentmaking.

And yet, when we reached China, we felt totally unprepared for what would lay ahead. Armed with only a few words of Chinese, we felt like we were diving straight into the deep-end of the ocean.

Fortunately, we were not totally on our own. Once we arrived at our final destination, a large city in the heart of the country, we were met by an enthusiastic group of other tentmakers originated from different Western countries. This small group was to become like a second family through fellowship: people that we would work with, pray with, and support one another through the ups and downs of life in China.

What on earth are we doing here?

I remember that one morning, a few weeks after settling into our small flat and life as language students, my husband was gazing through the window, watching the endless stream of cars, buses, bicycles and people. He suddenly turned to me and said in a sigh: “What on earth are we doing here? Who am I, just one limited man from a small European country, to pretend to do God‘s work here and ‘save’ any of those millions of people? What was God thinking when He sent us here?…” I could not answer anything then, beside a feeble: “Let‘s just take one day at a time. God knows what He is doing.” In truth, I had been asking myself this same question. But eight years on, we can see that this question has been answered many times and in different ways.

In a way, the biggest blessing of following God‘s call and become a tentmaker in China has been our own growth. There hasn‘t been a day when we have not felt God‘s presence with us, and in a strong way.

As any Caucasian Westerner who has been in China knows, it is easy to feel like a complete “alien” in the Chinese world. You look different, you behave different and people often point to you like you are a kind of “circus wonder“. It is partly because of that feeling that God‘s presence has felt so strong. We felt strangers but never abandoned. Again and again, God has shown us that He did not make a mistake in sending us to China. We were right where we should be.

During our experience of tentmaking in China, God has truly worked in us and through us. We had the privilege to see Chinese friends putting their trust in Jesus Christ. Others have walked with us on their journey of faith and we were able to bring support and encouragement. Numbers don‘t really matter, neither is it crucial whether we started “churches” or not. Every opportunity that we had to explain the Gospel to a Chinese person has been very precious, because it was God-given.

Of course, there have been some steep learning curves. One challenge was particularly having to be extra flexible with circumstance around us. When you do ministry in China, you can never allow yourself to be too attached to a strategy. Of course it helps to have a vision, but allow this vision to be molded by the unfolding events around you. This is what we experienced again and again.

From day one we needed an open heart and mind. Humility and flexibility are key ingredients to any successful cross-cultural experience, but you need an extra-dose of it when serving God in a country with limitations. There are many things that we wished we could do, especially related to the local Chinese Church. But there was no point focusing only on what we could not do and become increasingly frustrated about it. Instead, we tried to look towards what we could do and with time, the opportunities were many.  

Many Chinese have a great hunger for God

With patience and understanding, you can go a long way in Chinese culture. Some fantastic doors were open to us, such as the time when my husband was asked by a representative of the Communist Party at his workplace to explain more about the Bible. Or when I was able to share Biblical principles for love and relationships to several hundreds of students, many of them coming to me afterwards to hear more. We never tried to keep secret that we were Christians and tried to model our faith the best we could, through our daily lives. The result was often that people wanted to know more. Many Chinese have a great hunger for God, for truth and purpose in their lives. In fact, we saw how much more open than in the West Chinese people are. Almost every week, someone asked either one of us about our faith, God or the Bible, and why we believed. The key was to be ready and to allow God to speak through us.

This is a precious lesson not just for tentmaking, but for every day of our lives as Christians, wherever we are. Since coming back to our home country, we have tried not to go out off our tentmaking lifestyle. There was nothing so extraordinary about our Christian work in China and this is a calling for every believer whether at home or on the mission field. We are all called to put God first into our lives and to reach out to the people around us. Jesus said: “Be ready for service and keep your lamps burning.” (Luke 12: 35).  And His disciple Peter wrote: “In your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” (1 Pet. 3: 15) 

 The World’s Mission Leaders Want Focus on Tentmaking

/ Steinar Opheim

Steinar Opheim
 

“Christians in many skills, trades, businesses and professions, can often go to places where traditional church planters and evangelists may not,” concludes the worldwide Lausanne Movement in the recently published Cape Town Commitment. The document may bring tentmaking into a new era in the global mission work.

For nearly 40 years the Lausanne Movement has been a major source of inspiration and a substantial contributor in the worldwide mission work. The Lausanne Covenant that was worked out during the world congress in 1974 has been a point of reference for nearly everyone involved in mission. The Manila Manifesto written in 1989 also contributed in forming a common understanding of the mission task among global leaders. It is therefore good reason to expect that also the document that was made during the world congress in Cape Town last fall will make its impact on the mission work in the years and decades to come.

The Cape Town Commitment concludes that tentmaking is a vital strategy if we want to reach the whole world with the whole gospel. The document therefore advises church and mission leaders to implement tentmaking in their strategies.

“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,” reads the document. You can download the full version of the Cape Town Commitment in several languages from Lausanne’s website at www.lausanne.org.

“The Whole Church taking the Whole Gospel to the Whole World” has been a motto for the Lausanne Movement. In Global Opportunities and Tent we have seen how the teaching on tentmaking is empowering the whole congregation to take part in the global mission task.

When we run seminars on tentmaking in the churches, people usually respond in two ways. One groups says that for the first time they will really consider to move to a new country in order be ambassadors for God’s kingdom. They have never thought of becoming missionaries. But applying for a job where they can continue to use their professions in a new culture sounds like something they could do. The other group says that they will still not consider moving abroad, but they’ve got a new vision on how they can serve God in their workplace at home.

Global Opportunities and Tent are ready to serve churches, mission agencies and private persons who want the gospel to be known in the whole world.  Don’t hesitate to contact us to find out how we can work together to fulfill the Great Commission.

“Christians are better than other people”

/ Steinar Opheim

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After three years of hard work and Bible teaching, a tentmaker serving in Asia was speaking at a house church meeting. – It is true that Christians are better than other people, isn’t it? the tentmaker asked.

The tentmaker was surprised to see people in the congregation starting to nod their heads in agreement. After a few clarifying questions, he realized that what he had tried to teach people throughout the last years had been in vain. The believers in this mid-sized Central Asian city really believed that they were morally superior to others in the society.

“If I could have done it over again and retrained the believers, I would have done things in a very different way,” the tentmaker stated a few years after finishing his job in the former Soviet republic. With a lack of knowledge on how to train disciples, the tentmaker focused on Bible teaching and systematic theology.

“For all Christians it is valuable to have a profound knowledge of the Bible, but I understood too late that many of the people I taught did not apply the Biblical message to their own lives. As a result, their lives were not changed,” states the tentmaker.

What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus Christ in my life, at my workplace and in my neighborhood? This is one of the most central questions when it comes to discipleship training. Unfortunately the Biblical message remains head knowledge for many of us, and thus our lives are not changed according to the Scripture. Theological issues, and not the transformation of lives, also remain the focus in many churches.

Jesus called us to make disciples of all nations. In the four Gospels we read how he trained his disciples, concentrating on the few people he knew would be able to teach others. And he focused much of his teaching on everyday challenges and principles in the Kingdom of God.

There is no doubt that a tentmaker can be a good disciple-maker. A tentmaker works and lives under the same conditions as the people he or she has come to train. In this way a tentmaker, like Paul, the tentmaker from Tarsus, can model what it means to follow Jesus in everyday life. 

It is said that when we we aim at nothing, we hit it every time. If we don’t know what the aim of our discipleship training is, we will probably fail. Dawson Trotman, the founder of Navigators, has given us the following guideline that can be of help: “A person is mature physiologically when he or she can reproduce physically; so too, a person is mature spiritually when he or she can reproduce spiritually.”