Our fellow team members stimulated our ideas about lifestyle and contextualization of the gospel. We served him tea and he soon found out other people were there, too. To our pleasant surprise, he was not the least bit alarmed to learn that we met with other foreigners to study the Bible and pray. As he began to make friends with other team members, Ahmad was amazed at how different these foreigners were from others he had met. He admitted the key to the difference was their devotion to God.
Some tentmakers fail because of a lack of adequate preparation.
I was fortunate because my employer had arranged for a language and acculturation course for both my wife and myself. On the job, I became more fluent in the national language and gradually became somewhat conversant in the regional language was well. As far as Christian experience was concerned, we had been active in the Navigators student ministry and as small group leaders in our home church. These evangelistic and discipling skills were critical to our success in making friends with Muslims. However, I'm now convinced that if a tentmaker wants to be a church planter, he needs thorough grounding in both theology and missiology.