If you’re the parent of a high-school-aged teen and you’re wondering what comes next for them, or if a TENTMAKERS Christ-centered leadership course could be the right fit for your family, you’re not alone.
At TENTMAKERS, our mission is to equip and empower disciples to be Biblical tentmakers who live out their God-given calling while transforming culture through Christ, one relationship at a time.
To do this, we embrace 12 life-giving, character-building skills across our programs.
In this article, we’re going to delve into what those skills are, and how we build them into our TENTMAKERS Christ-centered leadership programs. By the end of the article, you’ll have a clear understanding of how a TENTMAKERS program can change your relationship with Jesus Christ as you grow in these 12 core skill sets.
The 12 Christ-Centered Leadership Skills
TENTMAKERS provides training that equips and empowers you with twelve life-giving character-building skill sets. What you learn will help you grow into your God-given potential. At each course you will experience:
- Christ-centered Training Content for building practical skills for purposeful living
- Unique Training Process which anchors skills & builds confidence
- Unique Training Environments which promote spiritual growth & transformation
- Unique Training Methods which build you up and encourage you
- Unique, Passionate Trainers who seek to bring out the best in you
- Growth in Confidence & Purpose in living your life on mission as a Biblical tentmaker
What are the 12 TENTMAKERS Leadership Skills?
The 12 leadership skills your teen will learn through a TENTMAKERS program are:
- Jesus following skills
- Learning and thinking skills
- Decision-making/wisdom-seeking skills
- Worldview skills
- Relational skills
- Communication skills
- Motivational skills
- Management skills
- Ministry skills
- Entrepreneurial skills
- Citizenship skills
How Can These 12 Skills Help Teens Prepare for a Christ-centered Life on Mission?
These 12 skills can help teens and young people in any of the different life situations that they're going to encounter in the future. The skills they’ll learn through a TENTMAKERS program are practical and translate easily to day-to-day situations.
Teens will leave with the confidence and tools they need to initiate conversation and reach out to others and speak with clarity. They’ll be able to encourage people to take action. They will leave with ideas about what God is telling them to be and do with a written plan to bring it to life. They’ll learn to help others around them succeed and meet their goals while building a process to make good decisions.
Having learned how to learn, program attendees will understand and put into practice the fundamental disciplines as a follower of Jesus Christ and can discern and share what a Christ-centered worldview is in relation to other commonly held worldviews. Additionally, they will be able to lead an effective Bible study.
Program attendees will be able to find encouragement because they know who they are in Christ, and have the vision and tools to plan effectively and enroll others in that vision. They will understand the principles of self-government along with the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship.
At TENTMAKERS, it's about acquiring skills by developing an attitude of a servant leader while becoming confident enough to want to build others up and make a difference rather than simply becoming another consumer in society.
The 12 TENTMAKERS lessons are all about becoming someone who aspires to live purposefully to make a difference in the world, starting with the community they're currently living in. In other words, TENTMAKERS programs equip teens with the foundation they need to live a life on mission.
How Can These 12 Skills Help Parents Live a Christ-centered Life on Mission?
At TENTMAKERS, we’ve found that a lot of the same skills we want for our young people are the skills that are going to help parents work with young people.
Parents will ask themselves:
- Am I connected with my son or daughter?
- Have I settled in my relationship with my son and daughter, or could I dig deeper and find out more about what they're thinking and feeling?
- Am I building up my young person in the different roles and responsibilities they carry?
- How am I encouraging or discouraging them in their pursuits?
As a parent, the 12 TENTMAKERS skill will bring you to a place to successfully guide your children along the way so that they can become the young man or woman of God.
Because these skills are very practical, they help you take on the role of parent as you seek to guide, direct, and release your young people to a world that has a lot of pitfalls and obstacles.
How TENTMAKERS Christ-Centered Training Experiences Will Change Your Life
What is Life Like for Alumni Before Acquiring These 12 Christian Leadership Skills?
TENTMAKERS’ own Chuck Salibi, Wisconsin Regional Training Manager, had this to say about his life before learning the 12 skills:
“I thought I had good relational skills, but I tended to be more abrupt and didn't listen to my children very well, which created animosity. I wasn’t hearing them. That was a skill that was really brought out in TENTMAKERS 40-day Leadership Training Program. My wife could see there were some strenuous things going on in my job at the time as well, and so, things came up and as the saying goes: ‘work gets the best and family gets the rest,’ which was the case for me.
I was tired. I was short. I wasn't listening well. After the 40-Day Training, that completely turned around. I had practiced and gained confidence in working with the skills of relating to people and the first people I wanted to work with were my family and let them know I love them by listening to them and not judging them and not telling them what to do, but helping them find out for themselves.”TENTMAKERS’ Mark Eliason, Associate Training Director, Alumni Relations, had this to say about his life before and after learning and utilizing the 12 TENTMAKERS Christian leadership skills:
“I was introduced to TENTMAKERS not long after graduating from college, and in college, I had all kinds of ideas about what I wanted to do, but I didn't necessarily have the experience to actually do them. One of the effects of TENTMAKERS training in my own life is that it put some feet under what I wanted to do. I learned the importance of a good plan. I learned the importance of building encouraging relationships. I found that there is a major importance in being called in a ministry position and being able to manage that ministry to work with others effectively.”
How do TENTMAKERS Trainers Teach the 12 Christ-Centered Leadership Skills?
What Makes TENTMAKERS’ Method Unique and Impactful?
Our training is an experience in which we want to draw the wisdom of a whole classroom.
One of the fundamentals is that everyone is taking the training, trainers and participants alike, we're all participants. In that way, every training experience is unique and different because we're drawing on the wisdom of the group and sharing our experiences so we're all benefiting from one another, not just from the wisdom of the guru at the front of the room.
The real difference between a TENTMAKERS trainer and other trainers that may be out there in the world is that you don't have to know everything. As a matter of fact, you shouldn't share everything you know, as your job is to draw from the group and for others to gain from the wisdom that surrounds them in that classroom.
Finally, at TENTMAKERS, we have a passion for Christ and we have a passion for the participants. We want to see God working in each of the participants. For this reason, all of our events are done with prayer, and we are engaged relationally with the people who come in and are engaged in our training.
We don't just deliver a bunch of content and then expect participants to remember. We deliver content in a fundamental form and apply or practice it right away once the skills are developed, and we can continue to advance in that training sequence with a little more knowledge and then additional practice.
Ready to change your relationship with your family, community, and Jesus Christ by embracing the 12 Christian leadership skills? Find out if a TENTMAKERS program is right for you. Register for our upcoming webinar and have your questions answered by a member of the TENTMAKERS team.
