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 noticed a few weeks ago that there is a new Sovereign Grace Churches missions website now online for us to explore. Can you tell us a little bit about the website and the thinking behind creating this website?

Mark Prater:

Love to, I'm excited about this website, it's sgcmissions.org. And if you go to that link, you'll find basically three banners on the homepage: Church Planting, Emerging Nations and Missionaries, and there's a theology that lies behind each of those and a philosophy of mission and ministry captured in the brief descriptions that you'll see on that homepage. So for Church Planting, it's the work of establishing new congregations, that's what we want to do in church planting, we want to establish new congregations in an area where we want to reach the lost with the gospel, like many other church planting organizations and denominations are doing. And then Emerging Nations is described this way: the work of partnering in new places as we have opportunities to partner with churches not only in the states, but obviously throughout the world. And then under Missionaries: the work of reaching new cultures. And behind that one is a theology of missions and the way that we think about it in Sovereign Grace and the way that we've defined missionary, we've mentioned this in a previous podcast, we believe in missionaries ,as we define them, there's a strong ecclesiology component to that, which means missionaries are sent from local churches to areas or unreached areas potentially where they are either going to establish a church or are connected to a church and continue to receive care and support from the sending church, and care for the church as well. So you hear the ecclesiology in all of that. And so I think Eric Turbedsky and Dave Taylor did a really good job of capturing how we think about missions in Sovereign Grace and how that gets expressed. So there's a theology and a philosophy behind the website that I thought those men captured very, very well.

Benjamin Kreps:

Yeah, I'm on the website right now. It looks great. Very simple to navigate under those three categories. What do you hope to accomplish through this website?

Mark Prater:

We hope to really serve pastors; we hope to serve the members of our churches and maybe even those outside of Sovereign Grace in this way: we want to stir all of us for the mission of the gospel and reaching the lost with the gospel. So for someone interested in church planting, you click on the Church Planting banner and there's a church planting pathway that's laid out so a guy that may be interested in planting a church can just begin to express interest by submitting a form for that pathway. We also mention there a couple of initiatives within our church planting department: The Antioch Project, which is helping elderships who haven't planted churches before to plant churches, and then Small Towns Initiative, which is an initiative by the Church Planting Group to help us plant churches in small towns, whether that's here in the states or throughout the world.

And then if you click on the Emerging Nations banner, you'll find a Partnership Pathway. So a church that's not a part of Sovereign Grace can learn "how do I become a part?" And each of those steps is clearly laid out and there's an action that a pastor can take if his church is interested in being in Sovereign Grace. There's also a new one that I'm very excited about, there's a description of short-term mission trips. And you click on that and basically you can either find a trip or submit a trip. And the purpose of all of that is to try to gather in one place, all of the short-term mission trips that are being done in Sovereign Grace churches so that if a member in one church wants to join another church's mission trip, they can potentially do that.

So I'm really excited about that and think it's a way to, again, stir interest in the mission of the gospel. And then for Missionaries, the work of reaching new cultures, there's a step there for someone who really wants to give their life to being a missionary whether that's in a reached area or unreached area, and there's a form to fill out that will engage you with the Emerging Nations team. So I wanted to do this podcast, and have been waiting to do a podcast on this, because I think it will really serve the pastors and members of Sovereign Grace churches in particular, as well as anyone outside of Sovereign Grace, because we give clear steps on what you can do if you want to be involved in gospel mission.

Benjamin Kreps:

That's excellent. And it is very clear and simple to navigate with action steps and all of that. So a good work here on the website especially for us at Living Hope, when it comes to the short-term missions trips, it hasn't always been easy to know what's going on in Sovereign Grace and where people can partner up. So I think this is going to serve our churches big time, as well as the rest of the categories on here. So thank you to everyone who developed the website, Eric and Dave. Thank you Mark, for the update. Thank you all for watching. We'll see you here, Lord willing, next week. Bye for now.