In church planting circles, the “person of peace” is a concept addressed on a regular basis.  This concept finds support from passages such as Luke 10:5-6; John 4:28-30, 39-42; Mark 5:18-20; and Acts 10:24; 16:15, 30-34; 18:8.  The concept generally refers to the first few people who come to faith and are able to carry the gospel faster and farther throughout the population than the church planting team.

When approaching a large population segment, people group, etc., the church planting team should not be asking the question, “How can we personally evangelize all of these people?”  Rather, they should be asking, “How can we reach a few people with the gospel, and equip and return them (Eph 4:11-12) to reach their families, friends, and acquaintances?” 

I want to offer a simple approach to assist you and your team in locating persons of peace.  Simple is the key word.  A portion of the following information is taking from my lastest book, Discovering Church Planting.       

Using the P.A.W. Approach

In order to find persons of peace, I often encourage teams to use the P.A.W. approach: Pray, Act, and Watch. Though this paradigm is not a linear model–but rather all three aspects, at times, are happening simultaneously–for the sake of explanation, I will address each aspect individually.

Pray

Prayer is a critical component of any missionary work.  Before teams enter the field, they should already be spending significant amounts of time in prayer. After the team arrives, it should be praying that the Lord would open hearts to the gospel, asking for “Lydias,” who will be the initial believers to form the new churches (Acts 16:11-15) and influence their communities.

Act

As the team prays, it must get out into the community among the people. Churches are not planted in offices. The team must love and serve the community. It must connect with people relationally while sharing the gospel among the highways and hedges. As the team acts with humility and connects with the people, the Lord will provide opportunities for the good news to be proclaimed. There are multitudes of ways a team can be active: Bible studies, service projects, sports camps, having neighbors over for dinner, cookouts, block parties, street evangelism, door-to-door visitation, meeting families at parks, or simply connecting with people in restaurants and coffee shops.

Watch

While sharing the good news with contextually relevant methods, the team should watch where the Spirit of God is working.For example, though Paul normally began his work in the synagogues, his strategy in Philippi deviated from the norm, possibly because no synagogue existed.  After spending “some days” in the city (Acts 16:12), the missionaries finally located a place of prayer by a river. It was at this location that people were engaged in the spiritual activity of seeking God. Realizing that the opportunity to speak to the women gathered there was not by chance, Paul shared the gospel, which resulted in the first believers in Philippi (Acts 16:14).

Arguing that the fields are “ripe for harvest,” Robert Logan and Neil Cole (Beyond Church Planting) encouraged church planters, “Open your eyes to find the fields” containing “good soil.” As church planters use the P.A.W. approach to finding persons of peace, it is not difficult to see God already at work among the fields of this world.

According to Logan and Cole, such receptive peoples tend to fall into six categories:

• Bad people make good soil; there is a lot of fertilizer in their lives (Luke 5:32).
• Those in poverty are often good, receptive soil (James 2:5).
• Young people are often more receptive than older (Matthew 18:3).
• Those searching for God in the occult or other religions can actually be more open than you think (Matthew 7:7).
• The uneducated and the powerless are often good soil (1 Corinthians 1:27).
• Those deemed insignificant and discriminated against (1 Corinthians 1:28-29).

These are my general thoughts on reaching persons of peace.  It is not rocket science.  Of course, neither is church planting.  Many times we make it more complicated than it is biblically intended to be. 

So, now the question is:  How will you apply the P.A.W. Approach to your context?