The Person of Peace is the one God has prepared to receive the Gospel for the first time into a community.Our understanding of the Person of Peace changes the way we plant churches.  It radically increases the number of churches planted.  We have seen church planting teams go from planting a few churches per year to planting dozens of churches every year, and in some cases, even hundreds of new churches every year.

Appropriate Evangelism is the combination of the message of the Bible and the life of a Believer lived in obedience as a testimony to the transforming power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Many evangelism techniques focus on only one aspect of evangelism – personal testimony or the witness of the Word.  Appropriate Evangelism incorporates the witness of the Word and the living testimony of a transformed life.  Appropriate Evangelism is sensitive to the worldview/culture of the hearer/observer and answers in a loving way any questions that may arise from worldview issues and cultural barriers.

I’m in a country where Christian missionaries were forced to leave over forty years ago, and are still not allowed.  When the missionaries left, a few struggling, young leaders were in place.  The government and the culture were highly anti-Christian.  Many of these leaders gave up.  But one young man committed himself to making a difference.  In the forty plus years since he was left on his own he and his team have started more than 3,000 churches, mostly underground.

Ministry is the meeting of people’s needs inside and outside of the church.  It is our ministry to one another as Christians that demonstrates our love for each other to non-believers.  It is our ministry to everyone that opens the door to share our faith and the Gospel with those who do not yet know Christ as their personal Savior.

I depart for Bangkok, Thailand, on Tuesday, 22 Jan.  From Thailand I make my way to Burma. (Click here to learn more.) From Burma proceed to Singapore and Indonesia to meet with representatives from Indonesia.

A disciple is one who embraces and obeys all the teachings of Christ and endeavors by word and deed to make more disciples.A convert is one who practices a religion to which he or she was not born, and may or may not encourage others to convert.

The first week of this trip was spent training workers from restricted countries in Africa.   “Restricted” means that one cannot openly share the Gospel with non-Christians or start new churches.   The men and women who work in these situations risk their freedom, and in some cases, their lives, in order to share the Gospel we take for granted.  This describes the majority of the people I train.

The focus of evangelism in the West is individuals.  We have developed an entire industry around personal evangelism.  There are techniques that teach us how to lead individuals to Christ in every imaginable situation. 

I depart on 1 January 2008 for Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire.  The first half of the trip I will be conducting training for a group of leaders from countries I cannot visit.  The second half of the trip I will participate in strategy meetings for Sub Sahara Africa.  I return to the US on 12 January.
  
Please be in prayer for these leaders as we discuss obedience-based discipleship, leadership, and church planting.
 

In a recent meeting of the top 100 church planters in our ministry, we looked for common elements among these high producing leaders.  Each of these church planters, along with the teams they led, started more than 20 churches per year, each.  One group started more than 500 churches in the previous year.  The only common element we found in all these church planters was their commitment to prayer.