How the Leadership Team Retreat Went

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Benjamin Kreps:

Hey everyone. And welcome to the Mark Prater podcast, where our aim is to connect our global family of churches with our Executive Director. Mark, those who watched the podcast, read the podcast last week, know that you were going to a Leadership Team retreat this week. In fact, you just got back yesterday from that retreat, you shared with us a number of exciting developments that you guys were going to be praying over, planning into. How did the retreat go?

Mark Prater:

The retreat was just outstanding. In fact, I was talking with Jeff yesterday at the airport before we flew back to our respective cities. And he said, and I agree with him, that it was probably one of our best retreats from a strategic standpoint, and the depth of conversation on some of the strategic items that we discussed. But I think for everyone it's just good for us to remember why the Leadership Team exists.

The Leadership Team exists because it was put into our Book of Church Order (BCO) when it was ratified back in April, 2013. The purpose of the Leadership Team is to serve our pastors and our churches. And to hopefully do all of that by the grace of God, but for the glory of God. And so one expression of that during the retreat was we actually just went through the list of churches in Sovereign Grace and prayed for every church by name and prayed for the pastors in each of the churches. That really set our hearts in the right place. A reminder for us that we're not only dependent upon God, but we exist as a team to serve our churches. And that was the heartbeat that we carried into all of our really good strategic discussions.

Last week I mentioned in the podcast that we were gonna discuss a global expansion plan, if God allows us to continue to grow, and what it would look like for us to be potentially a multi-generational, global, small denomination. And there's a number of ways to have that conversation. One way that I started the conversation was to think philosophically about it and ask "What is it that we're, we're aiming for?" And obviously we're aiming for a family of churches united in our mission to advance the gospel of Jesus Christ.

But within that, we're seeking to build self-sustaining churches and ecclesiastical nations that also enjoy a vibrant interdependency and we're not quite there yet. And what that really means is that as we expand globally, there's gonna be a bit of a dependency on the churches in the United States. Not just financial resources, but people and time, etcetera. We want to serve our brothers and churches throughout the world in that way, but we don't wanna create an over-dependency upon the churches in the United States. So what we're really aiming for philosophically is a family of churches that are self-sufficient on the local level that are also interdependent in partnership together. So that was just a wonderful conversation.

Another conversaton that I led us into with a bit of trepidation is how we are responding to the opportunities that God is giving us. Wonderful opportunities to partner with churches throughout the world. But should we not just react but have some sort of proactive approach, as well. And as we talked through that we thought there could be a time and place where we call Sovereign Grace churches to pray for a church plant in a strategic city where we don't have a church yet, because we know that city will be influential and lead to the planting of other churches, either in that nation or that part of the world. Now we're not gonna have a map with a bunch of pins on it saying these are the cities we're going to, we really want to be led by the spirit of God. But for example, if we want to continue to have a presence in Asia, Singapore would be a great place to plant a church and to inspire folks to consider praying that way. And as we pray, who knows who might be stirred to say “I wanna go to Singapore and plant a Sovereign Grace church there”. So that was a wonderful conversation for us to have as well as many, many others. I'm just so pleased with how the retreat went.

Benjamin Kreps:

That's excellent. Well, it sounds like God answered the prayers of many of us who were praying for your retreat. And thank you for praying for our church. Very grateful for that prayer. You talked about a number of things that have to do with global possibilities and projects, but you guys also talked about things happening here in the states, including working on planning the pastors conference, coming up soon. Tell us about that.

Mark Prater:

It's coming fast, Ben. It's coming fast. We did spend some more time planning for the pastors conference. By the way, our registration has already exceeded the registrations for last year. And Dave Taylor tells us that there's more folks from outside the states who still plan to register. They haven't done so either because of trying to work out travel or because they're waiting on visas, if they do get them. So we're gonna have a big group of folks, I think a globally diverse group of folks, at our conference this year and we just can't wait for this conference. So we took time and went through each of the main sessions and made some adjustments in message themes. And I think I mentioned this before, we're celebrating 40 years of God's grace at this conference.

And one of the things I believe that we are known for, is preaching Christ and him crucified. So CJ is gonna open our conference on Tuesday night, preaching on the power of the cross and I can't wait for that for that main session. Each of the main sessions have specific themes and ways that we want to equip and care for our pastors and wives. We worked through the breakout sessions again. We have some creative ways to celebrate our 40 year anniversary. And by the way, in celebrating 40 years, we wanna focus on God himself. We want to focus on gratefulness to God for how he has been faithful to us for over 40 years. And how he has been faithful to lead us into a gospel centrality.

So those are some of the creative ideas and themes that we worked on to celebrate 40 years. And I just can't wait for the conference that starts on November 1st, and the day before, our Council of Elders meeting on October 31st. We did some planning for that as well. And I think that it will be a wonderful meeting in many, many ways. So those are some of the things we talked about this week.

Benjamin Kreps:

Wonderful. Can't wait for the conference. So grateful for the Leadership Team and the way that you seek to serve and care for our churches through intentional planning for the pastors conference that we'll get to experience soon. So thank you, Mark, for taking the time to work on that with the rest of the Leadership Team. Thank you everyone for watching or reading. We'll see you here, Lord willing, next week. Bye for now.