Strategic Leadership Team Conversations

VIDEO 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 leadership team retreat, this time I believe, in Los Angeles, where you gathered with the team and you were sharing with me before we started recording about how valuable that you think it is that you guys actually gather together physically in one place, apart from doing monthly Zoom calls and that kind of thing, that there's great value in that. Talk to us about that.

Mark Prater:

Yeah, it is a value. I think it's even a conviction for us as a leadership team because we love serving our family of churches and there's much that we get done over Zoom meetings, but actually being together face-to-face for a few days accomplishes a number of things. First of all, we are able to build relationally, not just in terms of deepening our friendships, but it allows the team to function as a team. We value team ministry in Sovereign Grace. Each of our churches has teams or are building teams because we share that value. And that really gets at plurality. We want to lead together as a team. We want to lead Sovereign Grace together, and that's our heart. It's also a BCO mention that the leadership team will function as a plurality. So it's not only a conviction we have, it's an attempt to honor our BCO.

So just being together for a few days does help us to accomplish that and to build relationally. It also just gives us a chance to have, as I've mentioned before, strategic conversations and to do strategic planning. That is a little bit more difficult to do over Zoom, not only because of the limitations of technology, but because Zoom meetings that go longer than an hour or an hour and a half begin to lose their effectiveness. Yes, Zoom fatigue. So this just allows us to linger in certain conversations. I always go in with an agenda. I always go in with a bigger agenda that I know we're going to get through because when we linger in conversations, the spirit of God helps us and we go down paths that we didn't plan. And sometimes those can be our most fruitful decisions in serving our churches.

I think that's become even more important to us as a team because we are realizing that the family of churches that we serve is a little bit more diffuse and diverse and well, here's what I mean by that. As a pastor of a Sovereign Grace Church, a pastor knows his flock and he knows the flock, he knows the context within his church exists. And so that can help you pastor people. It can help you to know how to preach to your people. That gets a little bit more complicated when you've got a family of churches that exist in different nations in different cultures. So we are a more diffuse and diverse family of churches and knowing who we are has a little bit more complexity than just knowing a local congregation. So we want to make sure we know who Sovereign Grace is and we want it to be able to lead us in a certain direction based on that.

So those are just some of the reasons that we think it's important to gather physically together three times a year. This one was in Los Angeles, by the way, because Dave Taylor did join us from Sydney, and that's just one leg of a flight for him rather than flying deeper into the states. So it does help serve him. And a decision, I can't remember if I mentioned this on a podcast or not, that we decided as a leadership team is that all leadership team members will attend one retreat a year. And the other two I'll decide who from the leadership team comes. And so this was a smaller group of men from the leadership team. It was Dave Taylor, Jeff Purswell, Jon Payne, Jared Mellinger, and myself. Even though the other guys, I'll bring them up to speed and we'll send out notes and decisions that they can read and then I'll follow up with them verbally. So we're just so grateful. I'm so grateful for this team and that I get to serve with them. Being with them again this week made me even more grateful to God for them.

Ben Kreps:

Wonderful. Yeah, it reminds me of the Apostle Paul, of course didn't have Zoom. He sent letters, but how he would communicate in his letters to those whom he sought to serve, those he loved that he wished he could be there in person. So that's wonderful that you guys were able to do that. So what was it like? What did you go over? What's an update coming out of the leadership team retreat about what you guys talked about?

Mark Prater:

Yeah, we talked about a lot. I felt like we got a lot done. So I'm just going to pull out some highlights. This is a partial list of just things that we talked about. We talked about how leading Sovereign Grace really is becoming more of a wonderful complexity. It's kind of what I mentioned before. We are diffused and we're diverse. For example, what I mean by that is that there are cultural issues in the states that really are important and that we need to help our pastors equip our pastors to lead through. That could be things like gender ideology or sexual orientation, or how does politics impact the church, those kinds of things. Those may not be issues that other Sovereign Graces churches face in other nations or they may be, but they're of lesser degree. One comparison: churches in West Africa and East Africa, for example, those in Liberia and Ethiopia, they are facing a more heightened prosperity gospel. That's the big issue or one of the biggest issues that they face. And so how do we equip them with addressing that when it's not quite to the same degree an issue here in the States? That's just one example.

So we had a wonderful conversation where we're getting down different issues that we need to equip our pastors to face, and it's a diverse list. And so then we talked about how do we take that and lead effectively? Obviously the good news is that the word of God speaks into all of those situations, right? So it does heighten our need in our commitment to provide biblically based theological leadership. And we just talked about ways to do that. So that was a wonderful conversation.

We had a conversation that I entitled Tone and Truth. Part of what we were talking about there is what should our tone be in communicating truth and what should our tone be in standing for truth? Because that's becoming, I think, more necessary that we stand for truth. And I sent the leadership team an article that Andy Naselli wrote before the retreat, which we did discuss a bit. That article is entitled Winsomeness Can Be a Virtue or a Vice, and it is a wonderful article. You could Google it and read it yourself if you'd like to. Obviously he's for Winsomeness. We want our tone to be godly and gracious and to be Christ-like because that's a reflection of what we believe about the gospel. But it shouldn't be so winsome that we water down our ability to stand for truth. Because in this cultural moment, I think even in this evangelical moment, we've got to be very clear and at times strong in defending the truth. And so I illustrated that by just pulling from an introduction that Kevin De Young recently wrote for that 100th anniversary edition of Machen's, Christianity and Liberalism.

And if you haven't read Christianity and Liberalism by Jay Gresham Machen, please do. I would get the hundredth anniversary copy that just came out a few months ago. If you've already read that book and don't have the hundredth anniversary copy, I think it's worth the price just for Kevin Young's introduction in Machen's book, because he really just pulls out why standing for truth is so important and what Machen did, if you don't know the history that Machen's book didn't start as a book, it began as an address that he gave to a presbytery in the Philadelphia area. And what he was addressing in that speech was that there was a move at that time to unite 18 different denominations as sort of one unified denomination. And Machen was against it because their creed was theologically ambiguous and really didn't represent Presbyterianism specifically. So he gave an address against what was known as the Philadelphia Plan. B.B. Warfield, a contemporary, joined him in that opposition, his denomination at the time, the PC USA, Machen's denomination, who was embracing this plan. And so he was speaking against it, making a strong stand against it, and it was so well received that he gave the address in 1921. And that was so well received that he was encouraged to turn that into a book, which was published in 1923. So this is the hundredth anniversary, and DeYoung reviews the book and then pulls out seven lessons that are important for us. And you should read those seven lessons. I walked the leadership team through them. One of those being it's important that we make sure we clearly communicate what truth is, but it's also important that we clearly communicate what is false and what is false doctrine. And we have to do both of those things.

So there is a place right now for us to stand for truth and to be clear on what's true and what's false and where possible do that in a winsome way, but don't allow tone, don't allow winsomeness to trump truth. We've got to be clear and standing for truth. So we had a great conversation around that, which was really, really helpful. A part of the reason we were having that conversation is another topic that we discussed is something I think maybe a lot of pastors are, or at least watching and asking the question, what is really happening in Evangelicalism right now? So what is this current evangelical moment or current cultural moment? If you can marry those two things together. So is it one of, as you watch Evangelicalism splinter a bit, is it one of just sad self-righteous separation or is it one where there's theological erosion?

And if that's the case, which we believe it is a bit as a leadership team, we have to guard our churches against theological erosion. And of course, we don't know what God is doing right now in this evangelical moment. We don't know where the dust is going to settle and what evangelicalism will look like. But what we do see is a drift theologically, certainly some theological erosion, which heightens the need for us as a leadership team. And I think for us as pastors in any Sovereign Grace church to provide, again, biblically sound theologically informed leadership. So we had a great conversation about that. We've asked Jeff to capture our thoughts and write it. And we may even find a way to get that into our pastors' hands. We talked about that. Jared Mellinger gave a wonderful publishing update for the journals that we have planned to be published in the next year or two.

And then a number of other publishing projects we're working on that will be self-published that are going to be released fairly soon. One of them on Joyful Generosity that was written by three or four Sovereign Grace pastors. It's about 10,000 words it was written so that members can interact with it and just have a biblical theological basis for generosity and giving first and foremost to their local church. Jared's taken Jeff's message on zeal that he gave at the pastors conference from Romans last year, put that into a book form and that will be published. And so we're going to begin to self-publish publications or books mostly drawn from resources we already have; put the Sovereign Grace logo on them so that someone makes a connection that it's a Sovereign Grace resource and may want to read it. And we hope that it serves both the members of our churches and the pastors of our churches as well.

And then we talked about, I've mentioned this before in a previous podcast, we plan to publish Theo Pastoral resources, kind of like our old perspective series. Some pastors listening to this or reading this podcast would remember that name. And we may even use that same name. There's a draft right now written of elder led, elder governed churches. What do we believe about that? Why do we think that theologically? Why is that a value? I know Jeff is thinking about a Theo Pastoral resource in the area of pneumatology, which I think would really serve our churches. So just some things that were exciting to talk about and that we have planned. And just a reminder on the Journal that's written primarily for our members, but I'm talking to pastors like yourself, Ben, that are using it to actually reinforce the leadership they're bringing their local church. So you were telling me right before this podcast that in just a few weeks you're going to start a series on shaping virtues and you plan to use that. Tell us about that.

Ben Kreps:

Yeah, we're having our community groups, actually, some of them already started doing this, but we're going to have each community group use the Journal as we go through the series. It'll take longer because they meet twice a month, so they can't interact about every sermon in real time, but they're going to be using the Journal; the article for each virtue and application questions as just a shared resource to get the conversation and application going in community groups. So we did just plant a church, sent out over a hundred people. We got a lot of new people. So we're endeavoring to acclimate them and for them to understand and be clear about what it is that we're after when it comes to discipleship and a culture of grace at Living Hope. So the Journal is serving us big time in that way.

Mark Prater:

That's good leadership on your part. Thanks for using it. And a reminder to our guys, we publish those resources because we hope some of them will be tools that you can use as pastors to serve your churches.

Ben Kreps:

Yeah. Excellent. Well, thanks for the update. And thank you to each member of the leadership team. Thank you for your sacrifice leaving home, heading to Los Angeles to serve our family of churches. And thanks for the update, Mark. So we'll see you here, Lord willing, next week. Bye for now.