Partnership for Salvation: Finding a Person of Peace

This week we take on the Luke 10 passage where Jesus told his 72 other missionaries to plan to find a person of peace. Notice that Jesus didn’t tell these guys to go set up a massive evangelism campaign; actually he was going to do that later. Instead he wanted them to initiate a base of operations through finding a person of peace.
Just what is a “person of peace”, “man of peace”, or “son of peace”? According to David Watson, former IMB missionary and now VP of Global Church Planting with CityTeam Ministries, the person of peace is “the one God has prepared to receive the Gospel for the first time into a community.” Based on the Luke 10 passage along with some other passages, David Watson developed a “Person of Peace strategy”. Part of this involved sending our missionaries in pairs, asking the Lord for harvest workers, staying focused on the main task, greeting a house by offering peace, and then healing the sick and preaching the Kingdom message. According to Watson, “the Person of Peace teaching is an entry strategy to new communities… this is radically different from traditional church planting methods. In the Person of Peace strategy, the evangelist has one job – Find the Person of Peace. This person may be from any walk of life, but he or she will welcome you, listen to your message, help you with your livelihood, and allow you to stay in the home, and influence his or her family and the community for the sake of the Gospel.” I’d encourage you to look at David’s blog, especially making yourself aware of his mp3 section for CPM Level1 Training and CPM Awareness Videos.
Just what makes a good person of peace search? Can you accomplish this through teaching and preaching? Through street witnessing? Through seminars? Most likely not. Most likely these contacts come through finding one person who accepts your teaching authority in his/her life and allows you to begin training him/her to be an evangelist. Keep in mind that this strategy is specifically geared toward starting a new work in a new community where there are no other existing “voices”.
According to the Luke 10 passage, if you can’t find a person that is ready to accept the gospel and begin a base in his home, you move on to the next place. The goal is to find the place where the gospel can be introduced to a community, an apartment complex, or a subdivision. It is in this type of establishing a base for ministry in a person’s home that the person of peace can be considered a partner in salvation or evangelism. You work through his contacts, his circle of influence. This almost goes in direct contradiction to most popular church growth plans that tend to be attractional rather than missional. Instead of casting a wide net for responders, you move in directly to one person’s oikos and exhaust those contacts by equipping the person of peace to be the soulwinner and trainer of his own friends and family.
So how do find this person of peace? I would give the following biblical steps:
1. Pray- Jesus said to “ask the Lord of the harvest for workers”. This makes sense only when you understand that you’re going out to seek out workers/ persons of peace.
2. Go- like lambs among wolves; realize this is a dangerous task, so go and stay focused. By necessity, this means you can’t sit around and wait for somebody to appear; you have to go find them.
3. Don’t stop- if you don’t find a person of peace, leave a witness, and then move on to find him/her in the next location.
4. Rejoice- we are told in vs. 21 that the report of these 72 returning even made Jesus pretty happy!