Tentmaking Tips

I'm Simon Holley. I lead King's Arms Church in Bedford, UK, and oversee the Catalyst Network of 800+ churches across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

Catalyst are in an exciting season, called by God to train 1,000 church planters. These will take many forms - traditional churches, house churches, DMM-style churches, and even 'under-a-tree churches' (as many of our African congregations are!).

Here's the reality: most of these future leaders will need to be tentmakers. The places and models they're called to make this inevitable. And I knew I couldn't be the guy calling others to do something I wasn't willing to do myself.

But I faced a major obstacle - I didn't believe it was possible to effectively combine ministry AND tentmaking! Sure, I'd run several 'hobby businesses' in my spare time. The most successful reached $30k annual turnover, which wasn't bad for a few hours a week, but it wasn't en

Actually, we’re back!

I took a 6 month break from writing these weekly newsletters & I’m going to resume again with help from my friend Simon Holley, a fellow pastor & tentmaker in the UK. Check out his bio on the Tentmaking Pastors site here. 

Simon oversees a network of churches across Europe, Africa & the Middle East. As a tentmaker, his focus has been on helping people use their skills, passion & expertise to develop online coaching programs. He’ll tell you more about this in future newsletters.

My vision with Tentmaking Pastors has been to help pastors, missionaries & Christian leaders supplement or replace their income with tentmaking like the Apostle Paul.

Simon shares that vision & adds an additional component of helping leaders “around the world,” not just in the US where I’ve been a tentmaker. Our plan is to continue to help leaders in developed countries, but we also want to write & develop resources to help leaders in the developing world as well.

We’ll

This is an important metric to track on your journey toward financial independence.

Your freedom number is the amount of money you need in investments in order for the return on investments to equal your living expenses.

Once you hit this number, your investments will pay your monthly expenses and you’ll become work optional.

Work optional just means that you can choose whether or not you want to continue generating more income since you don’t need it to sustain your lifestyle.

Many people think the best way to calculate your freedom number is to multiply your yearly expenses by 25. This is based on the 4% withdrawal rule in early retirement.

For example, if your annual expenses are $60,000, then $60,000 x 25 = $1,500,000 becomes your freedom number. Once you accumulate $1.5MM in investments, you can likely retire financially and live off your investments.

By reducing your annual expenses, your freedom number gets smaller, and you can “retire

Some of us even grew up in churches were many of the staff were paid full-time.

It’s easy for us to assume that our experience is the norm.

But it may surprise you to learn that many churches, perhaps most churches globally, don’t operate this way.

There just aren’t the funds available to pay a pastor full-time.

Most of us live in a context of great wealth. But most of the world doesn’t live in that context.

And the early church certainly didn’t live in that context.

Tentmaking is the norm. Funding pastors full-time is the exception.

It may not have been the norm in the church you grew up in, and that’s ok.

But, even in a Western context, there are thousands of bi-vocational pastors. They serve in churches where they get very limited pay, if any at all.

So, the first way I’d answer the question, “Is tentmaking a distraction?” is to say:

Far from being a distraction, tentmaking is what enables man

I tell them I’m glad to help. Then, I direct them to the free resources we offer like:

• Our weekly Tentmaking Tips newsletter

• Daily tweets/threads about earning extra income

• Step-by-step guides to earning thousands in extra income and free vacations

But it’s usually the case that they want to pay extra for additional courses & coaching.

I tell them about some of our paid products and then share the ways they can get those free as well.

After all, if I’m teaching hacks to get free travel or live nearly free, shouldn’t I give hacks for getting my paid content for free? Ha!

Here are the ways I tell them they can get any or all of our courses for free (and you could too):

1. Follow my step-by-step guide to earn an extra $1,200 quickly and apply that to any or all of the courses

2. Refer 3 friends to any course and get all of the course cost refunded to you
...

So many, in fact, that perhaps you will find it could be preferable to full-time paid ministry in some cases.

Here are 10 advantages (in no particular order):

1. Reduces church budget

   Especially when you’re planting a church or serving in a small church, the salary of the pastor can be a significant percentage of a budget. And even if you serve in a larger church, the salaries collectively are likely a large percentage of the budget. If you were to remove your salary, or even part of it, that could greatly lessen the strain on the church budget.

2. Sets an example of hard work

   Paul gave this as a reason for tentmaking when he was working among the Thessalonians (2 Thes 3:7). There was a laziness problem in the church and he wanted to set an example for the church of what it looked like to work hard in order to honor God.

3. Not a hindrance in a...

2 years and 9 months later, I asked for the last reduction all the way down to $0.

I was off the payroll and it was a dream come true!

You’re probably thinking, “Are you crazy?”

Haha. Yes, a little.

Our church was doing fine financially during those years. The elders were glad to continue paying me full-time. Other staff continued to get paid full-time.

But, in the Feb 2017 email, I gave the elders 2 reasons I wanted to come off the payroll. It was a long e-mail, but I’ll share a little of what I wrote to them here:

1. “We are beginning to cast the vision for ordinary men & women to start making disciples & planting churches themselves. You heard me talking about this in our Meltdown series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) & you also saw this vision that I shared with ou...

I encouraged you to focus on just making your first $1,000. I want to share a number of ways you can make your first $1,000 tentmaking.

1. Redeem Credit Card Rewards for Cash

   I wrote a PDF guide which explains this process called "Make an Extra $1,200 Quickly" that you can download here. The gist is that you’ll apply for cards with high welcome bonuses, earn those bonuses in the first three months, and then redeem the points for cash. I think this is likely the easiest way to make your first $1,000.

2. Earn Checking Account Sign-Up Bonuses

   It’s common for banks to offer cash rewards for setting up a checking account with them and completing certain qualifying activities. You likely won’t get all $1,000 by setting up one account but if you set up accounts at multiple institutions, you could likely come close. For example, right now at Chase, they are offering a $600 bonus

   ...