Hot Off The Presses From Sovereign Grace Publishing

Benjamin Kreps: Hey everyone, and welcome to the podcast, where our aim is to connect our global family of Sovereign Grace Churches with our Executive Director.  Mark, we are so grateful for the many resources that have recently been pouring out of Sovereign Grace. We talked about this on a previous episode: Jared Mellinger, leading Sovereign Grace Publishing, is doing just an outstanding job in providing us with books—books that we can keep and revisit and enjoy, hopefully that can endure. And so grateful for that and happy for us. On this episode, you have some new publications from Sovereign Grace Publishing that you want to tell us about.

Mark Prater: I do. These are hot off the press. These are brand new publications, and I just want to agree with you: Jared is doing a wonderful job leading our publishing department. There's a lot of work that goes into every book I'm going to mention today. So thank you—thank you, Jared, for your hard work. And thank you, Jared; keep it up. Just keep these publications coming out, because they're so important.

Yeah, I want to mention three new ones that you can purchase on the 10ofThose website. I'll mention this again, but all of our books now are being sold through 10ofThose. If you look at the URL, if you're in the United States, it would be us.10ofthose.com, and if you're outside of the States, it would be uk.10ofthose.com.

The first book I want to mention is this one by Josh Blount entitled Complementarian: The Glory of God's Created Design. It is a part of our Perspectives Series. For those that have not heard of that before, our Perspectives Series is a more theologically rigorous, written with more theological precision category of books that really, initially, we want to write on each of our seven shared values. And this is one of them: complementarianism. That's important to us, and we couldn't think of a better person to write on that than Josh Blount. A no-brainer reading this book. I just am so glad we chose Josh because he has written a really, really helpful book. He speaks so biblically about gender, about equality and dignity and value before God as men and women, but that God in His goodness has given us these complementarian roles that complement one another and, in His good design, lead to flourishing for men and women, for families, for communities, for churches. He just does it so, so well. And he's got a little bit in there at different parts in the book where he speaks to someone you might know that is wrestling through gender confusion. He speaks to it with a biblical accuracy and a pastoral heart that really comes through. So, I just couldn't commend this book more. I say in my endorsement, this is a book for every Sovereign Grace pastor and member to read. If you're going to the Pastors Conference, by the way, you'll hear more about this at the conference. So that's the first book I want to mention.

The next one is Pastoring Together: The Joyful Call of Team Ministry by Jon Payne. John's been working on this book for some time, and it is just an outstanding book. I would say this is a necessary read for every pastoral team in Sovereign Grace. Let me just tell you about the table of contents. I won't read every chapter heading because John writes a number of chapters that are shorter in nature, so there are a number of them, but I think the headings do help you:

·       Section 1: The Theology of Pastoring Together (there are 10 chapters there)

·       Section 2: The Character of Pastoring Together (there are 6 chapters there)

·       Section 3: The Practice of Pastoring Together (there are about 12 chapters there)

Obviously, he provides a theological basis for team ministry and leading a church and pastoring a church well within a plurality. But he offers so many helpful, practical suggestions that really do foster team health on a plurality. I think one of the things that can happen in the busyness of pastoral ministry—sometimes the urgency of pastoral ministry—is we don't take time to tend to the health of the eldership, the pastoral team. And this book will help you to do that.

In fact, he's got an endorsement from Mike Bullmore—many of us know the man outside of Sovereign Grace—and I just thought, I have got to read what Mike says on the back cover. He says this:

"Pastoring Together is singularly practical, yet it taps into and celebrates the joy of pastoral teamwork with sober realism and an eye toward the importance of the ordinary daily and weekly rhythms of pastoral life. John Payne provides a very useful primer on doing ministry together."

So there is a shout-out from Mike Bullmore and an encouragement for you to read Pastoring Together. Again, that's available on the 10ofThose website. Or if you're going to the conference, 10ofThose is going to actually have a book table, and we'll have resources there.

And then the last one I want to mention is Ordinary Pastors: A Vision for Christian Ministry by our founder, C.J. Mahaney. This book just warms my heart because it is a collection of six sermons that were preached by C.J. in different pastoral gatherings. I can remember many of these sermons, sitting there hearing him preach, and that's why it's so dear to me. But we wanted to capture these in a book because there will be future generations that won't necessarily hear C.J. preach those in the live preaching context. We wanted his influence to continue, because these are the kind of sermons that a founder preaches that lay a foundation for an entire denomination. These are denomination-shaping sermons, especially for pastors, that every pastor—even if you've heard these before—needs to read again. So, Ordinary Pastors by C.J. Mahaney.

Benjamin Kreps: And I'm sure you'll have the same experience I've had in looking even at the titles—

Mark Prater: Yes.

Benjamin Kreps: —you'll know the concepts and what was happening in your life, right?

Mark Prater: Yes. So again, that's available on the 10ofThose website as well.

Benjamin Kreps: Well, those all seem like excellent resources. Our team just got the Complementarian book by Josh Blount. We are looking forward to it—we have a live situation right now where a couple is interacting with a pastor, and they're struggling with complementarianism and egalitarianism. So we're looking forward to using this as a resource to aid in that conversation.

By the way, we use 10ofThose at Living Hope because, in case anybody checking this out doesn't know, 10ofThose will put on a book fair at your church. We have a yearly book fair at Living Hope in the lobby, and we sell a ton of books. We usually do it around some sort of event or whatever. Lori Reyes comes in; they ship the books to you, and they do it based on the size of the church and everything. So just as an aside, 10ofThose will do book sales at your local church. That is potentially something to look into, because we want to be putting books into the hands of our people.

Mark Prater: Yeah, that's good to know, and thanks for mentioning that. Again, let me just say, if you're going to the conference, we've got a whole pavilion set up where we're going to have a number of things that you can Benjamin Krepsefit from, like booths from Sovereign Grace departments: Sovereign Grace Pastors College, church planting. But in that same area will be the 10ofThose bookstore, and it's going to have a bunch of good resources. If you've never met Lori Reyes, please meet her. She grew up in Sovereign Grace—

Benjamin Kreps: That's right.

Mark Prater: —and knows and loves Sovereign Grace very much. I think Jason, her husband, is going to be there as well, so you should meet them. We love our partnership with 10ofThose. You can buy books there at the conference, or you can go to the 10ofThose website and buy these books that I just mentioned.

Benjamin Kreps: Yeah, we're looking forward to it—those of us who are going to figure out how to distribute the weight in our suitcases with all the books that we plan on buying! So wonderful. Grateful for the good work that Sovereign Grace Publishing is doing, and grateful for the guys who are writing these books for us to serve us. Before we end the podcast, though, final thoughts that you have for us?

Mark Prater: Yeah, I was reflecting on these three books, and I was very moved by the goodness of God that these books represent. Specifically, what I mean by that is that there are generations here.

Benjamin Kreps: Yeah.

Mark Prater: You've got our founder, C.J. Mahaney—who, I could never do what C.J. did, and I stand on his shoulders every day—who built a denomination foundationally, preaching sermons like those that are in this book. But then you've got the second-generation pastors, John Payne and Josh Blount, who are writing really good stuff as well and are going to have an influence for generations to come. It's just another evidence—we can hold it in our hands—that God is allowing us to become a multigenerational family of churches. I'm just grateful to God for His goodness towards Sovereign Grace.

Benjamin Kreps: Amen. He has been so good to us, and that includes these resources that are gifts to our family of churches that will serve us, Lord willing, for years ahead.

We're recording this right before we're heading to the conference here in a few days, so when this drops, it'll be the week of the conference, I believe. Can't wait to see you there, Mark.

Mark Prater: Look forward to seeing you, Benjamin Kreps.

Benjamin Kreps: Think about that first song: it's like 1600 people raising their voices together. Can't wait. There might be noise complaints from the surrounding neighborhoods; we'll see! Can't wait to see everybody in just a few days. Thank you for checking out the podcast. Thanks for the updates, Mark. We'll see you here next week, Lord willing. Bye for now.