What to Expect When You Come to Work With Us
As you get ready to come out and work with us, we want you to feel prepared and confident. This experience is about rolling up your sleeves, learning, leaning in together. Below, you’ll find practical guidance, best practices and resources that will help you arrive ready.
To Those Preparing to Step Into This Space,
“The ones who truly see are the ones who intentionally slow down to notice what they’re looking for.”
Most of us are wired for doing. We strive, we push, we conquer. We rush toward results because the doing feels more important than the becoming.
That’s where I was when I entered Tentmakers. I came with ideas, dreams, and aspirations. I thought I needed affirmation to charge forward. What I discovered instead was that the journey itself is the destination. The fruit comes from preparation—and that preparation is the deep work of unearthing the soil of your heart and mind. Some seeds need planting, others need to die, so that God can do in you what you were designed for, and shape you into who He created you to be.
As you begin your own journey with Brent and Erin, here are four invitations that will help you enter the process well:
- Be Open. You may already have a picture of what you want to walk away with. The truth? It likely won’t look like that. The better truth? It will be more than you imagined. Redefine what “a win” means.
- Be Watching. God has been at work long before you arrived. The question isn’t if He’s working, but how He’s working and how you’ll join Him. Pay attention to the signposts before, during, and after your time here.
- Be Listening. Slow down. Create space to hear God, in your thoughts, in your feelings, in your encounters. It may be a word, a moment, or a new relationship. Lean in to the whispers beneath the noise.
- Be Led. You’re a leader, but leaders often resist mystery because we like having answers. Trust Brent and Erin to guide you where you need to go, even if it’s not where you expected. You’ll get there.
If you feel stuck, burnt out, or restless, you’re not alone. Many arrive here having carried the weight of their dreams alone. You can’t go back, but you also don’t yet know how to move forward. That tension is exactly where God does His best work.
The theme of this process is Rest and Vision. Every part of you will resist the rest – but without rest, there is no vision. If you don’t slow down, you’ll never see what you’re truly looking for.
Praying for your engagement,
Josh Lindblom
Former MLB Pitcher, Ministry Leader, Founder, Speaker
Recommended Reading
and Resources
- Henri Nouwen, Discernment (short, easy read)
- Dallas Willard, Hearing God (longer theological and philosophical read)
- Pete Greig, How to Hear God: A simple guide for normal people
To the One Who Is Ready to Be Known,
Before the Blueprint: You can’t design the life you’re meant to live until you understand the person God designed you to be. Through a guided StrengthsFinder deep dive, that’s exactly what we uncover.
Before you arrived here, God was already at work designing something in you that no one else carries. The way you think, the way you feel, the gifts that flow almost without effort, and even the wounds that have quietly shaped you, none of it is accidental.
So often the leaders who come through Tentmakers are incredibly gifted people who have never truly stopped to understand themselves. They know how to lead others, how to cast vision, how to persevere, but they haven’t had space to ask, Who am I, really? And what have I been carrying that was never mine to carry alone?
Those are the questions we’re going to sit with.
Here is what I want you to know as you prepare:
You are not a project to fix. You are a masterpiece to understand. Come with curiosity, not self-judgment.
What you carry matters. The things that have drained you, the pain you’ve tucked away, we’re going to make room for that. Not to dwell in it, but to release it.
You are safe here. You don’t have to perform or lead. Just show up with open hands and a willingness to be known.
Come ready. You are more than you know.
In His love,
Pamela Nelson
Recommended Reading
and Resources
- “Hidden in Christ” by James Bryan Smith (30 short devotionals on Living as God’s Beloved)