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, I understand that this week you have a Leadership Team retreat coming up. You have three of those each year. This one's a little different than the ones you've had in recent years because you're inviting the Regional Leaders to join you for part of that retreat as well. Which means my guy, my homeboy, Ken Mellinger will be there. So tell us about that. Tell us about what you're thinking as you head into this retreat.

Mark Prater:

We're so looking forward to the retreat next week, just for us to be together as a Leadership Team, given how spread out we are geographically, it's just good to meet three times a year together, face to face. Dave Taylor still can't get out of Australia. So he'll be joining us via Zoom. And we're looking forward to the day when he can travel to our retreat and join us.

But we've designed this retreat so that the first couple of days or so we've invited the Regional Leaders to join us. We did that back in 2016, so it's been five years and probably too long since we've been with them. We wanted to get together with these men because they play such a vital role in our shared mission together. I mean, obviously they are responsible to make sure that the polity functions on a regional level and the committees get their jobs done, but they're really leaders. And the BCO is very clear about that. They're charged really to lead their region by casting vision and inspiring, and just thinking and dreaming about the future together as a region.

And the other role they really play that's so important is in the health of our family of churches. And what I mean by that is our family of churches is only going to be as healthy as our local elderships are healthy. And those men are really responsible to make sure that elderships are cared for, invested into, equipped and strengthened. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that next week. So they just play a vital role and we can't wait to be together with our nine US regional leaders next week.

Benjamin Kreps:

That's great. Yeah. Such an important role they do play in serving us—having known a number of these men, they're just of the highest caliber and quality and are serving our regions so well. So what kinds of things will you be talking about and thinking about during the retreat?

Mark Prater:

Well, first of all, good food, let's start there. We want to have some great meals together and we want to laugh together. But these men really are also responsible to make sure that our values that we share are lived out in our churches, in our regions. So one of those values is that we build relationally. So just being together with them is important.

And we're just going to start by hearing from them. We sent them some questions, things like, "What are you most encouraged by in your region right now?”, “What needs or burdens do you have for your region that we want to hear about?" And then just take some time to pray. So we're just going to begin by hearing from them.

We're going to talk a little bit about the strategic and vital role of leadership that a Regional Leader provides and talk about some ideas that we can just sort of share together. We're going to spend some time looking at the global partnership plan—we want to get their eyes on it and get their input, obviously. And then we're just going to talk a little bit about equipping elderships and Mickey and Jon in particular will lead us through a conversation about using an evaluation tool they've been working on just for an eldership to assess their health, that a regional leader can use. And then we're going to talk a little bit about just developing future pastors and leaders within their region. And Jon and Jared are actually going to lead that conversation.

So just some of the things we have planned that we want to talk about. We're hoping to have time for a competition as well, regional leaders versus the leadership team. We'll see if we're able to pull that off and maybe I can give you an update on who wins that in a future podcast.

Benjamin Kreps:

What are we talking about here?

Mark Prater:

Well, I think Mickey is in charge of that. I think he's thinking miniature golf at this point. I think the backup plan would probably be bowling if it rains, but we'll see. We'll see how it goes.

Benjamin Kreps:

Nice. Well, I'm sure that a number of us will be praying for the retreat and trusting that God will meet you in all sorts of wonderful and even surprising ways. So we'll pray that way for you and and anticipate hearing an update about how it all went. So thank you everyone for watching. We'll talk to you next week, Lord willing, but bye for now.