The Tentmaker's Way

The Lament

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from doing what you believe is right and watching it not work.

I see it everywhere in the faith-based creative world right now. Writers pouring themselves into pieces that people are reading and sharing. Podcasters building real audiences, getting real messages from real people whose lives are being touched. Substack authors growing their subscriber counts, earning genuine affirmation — and still struggling to pay the bills. Still relying on the generosity of others just to keep the lights on. Still quietly wondering if God is listening.

The confusion is what makes it so heavy. Because the work feels like obedience. You're writing about the Lord. People are telling you it's helping them. That affirmation is real — and it's also part of what makes the trap so disorienting. The impact is there. The income isn't. And when the gap between those two things won't close, the exhaustion goes deeper than fatigue. It starts to feel like abandonment. Like maybe you heard wrong. Like maybe the calling wasn't real.

That's where I found myself. I'm still there in many ways — still cleaning up the wreckage, still watching the indicators lag behind the correction. But I can finally see it for what it is. And that's what I want to talk about.

The Confession

For years I was slowly being stripped raw and I didn't fully see it.

My Substack was growing. The podcast was getting downloads. People were reaching out to tell me the work mattered. By every platform metric, things were moving in the right direction. But underneath all of it, the financial foundation was eroding. Quietly. Steadily. Like a boat taking on water through small leaks you can't quite locate — except I wasn't alone in the boat. My family was with me. And the longer I stayed out there trying to rescue others, pulling people in, the lower we sat in the water.

The desperate logic of it kept me going longer than I should have allowed. I just need more subscribers. I just need to be more consistent. I just need to crack the algorithm. It was a game I kept agreeing to play, even as it cost me more than I had to spend.

It came to a head in the way these things usually do — not with clarity, but with collapse. I broke. I got on my knees and I pleaded with the Lord. Not a composed prayer. A desperate one. Please help me. I'm going to lose everything. I don't know what to do. That kind of prayer.

What came next wasn't a rescue. It was a reorientation.

AI evaluation work was growing. Podcast editing projects were coming in. Real work, tangible work, work the market would actually compensate. And as it did, something shifted in how I understood work itself. I had been carrying this idea that money was somehow cursed for me, that provision was being withheld. But that wasn't it. The problem wasn't a money curse. It was a broken theology of work. I had been chasing an idealized version of calling while dismissing the ordinary, dignified, ordained work that was right in front of me.

Work was in the garden before the fall. Adam was tending. It wasn't a consequence — it was a gift. And my first stewardship isn't my platform. It's my family. If I'm helping people on the internet while my household is sinking, I'm not being faithful. I'm being deceived.

The Diagnosis

The platforms are not the villain. But they are the seduction.

It would be easier to blame them — the algorithms, the subscription models, the endless optimization for engagement. And there is something worth naming there. These platforms are architected to make monetization feel more achievable than it actually is. They surface the success stories. They hide the economics. They show you the writer with ten thousand subscribers and a paid tier and never show you what that actually took, or how many tried and quietly disappeared.

But the platform is not the root. The mindset is.

There is a belief — deeply embedded, rarely examined — that creative work shared openly online should be enough to build a livelihood. That if your writing is good, if your podcast is faithful, if your content is genuinely helping people, the income should follow. Substack built an entire model around this promise. Build your audience. Own your list. Get paid for your work. It sounds right. It feels right. For most people, it isn't enough.

And for Christians especially, there is an added layer of vulnerability. We love this work. We love writing about the Lord. We love serving through our creativity. That love is not the problem — it is a gift. But that gift is being exploited by a system that profits from our output while we absorb the financial risk. We give our best thinking, our deepest convictions, our most carefully crafted words — to platforms that own the relationship with our audience, control the distribution, and owe us nothing.

We are not building. We are feeding.

And the cruelest part is the shortcut mentality underneath it all. Meaningful creative work has always required sacrifice — years of obscurity, the slow building of a body of work, the discipline of craft before platform. We want to compress that. We want the reach without the runway. And in doing so, we surrender ownership of everything we have to systems that were never designed to sustain us.

But this isn't actually a new problem. And the answer isn't new either.

The Theology

Paul made tents.

Not as a side hustle. Not as a fallback while he waited for his ministry to monetize. He made tents deliberately, intentionally, as a matter of integrity. He writes in his letter to the Thessalonians that he and his companions worked night and day so they would not be a burden to anyone. He refused to let his ministry be confused with a transaction. The message had to be free — genuinely, structurally free — and the only way to guarantee that was to fund his own life through his own hands.

That distinction matters more than we've allowed it to.

The modern church has largely lost it. Pastors have become a professional class. Ministry has become an industry. And the extraction — however subtle, however well-intentioned — has done something to the integrity of the work. When the preacher's livelihood depends on the congregation's giving, something gets complicated. The incentives shift. The message bends, even slightly, toward what sustains the institution.

Paul saw this coming and refused it. Not because work was beneath him. Because work was with him. It was the thing that kept him free.

This is the model we've forgotten. Tangible, marketable skills deployed in the world — skills that fund the life, free the ministry, and keep the message unentangled from money.

For Paul it was tentmaking. For me it's been AI evaluation work, podcast editing, and learning new technical skills that can be valued in the open marketplace. As I've gone deeper into AI — learning to build, evaluate, and work with these tools at a technical level — I've found that the skills themselves open doors. And not just professionally. When you are in the world, deploying real skills alongside real people, that's often when the most genuine moments for ministry present themselves. Not manufactured. Not scheduled. Just the Lord working through ordinary presence in ordinary places. That's what it means to be in the world and not of it. And it's exactly what we sacrifice when we retreat from tangible work to yell at the world through a screen.

These aren't distractions from the mission. They are the mission — the foundation that makes everything else possible without needing anything in return.

We don't need to be compensated for what God has put in our hearts to say. That's not a request. That's a freedom.

The Invitation

Here is what I want you to hear if you are exhausted, if the bills are stacking, if the content isn't converting and you're starting to wonder if God has gone quiet:

He probably isn't quiet. You're probably just watching the wrong door.

The provision may already be moving — in a skill you've been developing, in work that feels too ordinary to count, in an opportunity that doesn't look like ministry but is exactly where the Lord wants you. We are conditioned to expect the answer to look like breakthrough. Sometimes it looks like a trade. Sometimes it looks like showing up early and doing unglamorous work that the market will actually compensate. Sometimes the answer is already there and we keep walking past it because it doesn't feel spiritual enough.

Your skills have value. The Lord gave them to you. Don't discount them because they don't come with a theological label.

Now — someone will point to Paul's letter to Timothy. The worker deserves his wages. Elders who lead well are worthy of double honor. That's scripture, and it's true. But look at what that passage is actually describing. It's not a podcast. It's not a Substack. It's an elder — embedded in a local community, genuinely accessible, present when needed, sustained by the people he actually serves. Not extracted from them. Sustained by them. There is a difference, and it matters enormously.

Vocational ministry is real. But it is rare, and it is accountable, and it looks nothing like a content business. The pastor worthy of that support is known by his community — not his subscriber count. He is available — not just on Sunday mornings behind a production budget. He is present in the ordinary moments of people's lives, not broadcasting at them from a distance.

Most of us are not that. And that's okay. Because most of us are called to something Paul understood better than almost anyone — to go into the world with skill and integrity, to work alongside people, to be present in places where the Lord can move through us without us even announcing it.

The plumber who loves the Lord and shows up faithfully to someone's home is doing ministry. The accountant who treats every client with dignity is doing ministry. The AI evaluator who takes the work seriously and thinks carefully about what it means for human beings — that's ministry too. They are in the world. They are not of it. And they are not asking anyone to fund it.

That is the tentmaker's way.

If something is living in your heart that needs to be said — say it. Write it. Build the platform that lets you say it on your own terms. A blog. A website. A book. Something you own, something no algorithm can demonetize or deprioritize or take from you. I'm not telling you to stop creating. I'm telling you to stop feeding platforms that profit from your creativity while you struggle to keep the lights on.

The content can exist. It should exist. But it cannot be the foundation. It has to be the fruit.

Build the skill first. Learn the trade. Find the work the marketplace will compensate you for — honestly, reliably, sustainably. Let that fund your life and free your voice. Because when you no longer need the platform to pay your bills, something remarkable happens. You stop writing for the algorithm and start writing for the reason you started in the first place.

And don't for a moment view this as retreat. This is not surrender. This is not quitting. Never underestimate what the Lord can do with a life that's properly ordered. I never would have predicted that the path I'm on now — the technical work, the AI evaluation, the building and learning — would fold so naturally into the writing and thinking I've always wanted to do. But here I am, doing the most creatively fulfilling work of my life, on a platform I own, saying things that are actually living in me. Not for followers. Not for income. Because it's true and it needed to be said.

The Lord has a way of making things fit together that we never could have arranged ourselves. Trust the path he's already clearing. Build the skill. Own the platform. Free the voice.

The depth you're searching for doesn't live in the algorithm. It never did.