Welcome to Tent Ministries
TENT (Training in Evangelism Needs and Technology) is an indigenous ministry founded in 1985 to equip grassroots workers with a two fold emphasis:
1. Cross-cultural communication of the gospel.
2. Use of contextual technology for income generation.
Joined with people group research, this is TENT™s strategy for reaching the more than 4000 unreached people groups of India.
TENT has three major training programs:
Tentmaker's Training
A two to four week intensive training course in gospel communication skills and simple technologies for pastors and evangelists who desire to be tentmakers.
Beginnings of TENT
Bishop Bunyan Joseph, one of the first bishops in India, followed the principles of TENT making during his service as a devoted pastor and missionary. He inspired his son and daughter-in-law to start training pastors and evangelists with simple technology, so that may be earn for themselves, to support their families in ministry after Pauline method. This was started in 1985.
This was started in the garage of Prof. and Mrs. Vijayam, where they conducted two to three week training programs. For giving training in agriculture, horticulture and animal husbandry, the trainees had to be taken to the Agriculture University in Hyderabad, India. This became rather difficult, and the models shown are much larger than what the evangelists hold, hence the need for locating a land of our own.
In 1989, we bought some land, 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) east of Hyderabad. As the training of the evangelists was going on, the Lord gave a vision, after a major earthquake took place in September, 1993, killing about 30,000 people. The Lord showed Prof. B.E. Vijayam, the verse Matthew 24:14, “The Gospel of His Kingdom will be preached to all the nations as a testimony to the whole world, and then, the end will come.” Vijayam was curious to know about the nations in India. The Anthropological Survey of India, has proved that there are 4,635 people groups, or “nations” of India.
In the Presence of the Poor- Changing The Face of India - Written by Kay Marshall Strom, 2009
“WHY DOES GOD MAKE SO MANY POOR PEOPLE?”
That is the question that Dr. Vijayam, PhD, recipient of India’s highest national science award, kept asking as he grew up. He could not get over the suffering, despair, and seeming hopelessness all around him in India, and it eventually led
him to embrace Marxist Communist as a hope for the poor.
In this deeply moving account you will be profoundly challenged through the life one man who, after giving his life over to Christ, took his natural God-given talents with his training and experience, and then got to work right where he was “for such a time as this.” Reaching across the deep culture chasms of caste and class, Dr. Vijayam pioneered the idea of harnessing technology for the poor and using it in combination with cutting edge microenterprise concepts. He and his wife worked to free those enslaved as “bonded laborers.” To fulfill his vision of seeing the Gospel spread to each of the 4,000 unreached people groups in India, Dr. Vijayam established a center dedicated to training men and women “master trainers” who in turn train grassroots workers in the most inhospitable of areas.
So, what can one person do for the Kingdom of God in the face of seemingly insurmountable difficulties? Only change the world is all.
