You will not leave the way you arrived.
Here is what happens when you come to Tentmakers.
Before you arrive, we are already thinking about you.
"We want the best because we are serving the best. This is what they deserve, and it’s what God wants for them."
Brent and Erin read every application personally. Before your feet touch Montana soil, they have been praying for you. Not as a policy. As a practice. They want to know who you are, what you are carrying, and where God seems to be moving before you walk through the door.
What you are about to read is not a schedule. Tentmakers does not run a script. What follows is the arc of what most couples experience when they come, offered not as a promise of what will happen but as a window into what this actually is.
Every engagement looks different. That is the point.
Rest with a roadmap. Here is what that looks like.
A welcome basket is waiting. Your favorite snacks are inside. The lodge has been prepared with care that most guests notice the moment they walk in. You have been prayed over. Brent and Erin have already been thinking about what you need, what questions to ask, and where the Holy Spirit might want to take things.
You do not need to prepare anything. You do not need to arrive with answers. You just need to show up.
Northwest Montana has a way of doing that. The mountains, the quiet, the 360-degree views of the woods from your private space. It is a physical reminder that you are no longer in your regular life. That is not accidental. It is the whole design.
Some guests arrive jet-lagged. Some arrive anxious, unsure how to show up or what to say. Some arrive carrying the same mental load they packed with their luggage. Brent and Erin have seen it all. The first thing they do is make you feel like family. A meal together. A tour. A chance to breathe before the work begins.
Rest is not the break before Tentmakers. Rest is part of the work. You cannot hear clearly from God when you are exhausted. The lodge is designed to help your whole self arrive, not just your mind.
Your engagement begins with Pamela, Tentmakers' certified CliftonStrengths® coach and counselor. She runs a guided strengths assessment for both of you, independently and together. Most couples have never done this. What emerges is often the first time a wife has seen her own gifts named and taken seriously in a strategic conversation. What comes out of it shapes everything that follows.
Then the real conversation starts. Brent sits with you and begins extracting ingredients. Not just the vision. Not just the goals. The hard lines too. What are the nos? What is the family refusing to sacrifice? What has been carrying you that you were never supposed to carry? What has the wife buried under everything else that needs to come back to the surface?
Erin is drawing things out of the room that would not surface without her. A woman can hear from a wife what no man can. What she extracts becomes part of the roadmap. That is not a side conversation. It is half the strategy.
The Holy Spirit tends to show up in this part. Things surface that no one planned for. Guests regularly say they had no idea the conversation was going to go where it went. Brent and Erin have stopped being surprised by this. They have learned to make room for it.
Somewhere in the middle of the engagement, Brent and Erin send you out. Into Glacier. Into Whitefish. Into the quiet. Not to fill time. To decompress, pray, and let what has surfaced settle before the roadmap gets built.
This is where couples often have the conversations they have been putting off for months. The ones that needed Montana and the Holy Spirit to create the space.
The roadmap Brent builds is reverse-engineered from where God is calling you, filtered through your strengths, your family's hard lines, your marriage, and your specific season. It is not a vision board. It is not a goal list. It is a written, practical, daily-steps document that a tired couple can open on Monday morning and actually use.
Most advisors hand you a vision and wish you well. Erin makes sure you can live it. She turns the big abstract goals into checklists, calendars, and rhythms. She has watched too many great engagements fail on the Monday after because no one made the roadmap executable. That does not happen here.
For the leaders who are called to write or speak, Erin also works with you on the five-step story framework during this phase, mining the message you were born to tell and building a path toward the platform or the book or the stage.
Before you fly home, you have a written summary of everything that was uncovered, decided, and mapped. Your strengths profile. Your roadmap. Your next steps in priority order. The hard lines you named. The dreams that surfaced.
Guests often start working on the plane ride back. That is not unusual. It is the goal.
"I had no idea this is where it was going to go. I had no idea God was going to do this or guide us here."
Questions people ask before they apply
Do both spouses have to come?
Yes. This is non-negotiable, and it is the whole point. Serving one spouse without the other means baking a cake with half the ingredients. The roadmap that comes out of Tentmakers is built for the couple, the family, and the calling together. Both of you need to be in the room.
How long does an engagement last?
Guests typically stay two nights, three days. You arrive the first evening and share dinner together. The next day is the intensive itself: a full day, with intentional breaks for resting, not a forced march. Brent and Erin don’t clock-watch; they go until the work is done. Guests are welcome to stay longer, calendar and lodge allowing, to let what surfaced settle, keep listening for what God is saying, and explore Montana instead of rushing back into the busyness of life.
What does a typical day look like?
The strengths work with Pamela usually anchors the first session. Deep-dive conversations with Brent and Erin fill the working hours. Meals are shared together. Time is built in for Montana to do its work. The roadmap gets built toward the end. Nothing is rushed.
Is this a retreat or a consulting engagement?
Both. That is what makes it different. It is immersive, relational, and led by the Holy Spirit. It is also strategic, practical, and you leave with a written roadmap. Most leaders have had one or the other. Almost none have had both at the same time.
What do we actually leave with?
A written roadmap reverse-engineered from where God is calling you, filtered through both of your strengths and your family’s hard lines. Clear next steps in priority order. A strengths profile for both of you. And for writers and speakers, a framework for the message you were born to tell. You leave with something you can act on the moment you get home. Plus post-engagement coaching, so the plan doesn’t die on a shelf.
How do we know if we are ready?
If you are both willing to show up, both humble enough to hear hard things, and both ready to do something with what you hear, you are ready. The application is the right next step. Brent and Erin read every one personally and reach out directly if it is a fit.
How much does it cost?
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
Counselor, Gallup Certified CliftonStrengths Coach, Leadership Coach, Speaker, Author
Recommended Reading
and Resources
- “Hidden in Christ” by James Bryan Smith (30 short devotionals on Living as God’s Beloved)
Your whole self needs to show up. These tools help.
Most leaders arrive at Golden Eagle Lodge carrying more than they realize. Not because they are weak. Because they have been giving everything they have for a long time with very little room to recover.
Genuine transformation, the kind that sticks and multiplies when you go home, requires your whole self to be present. That means your body, not just your mind and your vision. Every wellness tool at the lodge is completely optional and available throughout your stay. Use all of them. Use none of them. What matters is that you leave having given yourself permission to actually rest.
Sunlighten Infrared Sauna
The Sunlighten uses infrared light to warm your body from the inside out, promoting cellular repair, reduced inflammation, and lower cortisol levels. It is restorative in the truest sense of the word.
Shiftwave
The Shiftwave delivers sound frequencies and pulsed pressure waves directly through the body to shift your nervous system out of stress and into genuine rest, often within minutes. Many guests describe it as the first time they have truly felt still in years.
Cold Plunge Therapy
A short, deliberate cold immersion that triggers the release of powerful neurotransmitters that can elevate mood, sharpen focus, improve mental clarity, and leave you feeling energized and refreshed.
Sedona Pro PEMF Mat
The Sedona Mat delivers gentle electromagnetic pulses that support pain relief, better sleep, reduced inflammation, and improved energy at the cellular level. You simply lie down and let your body do what it already knows how to do.
Chroma Trinity
An all-in-one light system that combines red, near-infrared, daylight, and narrowband UVB wavelengths into a single device. Together, these wavelengths reflect key parts of the natural sunlight spectrum commonly experienced throughout the day.
The first step is simple.