Tentmaking Tips

Should you get your real estate license?

The legitimacy question tends to go round and rounf rather than resolve itself.

Am I allowed to do this? Is this compatible with ministry?

Here's a simpler way to work through it.

Ask what you're actually thinking of providing. If what you're offering genuinely helps someone, whether that's counsel, a skill, a service or a piece of teaching, that's not a grey area.

Value exchanged for value is not a compromise, it's how honest work has always functioned! Check it against your calling.

The question isn't "does this feel comfortable," it's "does this pull me away from what God has called me to, or does it support it."

Those are two very different tests, and most people are answering the first one while thinking they've answered the second.

Bring it into the light early. Legitimacy struggles in the dark!

A conversation with a trusted friend, or your leadership team, even an early, unfinished one, tends to shrink the fear faster than months of private wrestling ever will.

Separate...

Here's a question worth thinking about for a minute.

If money weren't a factor, what would you still find yourself doing?

Not your job description. Not what's expected of you on a Sunday.

The thing you'd end up doing anyway, because you can't quite help yourself.

For some pastors that's teaching. For others it's counselling people through a hard season, or event creation and management, or writing, or organising a team around a shared goal or coaching others.

Whatever it is, it's usually closer to who you actually are than the title on your business card.

Most of us spend years letting a role define us instead of the other way round. "Pastor" becomes the whole answer to "who are you," and everything else gets filed under hobby, or side interest, or something we'll get to one day.

But the thing you'd do for free is rarely a distraction from your calling.

And often in ministry you don't actually get to do the thing you love. It gets crowded out by all the other stuff.

When I tho...

A few weeks ago, I wrote a newsletter about my daughter graduating quickly from college.

A pastor I know had been worried for months.

He wanted to start building income outside his role, but he was dreading one conversation. Bringing it to his elders (the senior church leadership team for those of you from other traditions!)

He'd run every version of it in his head. The awkward silence. The raised eyebrow. The question about whether his heart was still in the church.

Eventually, after we chatted, he just did it.

It went nothing like he'd imagined. His leadership team listened, asked good questions, and were genuinely supportive. Not reluctant permission, actual support. They understood the pressure he'd been carrying, and they wanted to see it lifted.

Together they even worked out how to communicate it well to the wider church, so nobody would misread it or feel blindsided.

He told me afterward that the fear had been worse than the reality by a long way.

That's often how it goes. We assume the people around us will see this as a compromise before we've even given th...

More and more pastors are discovering something that sounds backwards at first.

Tentmaking doesn't make you a worse pastor. It can actually make you a better one.

Here's why.

- It makes you more relatable. Your church stops seeing you as someone floating above the ordinary pressures of work, money and family. They see someone doing ministry and juggling the same tensions they juggle. That closes a gap that most of us pastors are unaware of.

- It forces you to build team. You can't carry everything as you used to, so you learn to delegate, trust others, and let go of control. That's a skill most pastors need anyway, tentmaking just makes it non-negotiable!

- It relieves financial pressure. Pastoral ministry is stressful enough without family money worries (either for now or for the future) sitting underneath your mindset. Take that weight off and you often find you have more, not less, to give your congregation.

- It gives you fresh material. Real work in the real world hands you ...

I wrote a few years ago talking about whether or not college is “hackable.”

My wife walked into the post office this week and said, “I’d like to buy 1,000 stamps.”

A while back I was trying to do three things at once.

Preaching training for pastors. Helping people build online coaching programmes. Helping others write their first book.

All three came from real experience. I'd done all three myself. And none of them were landing.

I'd mention the preaching training to one person, the coaching programme build to another, book coaching to whoever asked what I actually did. Nobody quite knew what I was for. If I'm honest, some weeks I didn't either.

So I sat down and picked one. Just helping professionals and pastors get their first coaching offer built and launched, nothing else for a season.

Within weeks people started saying yes. Not because I'd got better at any of it. It was the same knowledge and experience I'd always had. It's because for the first time, people could see clearly what I was actually for.

That's usually how clarity works. It's not adding more, it's taking away until one thing is left standing.

If you're circling a few diff...