Florida Man Plants Deaf Church with Hopes of Reaching World’s Largest Unreached People Group

Peter Dublin loves surprising people.

“No one expects me to be what I am,” he says. “Especially deaf people. When I meet them, they all think I’m deaf too. And then when they find out I’m not, I always get that look like, ‘Wait—you’re hearing? Wow.’”

“I love that. It never gets old seeing that happen.”

For as long as he can remember, Peter has been a surpriser of people, deaf and hearing. “It started with my parents,” he says. “They had good friends who had a son born deaf, and my mom and dad decided they needed a support system, so they learned to sign.”

“I was born into that, and that’s how by the time I was six years old, I was fluent in sign language.”

For Peter Dublin, now a hearing member of the Deaf community, childhood language immersion led to a preteen ministry opportunity. When he was 12 years old, he began serving as an interpreter at his church, a position he held “for decades,” he says, “until I began to see something I couldn’t really explain.”

People were falling asleep.

That’s what Peter started noticing when he’d interpret sermons for deaf people in his church. “At first, I thought, ‘Man, I must be doing a pretty bad job,’” he says. “But then I started learning about how deaf people process and retain information. It’s completely different from a hearing person.”

Researchers have found that for the deaf and hard of hearing, following an interpreter is like watching a movie with subtitles—except the subtitles are moving, three-dimensional, and disappear immediately. “To follow what’s being said, a deaf person can’t look away, not even for a second,” Peter says. “That produces an overwhelming amount of mental fatigue. So, when I was interpreting for these people in church, it’s not that they were disinterested or disengaged.”

“They just needed something different.”

Several years ago, Peter’s church, Olive Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida, sent him out to plant Replicate Deaf Church, a congregation that has since become, as Peter says, “something different.”

“We started with 15 people, and our intention was to plant a house church that would stay intentionally small,” he says. “We really wanted to go deep with people. We wanted to do life-on-life discipleship—that’s difficult for most hearing churches to provide—and we wanted to raise up disciples who could plant even more house churches to carry the gospel to what is essentially an unreached people group.”

There are at least 70 million Deaf and hard-of-hearing people around the world, and studies show less than 2% of them know Jesus. “If those numbers are accurate, that would make the Deaf and hard of hearing the largest unreached people group in the world,” Peter says. “And from what I’ve seen, they’re not just unreached—they’re forgotten. All the great moves of God throughout history have been focused on the hearing world. There’s never been any kind of a revival or spiritual awakening in the Deaf world.”

“Like Jesus says, the harvest really is plentiful but the workers are very, very few.”

Progress for Replicate Deaf Church has been slow but sure. They’ve helped launch another house church in Orlando and two more in South America. But Peter, still a surpriser of people, dreams of how God might shock the world on an even grander scale.

“Everywhere I go, when I meet people, and they find out I work with Deaf people, I’ll hear, ‘You know what? I’ve always wanted to learn sign language,’” he says. “I believe God’s been trying to raise up an army of hearing believers for a long time, and learning the language, that’s the first step.”

“Now, we just need laborers in the harvest field, because there are millions of Deaf and hard-of-hearing people who are still unreached. So, I’m praying God will light a fire inside our churches to do whatever is necessary to share Christ with them, because I really believe Deaf and hard of hearing people—they’re at the end of the Great Commission.”

“They’re the finish line.”

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