Reflections
SYNERGY FOR MISSION
By Derek Christensen
The following paper, deliverd at the Marketplace Theology Consultation in Sydney, Australia in June 2001, addresses the relationship between marketplace theology and tentmaking in mission with special attention to issues in training.
In a way you could call the marketplace movement and the tentmaking movement, twins. There is so much of a shared gene pool, so much of a shared period of incubation, so much similarity in the timing of their birth as modern movements, that it is not hard to see them as being family.
But if they are twins, then they are twins in the way that the movie twins Danny de Vito and Arnold Schwarzenegger are twins. Sorry if you have never seen the movie but these two characters find out they are in fact twins though they have not seen each other for many years. Their birth was really a strange laboratory accident. Now one is a huge giant of a man, powerful, handsome, and at the same time innocent and naïve. The other is five foot nothing, a little round ball of fat, but very street wise in the world of the American city.
Marketplace and tentmaking are a bit like that. And that is what I want to talk about today.Most of the conferences I have gone to in the last 15 years have been tentmaker conferences. This is where I have put much of my time and effort and research.
And yet for 28 years I was a pastor and wrestled with the needs of people in the marketplace.
Now I am devoting time and energy to bring these twins back together.
Let me speak briefly about five areas:
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A shared history
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A shared theology
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Why tentmakers need marketplace people
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Why marketplace people need tentmakers
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And what the consequences are for training God’s people in today’s world.
And I want to speak at the popular level. I haven’t time to put in a thousand footnotes and cross references and I have no interest in impressing you as a scholar. Rather I want to speak out of a deep passion and heartfelt belief that it is time these two movements began to talk far more seriously than we have in the past.
A shared history
To be twins you need to be born at the same time. Both in fact have a very long history. Jesus spent much of his time in the marketplace and his ministry was designed partly to equip people for life outside the synagogue.
And the tentmaking movement normally traces its history back to the work of Paul in Corinth though there are in fact many Old Testament examples of the same principle and Acts 8:1-4 is probably a better starting point in the New Testament than Acts 18:1-4.
The Acts 18 passage mentions that Paul took work as a tentmaker along with Priscilla and Aquila during their stay in Corinth.
But the Acts 18 passages says that when the ordinary Christians were scattered after the death of Stephen, the apostles stayed in Jerusalem but the ordinary people scattered throughout the empire spreading the good news as they went about their very ordinary lives.
Both have a somewhat similar trot through two millennia of history – some great examples in the lives of God’s people, an occasional breakthrough in understanding but overall, the grey clouds of dualistic thinking and Greek philosophy kept either marketplace theology or tentmaking from becoming the natural and accepted norm in Christianity.
If we want to look at birth in modern terms then we go back probably half a century to 1950. There had certainly been labour pains well before that but many were false alarms.
1950 is in fact the date chosen as a turning point by both the delegates from New Zealand, each writing a masters thesis, each working independently.
Alistair Mackenzie, who follows in a few minutes in his thesis on faith and work starts with a book by J.H.Oldham in 1950.
In my work on the history of tentmaking I begin with the entry into Afghanistan by a few American Christian teachers in 1950, including Christy Wilson.
So the modern story spans about the same period. Each movement has had its own champions and for the marketplace movement some of the main champions are here in this room today. Only a handful of people have been linked to both and again some are here today. In general like Danny and Arnold, we have separated at birth and occupied separate worlds.
Both movements have to some degree experienced growing pains as the church of today has struggled to understand these old yet new emphases. We have also lived under the shadow of other main themes: the church growth movement, the people group movement of missions, the inroads of liberalism following the death of God controversies of the sixties, the rise of the pentecostal and charismatic movements as the power base of Christianity has moved away from mainstream to what some would call jetstream. Each has been a little slow to respond to the swing of Christianity from west to non west. And each has lived in a climate of massive changes in society. The figures indicate something like 50,000 people leave the church in Europe and North America between each Sunday of the year. Spirituality is not dead but Christianity has lost its monopoly in many places. The religions we thought may have been on their way out in the fifties are certainly on their way back in as we start a new millennium.
And our world is global now. We communicate electronically and when we switch on the Internet we have a choice of 8 billion web pages to choose from.
Shared birthday, shared heritage, some common struggles.
Shared Theology
Of far greater importance though is the genetic material we have in common – our common theological heritage. We have some differences. Mission tentmaking exists within the climate of cross cultural mission so those concerns that undergird mission are there for tentmaking too. But those theologies that are making many people rethink their faith as they encounter the marketplace movement are identical in broad terms with those that affect tentmakers. These are themes we have heard all week.
The clergy/lay division,
so absent in Scripture and yet so embedded in practice is mirrored in the tentmaking movement by the spiritual halo that surrounds the career missionary – specially chosen, specially called and specially blessed with the favour of God’s people. But the tentmaker is a curiosity – someone who appears to be making far too much money for far too little spiritual effort and who insults the home church by refusing to let them put their picture up with the label, “Our missionary in Saudi Arabia.” We have the same concerns about inequality of status in the kingdom of God.
The whole theology of work,
which is where Alistair MacKenzie started with J.H.Oldham is vital to tentmaking. Much of the time, when tentmakers have made a mess of things, it boils down to bad theology of work or more often, no theology of work at all. Many of the arguments tentmakers have with each other are on just this issue - is tentmaking a cover for outlawed evangelism, a necessary evil to endure till we can get on with real mission or is work itself mission in its own right as the place where God walks with us?
Another huge issue is that of call.
A perfect example of this issue comes from the college or seminary where I work. Those training for pastoral ministry get in largely because they can demonstrate a call of God. Those training in the programme I work with, – all the others, get in because they can prove they can cope with the academic demands and pay the fees. The criteria relating to call are worlds apart. And when it comes to tentmaking, it is just the same. The career missionary wouldn’t dare go out to the field without a call but the tentmaker is highly confused. He or she may be expected to have a call to the spiritual bit of their role but after working maybe ten years in a secular job has never been asked if they have a call to that. So most tentmakers lack a clear sense of call, in fact very often hardly a whistle.
And related to this is the whole question of life planning. How do Christians find out which way to go? It has long been my dream that every church should train up five or six wise career guidance counsellors who assist young people from their mid teens to think through their future from a Christian worldview.
Both movements are concerned for mission
How do we carry out the intentions of God in the world that lies outside the church? How do we do what we do with integrity, with enjoyment and in a way that reflects our Creator and our Saviour? Maybe we have a slightly different loading on this question. The tentmaking movement has tended to be so keen on mission it has sometimes drifted off the pace on work.And at times the marketplace movement has become so absorbed with work it has put the squeeze on mission. But this is an area of common concern where our findings should be of great mutual benefit.
Both movements are seeking to understand the Word of God in the light of a high view of the Kingdom of God.
It has always puzzled me that Jesus spoke so much of the Kingdom and his followers speak so much of the Church. When all our talk is of the church, then that which lies outside of the church in a programmed sense tends to fade into obscurity. But when we talk of the Kingdom, that can’t happen because everything falls under the bright gaze of the Kingdom. In a message by Landa Cope of YWAM, she stating categorically that the chief end of mission is not to plant churches nor evangelise people but the chief end is to bring about the Kingdom for the nation and bring the nation to fullness and fruitfulness under the Lordship of Christ. And that includes its art, its culture, its heritage, its ethnic uniqueness, its government and its commerce, its leisure and its pleasure.
And as a consequence of all of the above, both movements are thinking in ways that have massive implications for the way we do church.
The aim of each movement is to change the way we think about church, to break us out of the shackles of clericalism, to release us from professionalism, to give back to all of God’s people, a call and a commission from the Lord Himself. So when we think of these two movements as twins and we do a test of the genetic material, we find they have the same gene pool, the same blood types, they come from the same stock. There is more that makes us alike than makes us different.
And yet we have to admit the two movements are very different. Just as in the movie we have the six foot two and the five foot nothing, here we have two movements that to look at them would have people say, “No, they can’t be twins. They are just too different.”
Yet in the movie as it went on the two characters in fact become more and more alike. They begin to work together, to look out for each other, each with skills the other one needs. The cunning of Danny and the strength of Arnold make a team that defeats the thugs who were out to get them.
Now that is how it needs to be with our two movements.
But it will happen only as each lets the other supply some of the things missing in each individual movement.
Think about tentmaking. What does it need that marketplace theology can supply?
Tentmaking has some real hurdles to overcome. It is a small movement by missions standards even though the current estimate of numbers runs at some 200,000 people working overseas. And the mainstream mission movement hardly knows it exists. I have been back through some of the major mission journals, some for ten years and others for twenty. Some of the major ones can go a whole decade and never once use the word “tentmaker.”
Go to key books on missiology and on trends in missions and the ten major trends of world mission today. More often that not tentmaking is entirely absent. Go to the best known course on world mission today, the Perspectives course and there is one article there in that huge volume of some 800 pages.
So why is this?
Four reasons I think:
- Some bad practice especially in the early days,
- Too few thinkers and writers,
- Too much suspicion between tentmaker and career mission agencies up till the last seven or eight years, and
- Too much infighting and tunnel vision.
Let me expand that a little.
Bad practice.
Let’s face it, some of the early tentmakers were cowboys. They marched into a country, told lies at immigration, ran a sham business and broke the law out the back door. On occasion they trampled over the patch of existing missionaries, competed for the attention of any local Christians and often tried to teach the whole truth of God without any training apart from the bias of their own upbringing.
Now not all were like this of course. Most were far more responsible. But the lone rangers, the theological cowboys and the hermeutical hippies didn’t win a lot of friends in the mission world of the last thirty years. Some of them were in fact almost totally untrained in any sense of the word and the mission world drew itself up to its full height and tiptoed past the bad smell pretending it didn’t really exist.
Too few thinkers and writers.
Tentmakers by and large have been action people. People from business and commerce and the rough and tumble world of earning their own living. Very few have been trained thinkers and even fewer have got around to writing serious stuff. You can count the serious books on tentmaking on the fingers of two hands and none of them set out to match the work of the best mission scholars. Scholars take notice of scholars for better or for worse and when there is nobody to notice, then people think something doesn’t exist.
Too much suspicion between mission agencies and tentmaker agencies.
This is starting to break down but let me illustrate with two policy statements from major world missions that were in force in the early nineties. One had a policy that no tentmaker could ever serve in a country where there was a career missionary. The other had a policy that all the career missionaries in a country had to agree before any tentmaker could come in. And most for a long time had no policy at all – no place for tentmakers despite all the evidence that the world was opening up in that direction.
So if we have been talking about tentmaking and marketplace as twins, then between mission and tentmaking we have the situation where the parents are saying, “You think that’s our kid? You must be joking.”
Too much tunnel vision and infighting.
Sometimes lets face it, tentmakers are so fiercely independent that they can’t even get on with each other. Some of the stories of the early days of tentmaking don’t make good reading, stories of splits and divisions, egos in full flight and that is hardly the way to get a movement established.
So how can the marketplace movement help such an undernourished and neglected twin?
It can help with the thinking and the theology.
Marketplace Christians sure know how to write. Hundreds and hundreds of books, many of them at the level of the best scholarship. The theology is the same. A theology of the laity is the same whether in Sydney or Samarkand. A theology of work may find cultural variations but it is the same theology no matter where work is undertaken.
It can help tentmakers get serious about training.
If there is one subject I have immersed myself in it is this: training for tentmakers. And marketplace is some distance ahead but still struggling.
I remember vividly back some forty five years, running in the school cross country alongside my best friend. Someone had shot out ahead and had opened up a huge lead. And he turned and said to me, “Let’s go get him.” I said, “I don’t think I can.” He turned back and said, “Of course you can. Let’s go.” We did. He got him and won the race and I nearly got the front runner and came third. Maybe the unlikely twin movements I am talking about need to do that – marketplace turn to tentmaking and say, “Yes, you can do it. Let’s go.”
It can help with the initial field testing.
Tentmakers are simply marketplace Christians with an air ticket. I fail to see how a person can be a truly effective tentmaker unless they are first an effective marketplace Christian. entmakers cut their teeth in the marketplace at home, not abroad. In their own culture, not somebody else’s.
It can help with changing the way the church operates.
If the second reformation is in fact when the work of God is given back to the people of God, then it happens at home first. Tentmakers, calling back for an annual holiday, won’t change the church. But people who work all week and want Sunday to help them with it every week, will bring about that change.
So the tentmaker movement needs the marketplace movement very much indeed. It needs its writers, its thinkers. It needs marketplace practice at home. It needs the momentum being generated by the movement – one wave joining another wave to bring the tide of the Kingdom in.
Well if the tentmaker movement is so bereft of thinkers, has got itself so bad a reputation and starts with marketplace anyway, what on earth can the tentmaker movement offer to the marketplace movement?
It looks like Danny de Vito offering to help Arnold Schwarzenegger lift a bag of cement.
Yet there are some very important characteristics that I believe need to flow back that way.
An ever present reminder of the need for mission.
Tentmaking certainly has a grip on the gospel and a heart for spreading the gospel. History shows that characteristically whenever there has been a resurgence in mission interest abroad, there has been a renewal of evangelistic interest at home. The one sparks the other. The story of one helps generate the story of the other. I am not saying marketplace Christians have no heart for mission. But I am saying it never hurts to be reminded and encouraged and inspired by stories that have been carved out of passion and sacrifice.
A reminder of the existence of other cultures.
I am delighted that this conference is most certainly not monocultural. That shows the breadth and vision of the organisers. But it is possible for marketplace thinking to get stuck in a cultural groove. Tentmakers help us remember the world is a colourful mosaic of peoples and cultures and religions and we need to encompass the full breadth of that in our thinking.
Tentmaking sometimes has the same problem. Parts of the tentmaker movement for example have become so fascinated with the entrepreneurial business track that the love of free enterprise is in danger of distorting the message of free grace. But the Koreans and the Singaporeans and the Filipinos and the Latin Americans and the Indian sub continent to name only a few, have reminded us time and time again that the way we think and the way we write and the way we go about the gospel must rise above any one culture and any one church and any one nation. If the marketplace movement has in its midst people who come back with luggage labels from all over the globe, it helps to jog the memory.
A reminder of the place of availability to God.
It is one thing to learn to do work in a kingdom way, develop a good theology of work, live comfortably with our sense of vocation in a secular society. It is another thing altogether to say to God, “I am here right now Lord but if you want me in Kazakhstan setting up micro enterprise for poverty stricken Uighur Moslems next year, then I am willing.
Tentmakers remind us that in the Kingdom there is no guarantee of location or stability or worldly security. God is God and the cross is still the cross.
And I am sure there is more each movement can contribute to the other but time is going. You have the idea. The unlikely twins need each other, can feed each other and together can do far more than either could do alone. It is my heart’s desire to see these two movements grow together until there is no need to even identify them apart any more – it has become the way that we live as Christians.
Training.
I do have one final word and that is to comment a little on implications for training.
I certainly hesitate to do so in the presence of Rob Banks. He speaks out of deep scholarship and wide experience. I speak from a journey nearly as long as his but in a far smaller environment and as a pastor and missionary and as a New Zealander who loves simple solutions especially when they work. Others of you are also world leaders in training but having written two distance courses in the last eight months, one on marketplace Christianity and the other on tentmaking, these things are very fresh in my mind.
If these two movements were to combine, they may well add weight to the revolution that needs to happen in training God’s people.
Let me offer in a rush five brief comments.
I believe training for the future of the Kingdom needs to have in view the whole people of God and not just the professionals.
I have had the immense privilege these last six years of training very ordinary people out of the pews. And I watch them change before my eyes. They grow in wisdom and in stature, in usefulness and in confidence. We need to develop a mindset that all of God’s people need to be equipped well and to have on hand a whole range of delivery systems that allow that to happen. Sending the chosen few off to an elitist institution that will endow them with the mystique of professional ministry is not the way of the future. Yes, I want to train pastors and train them the best way possible. But not as a venture that is entirely separate from training the rest of God’s people.
One of the great things I have watched, with sinful delight as a pastor of 28 years, is future pastors and future congregations sit in the same classroom and the pastors discover to their dismay that their future members are just as smart and just as interested in the Bible and just as committed to the Lord’s work as they are.
To work, this training must have a new level of flexible delivery and availability.
Not just distance education, open learning or whatever you want to call it. But training that says, “Let me understand who you are, what your circumstances are and what you want to achieve and when we know that, we will design a package that can get you there.” That is an immense rethink. But there is no stopping that need now, secular or sacred.
It must integrate theory and practice.
It has to help people with the way they live and not with simply what they know. Knowing is vital but doing because of knowing and knowing by doing are better still. And one of the ways to do this is to provide constant interface between church and world, Sunday and Monday, amidst all cultures and circumstances.
It must remember the young and help them integrate their life path with a worldview that is of God.
We are talking about a lifetime thing here but let’s remember to start young enough.
It must come out of deep concern for mission.
When I was employed to set up our diploma in mission programme the Principal of the College said the name was chosen because the Kingdom needed mission as never before. He told all the lecturing staff, “If you can’t teach your subject with a mission focus, don’t bother to teach it.”
Not in a shallow, bombastic, insensitive way. But in the way that Jesus did – whole person to whole person, touching all of life with Kingdom fingers.
There is a revolution starting in training. Lets be part of it together.
The film Twins ends with the two of them, the one just as short as ever, the other just as tall as ever, both married, and now both the happy parents of twins themselves. No longer strangers and no longer mismatched. But family.
I would love to see this for tentmaking and marketplace Christianity.
Derek Christensen is lecturer of Mission and Marketplace Studies and Coordinator of Distance Education for Carey Baptist College in Auckland ,New Zealand. Derek teaches a range of subjects but has a particular interest in marketplace and tentmaker approaches to cross-cultural mission, and is currently completing research in this area towards a Master of Theology degree. He has previously served for many years as a Baptist pastor and on the mission field. He and wife Isa they have four adult children and three grandchildren. Derek enjoys reading, music, gardening and writing.
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