Leadership Team Retreat Recap

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. As everyone in Sovereign Grace knows by now, announced last year, I believe, and maybe it was even before that, but that recently the Leadership Team has expanded to include several younger guys to help you guys benefit from the grace in some other pastors in Sovereign Grace. And we benefit as well. You guys had a retreat last week. Tell us about that.

Mark Prater:

We were together there for most of the week, Tuesday through Friday. And it was just a very good retreat. I thought that it would be good just to remind folks why we do these retreats. Keep in mind that we're a Leadership Team that's spread out geographically, serving in different churches. Seven of the eight of us are here in the States and, of course, Dave Taylor traveled all the way from Sydney, Australia to this retreat.

So, these retreats are very important because they accomplish some things that I want to accomplish in building a Leadership Team. One is to deepen our relationships as we serve together as a team. One of the values in Sovereign Grace is building relationally. We want to model that by the way we build together relationally as a Leadership Team. One of my specific prayers for this retreat and a second objective for the retreat is I wanted these men who I have the joy to lead to be refreshed. Because in most cases they are leading. I believe five of the eight guys are senior pastors. Obviously Jeff has leadership responsibility in so many ways. And so they're typically in context where they're leading. And so, I wanted to have a context where they're not responsible to lead, even though they work very, very hard. And that was one of my prayers for them that they would be refreshed.

Third, is to be encouraged. And if we're going to lead a group of churches that is marked by the grace of encouragement that comes from the gospel, then we should model that in our own lives.

And then, fourth, we just worked very hard over the few days that were together and seeking to serve the pastors and churches that we have the privilege to serve.

So, of those four, I began the retreat by taking up probably a good hour or more just encouraging the team overall and encouraging each of the men. And I did that together, as a team, so that each of the other guys could hear the encouragement for the guy that was being encouraged. And I think it set a tone for the retreat that I really wanted. So that's really why we get together. And it's always a joy.

It also might be good to remind people who's on the Leadership Team. I mentioned Jeff Purswell, our Director of Theology, Tommy Hill, our Director of Finance and Operations, Rich Richardson who serves in Latin America and Mexico for us. I mentioned Dave Taylor, who traveled from Sydney, our Director of Emerging Nations, Jon Payne, our Director of Church Development, and Jared Mellinger, who's really taken responsibility for a number of things, but publications in particular. And then Eric Turbedsky travelled all the way from Orange, California, our Director of Church Planting.

So, from my perspective, it's an Allstar team.

Benjamin Kreps:

Yeah.

Mark Prater:

And a great group of guys to work with. The younger guys, as you mentioned, Ben, that joined the team a little over a year ago, Jared Mellinger, Jon Payne, Eric Turbedsky and Dave Taylor. They are really bringing it and they are serving the Leadership Team and by extension, therefore, our pastors and churches really well. And obviously we're thinking about getting them experience leading on a denominational level, so that there's a smooth transition of leadership somewhere down the road, whenever that might be. So that's why we do what we do. And that's who's on the Leadership Team.

Benjamin Kreps:

Excellent, fine men, fine pastors. What did you guys spend your time doing over the past few days of the retreat?

Mark Prater:

We had a very full schedule. I usually have a very full agenda knowing that we're not going to get through everything. And we didn't get through everything because I believe the Spirit of God led us during this retreat. And it's just the kindness of God to smile upon us and lead us in conversations and to go down roads some of the roads that weren't planned. And those were maybe some of the most fruitful conversations we had. So, I'm affected by the goodness of God towards this team and towards our family of churches.

We started the retreat with a longer conversation sort of under the category of cultural influences that may be impacting our churches. And began that conversation by asking Jeff—and I usually do this at every retreat—but for Jeff to sort of give his thoughts on current theological trends that he's seeing, and that we need to be aware of and equip our pastors to protect their churches from, or to strengthen them our pastors and churches in. And so, Jeff did a brilliant job of walking us through some of those theological categories.

He talked about complementarianism, for example, and the importance of that. He talked about gender ideology, some of the things that you see in the culture today. And then I asked each of the guys on the team to come prepared to answer this question, “What cultural influences do you see in the culture that potentially could impact our family of churches?” And so, some of the categories we talked in would be things like suspicion of authority and institutions, which the church is an institution obviously created by God and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. But that suspicion exists in our culture and could influence, for example. We talked about the discourse that it's happening in the culture is an angry discourse. It's kind of the anger of the age. That's the term I used. And are we as Christians sounding similar to the world in the way we talk about issues or even disagree over issues, which we're going to. So that's another category that we talked in. And those are just few of the categories that really started the retreat.

And I did that purposely because it was going to inform much of the rest of the retreat. So, we did some planning of the Pastors Conference. And we've got a theme, which I'm not going to share yet, but I am so excited.

Benjamin Kreps:

Come on!

Mark Prater:

That'll be another future podcast.

Benjamin Kreps:

Come on, break some news right here!

Mark Prater:

Yeah, yeah. Just to keep our viewership up! But after planning, just a bit of the Pastors Conference with the theme, I, and all the guys, we were just like, “We can't wait for the Pastors Conference to happen!” And, by the way, this Pastors Conference will be our 40th year as a family of churches. So that obviously shaped our thinking as well beyond in the cultural influences. So we already got some main session topics potentially put together. We talked through some breakout session possibilities. Those aren't all finalized yet. But we did that.

The other reason I started the retreat that way is we think about leadership development and what are the topics that we want to cover with our Leadership Development group. So that's another reason why I wanted to start with sort of that bigger picture cultural influences that we went through. Jon Payne is doing a great job as our Director of Church Development. And he just did this effective job of just walking through sort of the state of the churches in Sovereign Grace and just his overall thoughts about where he sees strengths and where he sees vulnerabilities. That was a very good conversation. So grateful for him.

We also we had a subcommittee—and we work in subcommittees now a little bit more—of Jared Mellinger, Jon Payne, and Dave Taylor. We asked them to bring a conference strategy. So obviously we got the Pastors Conference. There are sometimes regional conferences. Do we want to do any other conferences in Sovereign Grace, like a young adult’s conference, for example? And we just don't want to be doing conferences. We want to have a strategy for them. So walked us through that. We made some decisions based on that.

And then Dave Taylor—it was so good having Dave Taylor at the retreat just for his accent—but he contributed so significantly. And he gave an Emerging Nation's update and just kind of walked us through different issues that he sees in other parts of the world. And it was both humbling and encouraging. Humbling in the sense that we get to partner with brothers and sisters in one nation that are facing real persecution. Encouraging to see churches already responding to the new global partnership pathway. And he brought with him signed letters of intent that he and I signed together to sort of mark the moment of adding about 13 candidate churches now to Sovereign Grace.

So those are some of the things we did. You can tell, I could probably keep talking about this. But this podcast will be too long, so I'll stop.

Benjamin Kreps:

It's already gone long! But it's helpful to hear about what you guys are up to. And grateful for the way all of you men on the Leadership Team are investing in Sovereign Grace. Thank you to the wives of the men on the Leadership Team for releasing their husbands to do things like retreats that serve them, serve us. And thank you, Mark, for leading that retreat and the Leadership Team. And thank you all for watching or reading. We'll see you here, Lord willing, next week. Bye for now.