Raising Up Leaders
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, we aim to not only be a global family of churches, but also a multi-generational family of churches. And to that end, we need to continue to raise up and develop new leaders. And you have some thoughts about that.
Mark Prater:
I do. If God should be merciful to Sovereign Grace and we exist as a denomination for, I hope, generations to come, it's the multi-generational piece I've been thinking about recently. And we've been taking steps as a Leadership Team to really develop leaders so that as old guys like me begin to fade out, we've got men who are ready to lead. And as I think about our future, I'm just so grateful I'm in Sovereign Grace because we just have good men. We have good pastors in Sovereign Grace.
Just a quick story. Jeff Purswell, Jared Mellinger and I were meeting yesterday via Zoom, finishing up some planning for the first Sovereign Grace Journal that will be released in the Spring, we're hoping in April. And Jared was sharing the story where he sent some assignments for pastors in our denomination to write articles, to contribute to this first journal. And the responses he got back were basically, “Hey don't feel like you have to use this. If this doesn't work, no problem.” It's just those expressions of humility that you consistently see in Sovereign Grace pastors—that our guys aren't pining to be published in our journal is another way to say it. They're really just willing to serve. And I've been just very effected by that this week throughout over the last 24 hours, actually, just as I think about the men in Sovereign Grace.
So, as I think about our future, I think it's very bright because God has given us good men and good pastors. But we also want to take steps of planning. So, over the last, I think four or five years now, we've had a Leadership Development group and we've gotten to a place where some of those men in that group have transitioned onto the Leadership Team—Dave Taylor, Eric Turbedsky, Jon Payne and Jared Mellinger. So, we recently, at our retreat, just thought it's time to rethink our approach to Leadership Development. And, so, what we did is we decided to form two groups. The first one is what we're calling a National Leaders Fellowship. Almost all of those guys have been in the previous Leadership Development group. But they also hold significant extra local responsibilities. They might be a Regional Leader, or they might be on the Executive Committee, Polity Committee, or Theology Committee, serving in some significant way. And so we want to continue to develop them. And that group will be a group that we'll work with in a sort of semi-permanent way evaluating whether they want to continue in that group annually.
And then we formed a second group which we're just calling it a Leadership Development group. Those are guys that we haven't drawn together yet and have worked with. They would trend younger. And there's about, I think about 10-12 guys in that group. And we just believed that they potentially would serve extra locally in the future, maybe a Regional Leader, maybe on a national committee, maybe on the Leadership Team. And so we're going to pull them together for an annual retreat and then we'll evaluate with them whether they continue the following year. So we're really excited about this and love being with men that we can just pour into and invest into that we hope strengthens us for our future.
Benjamin Kreps:
That's great. Wonderful idea. And what kinds of things will you be emphasizing in this new Leadership Development group and then continuing to emphasize in the Fellowship?
Mark Prater:
Yeah, there'll be different things that we'll just kind of think through. I mean, things that we've done in the past are that Jeff's taught on Biblical discernment and how do you cultivate biblical discernment. Because that's really important for a leader to have good theological discernment. We’ve talked about ways of how you respond to critique and criticism, how you should think about your reputation—not only as an individual, but for your church or for denomination. We've done some sort of case studies type thing where we said, “Here's some of the challenges that we are facing in Sovereign Grace as a Leadership Team. How would you solve them? How would you address them?” And we've taken the group and we've broken down the small groups and they'd make presentations. That was really exciting to see some of the ways that our young men were thinking about how to serve our denomination. So just some of the things we're doing to try to both expose them and equip them for extra local leadership.
Benjamin Kreps:
Excellent. Well, it's happy to hear. Not surprised, but it's always happy to hear about Sovereign Grace pastors not looking for self-promotion, but for Christ promotion. And that's been what I've experienced in relationships here in Sovereign Grace. And I'm also happy to hear about how you're stepping into developing more leaders for our future. So thank you, Mark. And thank you everyone for watching and we'll see you here soon. Bye for now.