Transcript:

Hi, my name's Mark Prater. I want to welcome you to my first podcast. 

I hope to produce one of these a week, about five to eight minutes in length. And the purpose of them is to serve pastors of Sovereign Grace Churches, men who I love and men that I find are a joy to serve. Listen for this first podcast. 

I thought I'd tell you a little bit about myself and what I do and then my plans for how I want to use this podcast in the weeks and months to come. First of all, I've been married to my beautiful wife, Jill for 40 years now. She makes me look a lot better than I really am. So I may have her join me on a future podcast. (And by the way, she probably doesn't know that yet.) 

I'm also a pastor at covenant fellowship church where I've been in pastoral ministry for 23 years now as an elder here, some of the things I do locally with 20% of my time is: Attend and participate in all the elders meetings. I also lead our prophecy team here at Covenant Fellowship. And I actively pastor three to four families. I do that because I don't want to just be an elder in name. I firmly believe that what I do locally as a pastor affects what I do extra-locally in serving Sovereign Grace Churches. 

And in serving those churches, I use 80% of my time as the Executive Director of Sovereign Grace, a role I've been in since may of 2013. That has been a joy for me as well to serve the pastors and serve churches of Sovereign Grace. My primary responsibility as Executive Director is to lead the Sovereign Grace Leadership team under the oversight of the Executive Committee. 

So let me tell you a little bit about how I plan to use my podcast. But first let me start by pointing you to another podcast, which would be The Ordinary Pastor that features Sovereign Grace pastors, CJ Mahaney, Jeff Purswell, who's our Director of Theology on the Leadership Team and Mickey Connolly who is our Director of Church Development. This is an outstanding podcast that will equip you as a pastor in many, many ways. You can find that podcast on the Sovereign Grace website. If you go to training and then click on church development, you'll find The Ordinary Pastor podcast there. Their most recent version was taped on September 5th, and it's entitled A Theology of Sunday Mornings. You men will benefit from that. 

So the first thing I want to do is direct you to their podcast. My podcast is just going to be a little bit different. I plan to hit a broad range of topics. Things I plan to do are: Give you updates about Sovereign Grace. For example, I want you to hear updates from Bob Kauflin in Sovereign Grace Music. I also plan to interview other Sovereign Grace pastors. For example, Joselo Mercado just got back from Columbia not too long ago and he just had some wonderful time of ministry there. I want men to hear about that. 

I also plan to interview members of Sovereign Grace churches. I travel some and I want to set some of those interviews up before I visit one of your churches. It's an attempt to connect the members of our churches more meaningfully to the gospel partnership we share in Sovereign Grace. So recently I took some members of Covenant Fellowship with me to Australia to serve the church in Sydney and I'd love for you to hear about that experience. 

And then I just planned to hit different topics that I think will be interesting, hopefully to you: Things we're doing, for example, to build safe churches in Sovereign Grace, or how we can grow in recruiting church planters. 

So that's what I plan to do with the podcast. I hope it serves you men and you can look for that in your email soon and hopefully follow up emails if I am not too reluctant to do this. Thanks for listening. 

If you have questions or comments, Mark, would love to hear from you. For more videos like this, hit subscribe on YouTube or by email at markkprater.com.