Montana, Tentmakers, and holy hospitality

Hey Beloved,

I’m writing this with that particular kind of tired that feels clean. The kind you get when you’ve been with people face to face, when you’ve dreamt a lot, when you’ve sat at a table long enough for the conversation to get honest, and when you’ve remembered (again) that life is not mainly lived in the inbox.

I am traveling back from Whitefish, Montana, and I keep catching myself smiling at random moments today. Not because it was some flashy trip. It wasn’t. It was the opposite.

It was home. It was warmth. It was the kind of hospitality that doesn’t feel like a performance… it feels like a return.

And before I tell you what we built, I want to tell you who I was with.

Brent and Erin Weidemann run a company called Tentmakers. BTW, they also built a multimillion-dollar publishing company, coach and advise, and more importantly are building an amazing family with 4 daughters.

Their mission is simple and serious in the best way:

To come alongside leaders with strategic guidance and support, so they can maintain focus, cultivate visionary ambitions, foster sustainable growth, and navigate effectively to avoid mission drift.

In other words: they help good leaders stay true.

Not just productive. Not just growing. True.

And here’s the thing. The delivery mechanism for that kind of work is not only frameworks and calls and strategic plans.

It’s rooted in hospitality.

They host leaders at their property. They set a table. They pour coffee. They make room for bigger dreams and the weight that comes with them. They create space for clarity to arrive without force. They treat leaders like humans, not like machines that need optimizing.

If you’ve been around Ministry of Welcome for any amount of time, you already know why that hits me in the chest.

Because hospitality is not a side dish to the mission.

Hospitality is the mission.

The Weidemanns’ oldest daughter is 11 (almost 12… and she would want you to know that). And in the Weidemann household, she holds a very official role:

Head of Holy Hospitality.

Not “helper.” Not “tag-along.”

Head.

Which means when guests arrive, she is welcoming. She’s listening. She’s noticing what people might need before they ask. She’s learning how to welcome someone into a space and help them feel safe, seen, and genuinely glad they came.

And here’s the fun part for me: she is the youngest person I’ve ever taught the Unreasonable Hospitality framework to, and she is absolutely dialed.

Not in a cheesy way. Not in a “look at this cute kid” way.

In a “this is what formation looks like” way.

She is being discipled into attentiveness.

Not for applause. Not for social media. Not because it “builds the brand.”

Because it’s simply who they are becoming as a family.

I don’t know how to measure that kind of ROI, but I’m pretty sure heaven keeps a spreadsheet.

We did the work.

Yes, we mapped journeys.
Yes, we elevated touchpoints.
Yes, we talked loyalty, referrals, and growth.

That work matters. Excellence matters. It always will.

But the thread running through the last couple days in Montana was something older than strategy and deeper than performance.

The creative and intentional pursuit of welcoming people into their innate belovedness.

That phrase keeps coming back to me because it puts the whole thing in order.

Hospitality is not just “making people comfortable.”

It’s making a place where they can exhale.

Where they can be more honest than they planned to be.

Where they can remember what’s true about them before they start explaining what they do.

That’s what I watched happen in that home. Over coffee. Over meals. In the spaces between the agenda items.

And it reminded me of something I forget when I’m moving too fast:

Hospitality is doing something deeper than optimizing experiences.

At this point, you already know this: Hospitality is salt.

Quiet. Invisible. Transformative.

It preserves what is good.
It brings out flavor that was already there.
It makes ordinary moments nourishing.

And I think that’s why so much modern “hospitality content” feels like cotton candy. It’s loud, sweet, and it disappears the second you bite it.

But salt doesn’t disappear. It goes into the whole thing.

It changes the room.

It changes the relationship.

It changes the story someone tells on the way home.

There’s a line in Romans that has been orbiting my mind again, not because I want to get preachy, but because it is so plain and so challenging: practice hospitality. Be inventive with it. Take care of the saints.

Not because it scales.

Because it’s who we’re meant to be.

Here’s what I walked away with, and maybe you need this too:

The metrics will follow. They usually do.

But the real impact is what happens when people leave more themselves than when they arrived.

When places feel lighter.

When leaders feel aligned again.

When care is offered before it’s earned.

When someone is welcomed so well they start to believe, even for a moment, that they might actually be beloved.

That’s the kind of hospitality I want to keep designing.

Not as a tactic. Not as a growth lever.

As a way of being in the world that refuses to treat people like outputs.

If you want a simple practice from Montana, here it is:

Be the first to make someone feel safe.

Not with big gestures. Not with forced positivity.

With attention.

With a question that isn’t a trap.

With warmth that doesn’t demand anything back.

You don’t have to call it “holy hospitality” out loud for it to be holy.

You just have to mean it.

And if you’re in a season where you feel the drift, the blur, the pull toward “more” without knowing what “more” is for… maybe the next faithful move is not a major pivot.

Maybe it’s a table.

Maybe it’s a phone call.

Maybe it’s making room for the kind of conversation where the truth can finally show up.

Montana reminded me: you can build a strategy and still keep your soul.

You can grow and still stay true.

You can do excellent work and still make people feel beloved.

That’s the path. That’s the posture. That’s the point.

More soon,

Nathan

P.S. I keep feeling it more and more: 2026 is the Year of Hospitality. If you know someone who needs this reminder, would you forward this to them or share it? Let’s start a quiet movement of welcome, one table and one story at a time.