image/svg+xml Training Church Planters: Biblical Resources for Localized Training Programs Tentmakers Bible Mission creates biblical training resources adapted to specific cultures equipping national pastors to plant reproducing churches.
Tentmakers Bible Mission

A Project of Tentmakers Bible Mission

Training Resources that are Biblically-based and Culturally-relevant

An Innovative Approach to Church Planter Training

The greatest impact Western missionaries and churches can have in the world is through the strategic and effective training of church planters. There has never been a greater need for culturally-relevant, biblically-based resources for church planters.

Tentmakers Bible Mission is committed to developing quality training resources for missionaries and local pastors involved in training church planters and cross-cultural missionaries.

How Our Church Planting Resources are Unique

Addressing How Training Needs To Be Different

Our International Bible Training is a reproducible resource that allows missionaries to easily develop local training programs for church planters.

Training Church Planters by creating biblically-based, foundational resources

Foundational Resources

Biblical foundational resources are designed as a template or framework for our local experts to begin the process of adapting the content and methodology of teaching to their specific mission context. These resources will streamline the process of creating a complete training program.

Training Church Planters by creating a blueprint to adapt to specific contexts and mission fields

Blueprint / Guide

Additional blueprint resources educate and guide missionaries and national pastors in how to create localized, more effective resources for their cultural context. These church planting resources will create a step-by-step plan for adapting biblical resources to a specific mission field, minimizing time and effort needed in developing an effective training program.

Training Church Planters by making localized training resources for culture-specific church planter training programs

Localized Training Resources

Ultimately, each of our training programs will have unique training materials in the target language and adapted to the target culture. Our overall training philosophy is different and addresses an often overlooked aspect of cross-cultural training.

A Metaphor That Describes Our Church Planter Training

How We are Cooking Up A New Approach to Training

As humans, we universally connect with illustrations. We also love to eat. Here is a simple metaphor that explains the idea behind our contextualized training resources.

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Ingredients

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Recipe

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Result

The same basic ingredients can result in French bread, chapati, or a tortilla. Our training uses the basic ingredients (Foundational Resources) with an appropriate recipe (the Blueprint or Guide) to create a delicious (culturally speaking) result (Localized Training Resources). Depending on the context, they may look and taste different from each other, but they will ultimately satisfy hunger!

Looking ahead to the mission field as we are Training Church Planters New mission contexts require new training resources for church planters Each Church Planter training program will be unique, and uniquely designed for the students.

New Ways to Tell the Old Story

Culturally-specific Storytelling

Storytelling is an important part of communication in every culture. In Peru, carved gourds like this are used to tell stories. These "story gourds" have progressing pictures that reveal key parts of a story as the gourd is turned. Our training is designed to adapt both content of teaching material and style of teaching in order to more effectively communicate the most important story to those church planters in different cultures.

Five Church Planter Training Programs on Five Continents

Training Church Planters Through TBM Missionaries

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Cuba, Peru, Romania, Kenya, Mongolia

Our initial vision for training church planters is to begin training programs in five mission fields where TBM missionaries are or will soon be ministering. These five fields also happen to be on five different continents.

While these materials will have a larger impact through many organizations, the primary reason behind the development of our international Bible training is to resource our own TBM missionaries.