Sovereign Grace Executive Committee Retreat

VIIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Ben Kreps:

Hey everyone, and welcome to the Mark Prater podcast where our aim is to connect our global family of Sovereign Grace Churches with our executive director. Mark, you are back from another week of traveling. This time you were in Louisville, Kentucky meeting with the executive committee for your yearly retreat and you want to give us some updates about that. But before you give us updates about how the retreat went, why don't you remind everyone who's watching or reading this podcast who the executive committee is and what they do in Sovereign Grace?

Mark Prater:

Yeah, we had a great week this week in Louisville and very grateful for the men who serve on the executive committee. There may be people who are new listeners or readers of this podcast, some of the members of our churches, and they're wondering what is an executive committee. The executive committee is nine elders, Sovereign Grace elders, who are voted on by the council of elders to serve a four year term on the executive committee. So they're from our churches, men from our churches, and they're voted on by elders in our churches to serve on the committee and the executive committee's responsibility. They have several primary ones, and that would be first of all to oversee and evaluate the leadership team, evaluate me in particular, to oversee our finances, to make sure that our finances are stewarded with integrity and used in the way that our donors intend.

And they also have responsibility sort of in our legal realm related to our bylaws and that kind of thing. So this group of guys is really a good group of guys and I'm very grateful for the executive committee because if you think about it this way, in a nonprofit world, you've got a nonprofit, but there's a board that oversees the nonprofit and what do you have with that is accountability, evaluation, and just other eyes keeping an eye on what Sovereign Grace is doing. So I love that I benefit from their input and evaluation; the leadership team does as well, and it just really brings integrity to ministry, which we are really aiming for, and that's how the BCO was originally written. And we've been meeting for 10 years now in executive committee retreats and those men have done a good job. So that's just a little bit about the executive committee and what they do.

Ben Kreps:

Great. Well, the good news is you didn't get fired.

Mark Prater:

Yeah, I still have my job.

Ben Kreps:

But you were telling me before we started recording that you thought it was a wonderful retreat, and so give us some updates about what happened there.

Mark Prater:

Yeah, I'll just kind of give you some highlights. We began on Tuesday morning and prayed together, and then because we were in Louisville meeting at our building, we were able to do a tour of the Sovereign Grace Music Studio. And this studio is amazing. It is just really, really well done and they're beginning to use it and our people who are followers of Sovereign Grace Music are going to see the benefit of that studio in a fairly short time. So if you gave towards the Sovereign Grace Music Studio, whether your church or you did individually, thank you so much because this studio is top notch and it's going to serve generations to come. So we did a Sovereign Grace Music studio tour. We were all excited about that. We did lunch with the staff there. Just encouraged our staff there in Louisville, which was a wonderful time.

Ken, the chair of the executive committee, just gave an overview. He reminded every executive committee member of what their responsibilities are as an executive committee, and then he turns it over to me and the first thing I do is what I call Sovereign Grace update. And I have a very broad title there because there are a number of things that I'm thinking about or carrying on my heart or implementing that I want them to be aware of. And so I just walk them through different categories. One of them would be, for example, as we expand globally, what is our global strategy? The leadership team took time to just establish seven core strategic points for us to focus on our global strategy because there's a lot of work we have to do where we've got to make sure that we're focusing on the right strategic areas.

And so I walked those through with the executive committee. They love those. I walked through just a few updates related to the development funds and some encouragement of how that money was used. I walked them through just how the leadership team is doing, and I'll talk a little bit more about that. So I did a Sovereign Grace update that was followed by just an update on the strategic plan that I had presented them last year. It was a couple of years ago, or three years ago. They asked me to put together a five to 10 year strategic plan. So this is now, I think the third year of that plan, and each year I tweak it. So I gave them an update on our progress and essentially we accomplished about 90% of that plan as a leadership team. They were just very grateful for that and pleased with that.

And then I presented them an updated version of our strategic plan for 2023, 2024, and just sought to get any input from them. And they looked at it and said, basically, it looks great. And then after that, I walk them through sort of a draft outline of my State of the Union address that I give every year at the Council of Elders. And I do that because I just want them to be aware of it, and it's also an opportunity for them to give me input on my State of the Union. And they had some really helpful input for me. So that was sort of the first day.

Wednesday, the next day, they asked me to give a report of departments and regions. So basically what I do is I walk the executive committee through each department; department of theology, department of music, sovereign grace music, department of church development, church planting, et cetera, and drop into detail of how those departments are doing, how the men leading in each of those departments are doing. And it gives them a chance to ask questions and just get up to speed. The report of the regions was new this year, and what I decided to do not in terms of not walking through each region, I decided to just give an overview of our region and all of our regions in the US and here are their strengths and weaknesses. And then we talked about a couple of specific weaknesses that they wanted to kick around a little bit more. And so that was really, really helpful.

And then from there, we just talked about the leadership team the rest of the day, just kind of walking through the workload that leadership team is carrying, what I'm doing to address that. Rewriting job descriptions for myself, for Dave Taylor, for Jon Payne, for Jeff Purswell, those are the guys who carry a lot of work. And just thinking about then, how can we benefit from other pastors in Sovereign Grace, because here's the reason why. When we first began this global expansion, God was bringing us these global opportunities. We had minimal staffing. We had basically a part-time leadership team in minimal finances, and it's just not sustainable. So we're trying to figure out how do we scale for growth basically. And we thought, I think the best way to do that is to build with teams and teams that leadership team members would form, and then their teams would be filled with Sovereign Grace elders. And depending on the level of responsibility, we would want to pay those team members something for the work that they're doing. So I walked them through some teams we've put in place for Dave Taylor, for example, and they think that's a great way to scale. We're going to try it over the next year and see how it goes. And then we just take time to evaluate the leadership team. Then they asked me to leave and they evaluate me. So that was basically Wednesday.

Thursday was all about finances and budget. They have to approve the budget, the next fiscal year budget. So Tommy walks them through all of that. There's also the development fund, so they get an update on each development fund, how the money is being spent, and a budget for the next fiscal year for each of the development funds. And they have to approve that because they have financial responsibility, not just for the operating budget, but for the development funds as well. So that takes quite a bit of time to walk through that. Then we had a couple of policy issues that Tommy presented that they acted on as well. And one of the interesting things about this retreat, why it was so good, is all the members of the executive committee contributed, but not one of them talked too much. They all worked together really, really well. And again, the input I got from them this week was really, really good.

Ben Kreps:

Excellent. Well, we're grateful for the hard work that the executive committee and the leadership team put into helping us thrive as a family of churches. So thanks for making that time to everyone on the executive committee and for you, Mark as well. And thanks for the update and we'll see you here, Lord willing, next week. Bye for now.