Revisiting the person of peace: A response to A. Matthews

Abstract

Luke 10:1–16 records Jesus sending a group of 70 (in some texts 72) disciples to proclaim the kingdom. If an open-hearted “child of peace” welcomed them, the messengers were to stay with them, blessing and evangelizing them and their household. Since the 1960s, proponents of the “person of peace strategy” have derived from this text a methodology for contemporary disciple-making. Matthews, writing in this journal, critiques the strategy as a hermeneutically weak misreading of the text, which hijacks instructions intended only for the original hearers, and uncritically applies them today. Matthews does accept that Luke 10 contains principles relevant to contemporary mission, but for reasons of space he declines to say what these principles may be. I attempt to identify these principles through a missional reading approach and ask how Luke 10 forms communities for mission then and now. I conclude that its prime purpose is to form Christians to be interdependent messengers of profound peace, who seek out interdependent children of hospitable peace. I then apply these insights to our current missiological moment. Finally, in light of this discussion I assess the specific “person of peace strategy” itself. While I offer some criticisms, I find more to appreciate about the strategy than Matthews does.