Strengthening Local Churches

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, as you well know, our mission statement is that we advance the gospel of Jesus Christ through planting and strengthening churches. And we've been talking a lot over the past few weeks about the sort of work that's happening in the nations and mission, that sort of thing. But you want to tell us about how you and the Leadership Team are working to help strengthen churches. And that begins with the eldership of a local church, right?

Mark Prater:

It does begin with that. And it's really important because the strengthening of our mission really does come from the strength of our churches. To say it another way, I think strong local churches plant other strong local churches. And strong local churches participate in global missions in really gospel changing ways.

But it's not just our mission. It's also the strength and health of the local church. And the strength and health of a local church is truly the reflection of the strength and health of the eldership team that leads that local church. Our experience has taught us where you've got strong elderships, you've got strong churches is another way to say it. And when our churches have run into issues, usually it begins with issues and maybe even conflict on elder teams. So what we've been working on as a Leadership Team for probably about six months or so, is a tool that we hope to get into our pastor's hands fairly soon that can help you evaluate the health of your team. And we hope it generates good conversation. Not just so that the team can check its health or maybe even grow in some ways that the tool may expose. But also for the sake of the church and the sake of the people for whom Christ has shed his precious blood and for the sake of our mission.

Benjamin Kreps:

Wonderful. Can you give us a bit of a sneak peek into what kinds of things will be addressed in this tool?

Mark Prater:

Yeah, I would love to. We actually just looked at it this week in our Leadership Team meeting. We, decided at a retreat that Mickey and Jon Payne—and I think Jared Mellinger was in on the first conversation—we just kind of talked about ways or a tool they could develop to help elderships. Mickey's taken that work and presented it to the Leadership Team yesterday. We gave him some input and then our plan is to present it to our Regional Leaders at our retreat in June when they're going to join the Leadership Team for part of our retreat. We’ll get their input. And then, from there, we'd like to get it into the hands of our pastors.

But this tool has categories of questions that you can evaluate. So, the first category more has to do with your structure. How often do you have elder meetings and staff meetings? Are there other meetings that provide for a friendship and an accountability and for fellowship? It's just asking whether the right meetings are in place so that our life isn't just driven by ministry and the business of ministry alone, but that we continue to build together relationally as well.

There's also a category for how teams make decisions together. Healthy elderships don't agree. That's a good thing.

Benjamin Kreps:

Is that right? They don't always agree?

Mark Prater:

Yeah, that's a shock! Maybe not in Harrisburg for you, but in other elderships. So what do we do when we disagree? How do we work through potential disagreement? What do we do when we're the minority voice and losing a vote and don't agree with the full eldership?

And there's also just issues on teams between older and younger guys. And are we working through those issues so that the older guys are encouraging the younger guys in their future ministry and the younger guys are honoring the older guys. So just categories of questions that we think will provide just good discussion to evaluate the health of the team.

Benjamin Kreps:

That sounds excellent. And I'm sure I can say for all the pastors watching, reading this, we're grateful that you would work to serve our churches by serving us as elders with a tool like this. Looking forward to seeing it and looking forward to seeing how God might use it to strengthen our churches together in the future. So, thank you, Mark. And thank you everyone for watching or reading. And we'll see you here real soon. Bye for now.