“Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory”
Miguel de Cervantes
To be forewarned is to be prepared.
There are many ways the Enemy defeats us in our quest to serve the King and extend his Kingdom. C. S. Lewis describes a number of the subtle traps the devil uses to steal our joy in Screwtape Letters. Though fictional, these stories point out real truths about the spiritual battles that take place outside of our view.
Learning from the experience of our past, and the past of others can help us avoid the same pain and defeat. Through decades of walking alongside thousands of tentmakers and debriefing them on their experiences, Global Intent has gleaned wisdom from the wealth of tentmakers experiences.
New Training Video Series
The video series, “Tentmaking Challenges” shares nuggets of wisdom in bite-sized 3-minute pieces. Veteran tentmaker and trainer Ari Rocklin shares these tales in the hope that the tentmaker will see these challenges when they come and be better prepared to deal with them.
Potential tentmakers will benefit from these videos. They will help them envision experiences tentmakers often face.
“Tentmaking doesn’t work,” declared a discouraged couple in their debrief after returning from 2 years working among a least reached people group.
One of the most discouraging experiences for a tentmaker mentor is to be debriefing a returning tentmaker and hear their regrets about lost opportunities. As they describe where things went wrong too often the mentor is thinking, “Don’t you remember when we warned this would happen in class?” Sadly, they either did not remember, or they thought this couldn’t happen to me. This series addresses some of those lessons in succinct bites.
The Content
Here is what you will find in the series. Twelve 3-minute lessons on challenges tentmakers face:
- Finding and keeping Housing
- Getting and Renewing Visas
- Difficulties with Bosses & Co-workers
- Maintaining Ministry Focus
- Working too Many Hours
- Cultural Frustrations
- Instant Communications with Home
- Local with an Agenda
- Spiritual Oppression
- Team Conflicts
- Maintaining Spiritual Disciplines
- Materialism
- Ex-patriate Trap
Get Started
It’s not all bad news. Tentmaking brings great joy to those who respond to the challenge and follow Jesus to reach the least reached. Ari adds a bonus video sharing some of the pleasures of pursuing ones profession as a tentmaker. Watch “The Joys of Today’s Tentmakers” for a sneak peek into a future series in the works.
You can jump right into Challenges by clicking on the link to the Introduction here. The Challenges series is a project of Global Intent Media and is available for free on the their YouTube channel http://youtube.com/globalintent. Subscribe to the channel and click on the notifications bell so you will be alerted when new teaching becomes available.
By Phill Sandahl