Thanks for stopping by!

My name is Chris Galanos and I'm a Tentmaking Pastor in Texas.

You may be asking, "What's that?" It just means I'm in ministry but I derive my income from outside of our church. Much like the Apostle Paul did with tentmaking (Acts 18:1-4).

Many ministry leaders have reached out to me for help with tentmaking to support their own ministries. That's how TentmakingPastors.com was born.

Our passion is to help pastors, missionaries & Christian leaders supplement or replace their income by tentmaking like the Apostle Paul.

If you'd like help supplementing or replacing your income, you've come to the right place!

How It All Started

In 2007, after graduating from seminary, the Lord led me & my wife back to Lubbock, TX, my hometown, to start a new church. It's called Experience Life. 

Since the church was brand new & couldn't afford to pay us, we raised all of our support from friends and family. Much like missionaries do. 

Our first meeting was with 12 other people in my living room. And, with as much faith as we could muster, we prayed together that the Lord would allow us to reach 10,000 people in the next 10 years. That prayer definitely seemed crazy to all of us in the room. But we knew that all things were possible with God!

Over the next few years, our church started to grow very quickly. Much quicker than we could've imagined. 

Outreach Magazine named our church one of the Top 100 Fastest Growing Church in the US five different times. For several years in a row, they also recognized me as being the Youngest Megachurch Pastor in the US. I'm still trying to figure out if being the "youngest" is a good thing - haha!

Fast forward to our 10 Year Anniversary Celebration.

We had to rent out the former Texas Tech Basketball Coliseum to fit all of us in one room. We had grown to a church of thousands meeting in 10 different campuses over those 10 years.

At our 10 Year Anniversary Celebration, we celebrated 13,337 people who indicated they had committed their lives to Christ and 6,756 people who had been baptized during those years. 

From Megachurch to Multiplication

In Year 8 when we crossed the 10,000 mark, we began to pray, "Lord, what do you want our vision to be for the next 10 years?"

That's when the Lord began to show us what he was doing around the world. We began to hear about Church Planting Movements where millions were coming to Christ. 

Inspired by these movements & how God was speaking to us through his Word & prayer, we believed he was leading us to pray for 1,000,000 in the next 10 years. 

We knew that meant we'd have to focus on multiplying disciples & churches!

I wrote a book about our journey that tells the whole story called From Megachurch to Multiplication!

Supplementing Our Income

When our church first started & we raised our support, we enjoyed not being paid by the church so that the money could be used for ministry.

After 2 years, we began to get paid by the church. But I was constantly looking for ways to supplement our income. I hoped that eventually my salary could be reduced or eliminated entirely & the funds be given back to ministry. Just like in the early days.

Over the years we were able to reduce our income at the church until we finally came off the payroll completely a few years ago. A dream come true!

We did this using the 3 "hacks" described below. We call them hacks because we were able to earn extra income without having to work significant extra hours to earn it. These were easy to do on the side in a flexible way that allowed us to remain devoted to our ministry.