Sarah J spoke with Paul Gibbs, founder of Pais Project

Paul Gibbs

Paul Gibbs is the founder of the Pais Project, working in eight nations with schools and churches to help bridge the gap and help young people find their purpose. Paul is a speaker, mentor and visionary whose desire is to make missionaries wherever he goes. Having released his first book Sarah J found out the history of Pais and got the low-down on the trilogy.

Sarah: You founded Pais Project in Manchester, but you're now based in America, how did that happen?

Paul: We started in Manchester in a place called Loston, in a church called Sherial church. Essentially Pais is helping churches; we supply teams of people each year and they live with families in the church and they go into local schools on behalf of the church as missionaries. They go into local churches to help make missionaries of the young people.

My vision was to just reach north Manchester, but eventually we had people coming from all parts of the country on Pais wanting to go back to places like Birmingham, Walsall and Croydon. Eventually we placed Pais in loads of different cities. Then through the internet people found out about Pais from overseas. They would come and train with us and then they would go back to various different nations around the world. One day one of my staff members in Vancouver, Canada was at a seminar with a gentleman who was talking about something called the connecting church; a church that connects with its community. He was saying that the missing piece for him was working how to connect with local schools. She spoke to him afterwards and to cut a long story short, he loved the context of Pais so much that he said, come to America, we've got far more resources to base a global movement out of, so we moved over here.

Sarah: Is the Pais work still active here in the UK?

Paul: Yes, the Pais Great Britain headquarters is in the north of England in Burnley Lancashire, but it's just that there are teams in eight different nations and on four different continents.

Sarah: If someone would like to do a gap year and do something like the Pais Project, how do they get in touch with you and what kind of things can they expect from a Pais year out?

Paul: We offer one and three year apprenticeships. People can do other times as well, but the minimum is one year. The apprenticeship is a bit like learning leadership and discipleship, learning how to reach young people, but a general kind of leadership and also communication skills. We offer 200 hours of seminary Bible College style training. There's a lot of hands on working with young people. The way people can find out about Pais is mainly by going to our website www.paisproject.com. We also have a Facebook page that's updated pretty much every day with new videos and bits from around the world and that's facebook.com/paisproject.

Sarah: Why did you call it Pais?

Paul: When I was working on my own in schools, I initially represented my church plus some other ministers in north Manchester. I would come back every month and talk to those ministers about what was happening, what God was doing and they kept saying what Paul's doing is great and what Paul's doing is this. I felt I wanted to create more ownership and take it away from me and give it more of a name.

It was totally uninspired. Me and my pastor sat down and wondered what word we could use. He said there's no word for teenager, but there's a word in New Testament Greek for a child servant of a king, so Pais is the English pronunciation of a New Testament word, which means child servants of the king.

Sarah: And out of all this you decided that you would write your first book?

Paul: Absolutely, yes, it's called The Line and the Dot and its part of a trilogy. It's about how you get a vision. How do you know it's God? What's going to happen next if you do get a vision? The book is really aimed at helping people that know that God has a vision for their life but warning them as well. There's lots of books encouraging people to have a vision but very few practical books on what happens next; all the different problems you're going to face and what I learned going through those problems. I tell my story as an illustration. I believe there are four stages that all pioneers will go through and I talk about that in the book. It's also the story of Pais and hopefully it's a good read!

Sarah: The four stages of pioneering that you write about are revelation, revolution, resistance and reproduction. In a nutshell can you explain that to me?