Conference Resources
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Benjamin Kreps:
Welcome to the Mark Prater podcast where our aim is to connect our global family of churches with our Executive Director. Mark, we talked about the Pastors Conference on the last video that we did, but we want to talk about it just a little bit more before we move forward. There was just a number of wonderful sermons and breakouts. I know I've been recommending them to my church but you've been hearing from some guys about several ways to utilize these resources, to serve our church. Could you tell us about that?
Mark Prater:
I would love to, and I want to dedicate one more podcast to the conference and to the resources available through the really the excellent preaching we enjoyed, not only in the main sessions, but the breakout sessions as well. So, I thought we'd start with that. With the main sessions, I sent out an email with some ideas to all of our pastors. First of all, if there's an elder that didn't attend the conference, please take time to listen to all the main sessions and the breakout sessions. The other idea is to get the main sessions to your leaders and think about leader’s meetings where you can use them. Bruce Chick told me, for example, that they are dedicated in the next several leader’s meetings to just watching one of the main sessions and then discussing it as leaders in the church. I thought that was a great idea in terms of getting them in the hands of members.
One of the things we're doing at Covenant Fellowship is we send out a weekly email to our church. It's kind of a Sunday recap of our Sunday meeting and then just the events that are happening that week. And what we're doing now is we're featuring one main session message for each of those emails weekly until we've worked through all of those so that are the members of our church have an opportunity to watch them. So that's another idea. One of the things I also mentioned is that if you are developing young men for leadership or potentially pastoral ministry, I'd really encourage you to have them watch Jared's message or listening to Jared's message on partnership because it casts a wonderful vision for the partnership that we share in sovereign grace. So those are a few ideas related to the main session messages.
Benjamin Kreps:
That's great and helpful. We have a communications hub called Realm that we use at our church. And we just posted the resources. We’re already hearing from a couple of people about especially CJ's message, how it was deeply shaping and helpful. So, yeah, I mean, these are wonderful resources, but there were also breakouts there. I got to attend the leadership development breakout, which you led actually. And if you're leading something and Greg Dirnberger is involved, then I, I probably want to be there. And it was very helpful. But I wish I could have been at all of them. Thoughts about the breakouts and how we use that?
Mark Prater:
Love the thoughts on that. And, by the way, we should have audio for the breakout sessions up in about a week, I would guess. So, a couple of breakout sessions I would really encourage entire pastoral teams to listen to and discuss—and you can listen to it obviously individually but come together to discuss it. The first will be Josh Blount’s. It was really about the cultural pressures that churches are facing today. And he kind of broke it into three cultural pressures: critical theories, political idolatry, and the modern self. And obviously he's taken that from Carl Truman's title of his book regarding the modern self. And Josh just does a brilliant job unpacking the way that will equip pastors to biblically inform their churches of those cultural pressures and to protect their churches from them.
So, I would highly recommend that one and then the breakout on preaching. That would be a good one for all pastors to listen to, and then come together as an eldership and discuss what you learned from Jeff's breakout on preaching, How you can grow in preaching, because preaching, as you well know, Ben, is something that you just never arrive at. You always feel like you’re growing in it—at least I do anyway. That will be really, really helpful.
You mentioned the one that I led on leadership development with Greg Dirnberger and Steve Whitacre.. I think that'd be one that if you've got guys on your team or guys who specifically have responsibility for leadership development, make sure that they listened to that one and can benefit from the resources that are there.
And then the other two were related. First of all, there's one on parenting. I've heard a lot of good feedback on the parenting breakout session. So that would be one that I think you could make available to your church or to all the parents in your church and find a context to even potentially discuss it with them. And then Rob Flood, along with his wife Gina and Gary and Betsy Ricucci, led one on marriage. And, specifically the focus of how to maintain and strengthen our complimentarian convictions first of all in the home. That's where it's got to begin. But, also, in the church as well. And that was just an excellent breakout session as well, that you could devote a married couples meeting to something like that, where you listen to the breakout, and discuss it. So just some ideas to kick around and at least throw out there to maybe stimulate other ideas that might better serve your church. But the point being let's try to maximize all of the good teaching we received last week in Orlando.
Benjamin Kreps:
Yeah. Thanks for the suggestions. What a gift God has given us in Sovereign Grace to have so many gifted preachers and teachers to serve us so well. And the last conference certainly involved all of that. So, thanks, Mark, for your thoughts. Thank you for watching—everyone who is watching or reading. The holidays have begun by the time they read this or watch this. It'll already be past Thanksgiving. So Merry Christmas, I guess. And happy Thanksgiving. Alright, God bless you. And we'll see you here soon. Bye for now.