Planting Churches.
Training Church Planters.
Together.
These three phrases describe everything Tentmakers Bible Mission does. Behind them sits one conviction: the local church is God’s plan for reaching the world. Missionaries come and go. Funding shifts. Strategies get revised. A healthy local church, led by its own people, rooted in its own soil, continues. That is what we are committed to.
Planting Churches
Church planting is not one program among several at TBM. It is the strategy. Every project we take on focuses on either planting a church or training those who will.
That work is slower than most people expect. A missionary arrives, perhaps learning a language and culture. He gets to know a neighborhood, a market, a network of families. He preaches. People believe. Believers gather. Over years, leaders emerge from among them, and the local church is able to stand on its own.
The work takes patience. Missions cannot be systematized into a five-year campaign or compressed into a season. Paul spent a year and a half in Corinth and nearly three years in Ephesus, and he was the apostle Paul. We ask the same patience of our missionaries.
Training Church Planters
Paul told Timothy to take what he had heard and “entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). Four generations of teaching in a single sentence.
TBM missionaries are not investing in ministries that depend on them. They are building churches that will send their own missionaries. The measure of a church plant is not the missionary who started it. It is the church planters it produces.
Together
No one does this alone.
The local church is primary in missions. Missions organizations, including TBM, are secondary. We do not stand between a church and the missionary it sends. We come alongside, handle the logistics and the field oversight and the care that is hard to provide from six thousand miles away, and then hand the relationship back where it belongs.
The same is true of the people who give and pray. A missionary in Peru or Uganda is not a project you fund. He is a partner you send, and the church he plants is as much yours as his.
And it is true across our TBM family. National missionaries serving in their own countries are full and equal partners in the Gospel. Same standing, same voice, same dignity. Our family crosses cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and national lines, because the gospel does.
Together is how the work actually gets done.
So...About Together
It is time for a new…old mission organization.
One that innovates by exegesis.
One that adapts our methodology to sound theology.
That is what we strive to do at Tentmakers Bible Mission. If what you find is worth your confidence, there is room for you to partner with us. Churches send. Supporters give and pray. Men and women called to the field come to us, and we help them go. Together we can see God’s strategy advance through church planting and training church planters.