Strategic Stewardship for a Global Mission: Leadership Team Retreat Highlights
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Benjamin Kreps:
Hey everyone and welcome to the Mark Prater podcast - where our aim is to connect our global family of Sovereign Grace Churches with our executive director. Mark, you are freshly back from another leadership team retreat. The leadership team have these throughout the year where you come together to really put in some significant work when it comes to planning, praying together, thinking through how you can best serve our family of churches. How did it go? Where were you? Who was there?
Mark Prater:
I just landed about an hour and a half ago and we had a really good retreat. We were meeting in Austin, Texas for a couple different reasons. We kept Jon close to his church and it allowed Dave Taylor to fly in early and spend a few days in Juarez, Mexico with Carlos and his church. Actually, Dave was able to spend some time in El Paso with Hellman Ávila at Misión de Gracia and also with Ricky Alcantar at Cross of Grace. Then he was able to cross the border into Juarez and spent time with Carlos and his team, preached on Sunday, and had a great weekend with Carlos and Iglesia Gracia Soberana de Cd. Juarez.
Not all of the leadership team was at this one. What we do is just remind folks who listen to the podcast. We all come to the February retreat and then I decide who comes to the June and September retreat. So, this time it was: Dave Taylor, Jon Payne, Jared Mellinger, Jeff Purswell, and myself. So, there was only five of the leadership team members there and we had just a wonderful week. I went in with a packed schedule, which I typically do. We didn't get through it all, but I think we talked about the right things and I put a post on X that we're gathering and if you saw that post and prayed for us, Thank you so much for praying because God answered your prayers.
Benjamin Kreps:
Excellent. Well, anyone who's been checking out the podcast for a while and has heard updates after retreats like this, know exactly what you said - You plan a very full schedule. You guys are working. You're having fun, enjoying food and things like that, but you're not just hanging out, you are putting in work. What were you guys talking about and working through over the course of the retreat?
Mark Prater:
There were so many things. I don't have time to hit them all in this episode, so I just want to highlight a few things that we did - just to give you an idea of what we talk about as a leadership team. One of the things we did is we planned our 2026 February leadership team retreat. That's the one where we include the United States regional leaders. It's such an important strategic retreat, and when we planned for this one for February 26th, we're going to include our non-leadership team directors. That's Bob Kauflin (Director of Sovereign Grace Music) and Joel Shorey (Director of Church Planting), Eric Turbedsky (Director of West Coast Development) is already there because he is a regional leader, and then some other key leaders that we want to invite.
We decide who's going to come and give them enough time to plan to be there, an agenda for our time with them and then what we want to present to them that we’ve already agreed upon. It's a demonstration of how we work out ahead, for example.
This year, we had a good lengthy discussion regarding our global strategy and expansion. About two years ago, we put together global strategic points and I wanted to revisit those just to make sure we're on the same page - and saying and thinking the same thing. I believe our global strategy points govern how rapidly we expand globally.
I'll illustrate that here. The overall strategy in one sentence is this - Sovereign Grace aims to build self-sustaining, interdependent churches and ecclesiastical nations who are faithful to our mission to advance the gospel of Jesus Christ for the glory of God. These global strategic points fill that out, and these things really do help us in terms of how to build strategically, what the leadership team gives our time to, and they actually, again, govern our expansion.
There are seven global strategic points and the first is theological education. We think that's an important strategic point because it fosters theological fidelity and theological consistency as we expand globally.
The second is ecclesiological clarity, and of course we have ecclesiological clarity, especially in Section 1 of our BCO, but what we're talking about is how that gets worked out in a practical sense. As we expand globally, it fosters a local church emphasis. We want the local church to continue to be the dearest place on earth, to say it another way. It really talks about our commitment to give care to churches and to our pastors. It brings mission clarity to the church. What is the church called to do it in its mission? There can be a lot of pressures on the church to do a lot of different things, but it really does boil down to fulfilling the great commission - to making and maturing disciples. And then, as we build nations, it really aims at our polity structure. So that's ecclesiological clarity.
The third one is relational development - and I think that kind of speaks for itself - but we want to foster interdependent churches - not only because it’s a New Testament biblical principle - but we want to do it in a way that we continue to build relationally and that churches care for one another and that we are known as a family of churches 50 years from now because we are building relationally.
The fourth one is missional risk. In expanding and planting churches and sending missionaries, we still want to take risks for the sake of the mission, but those must be prayerful and thoughtful and wise risks in advancing the gospel.
Fifth is leadership development, and what we mean by that is a couple of things. There are existing leaders that we want to invest into now. We want to identify our key strategic leaders throughout the world, which I think we've done right now - Jeffrey Joe in the Philippines, Carlos Contreras in Mexico, Michael Granger in Ethiopia, Riley Spring in Australia, just to give you a few names. We want to invest into them because how Sovereign Grace develops in a nation will somewhat depend upon leadership and maybe in a large part on leadership. So, we want to be investing into those leaders and then we want to invest into future leaders so that we can continue to advance the gospel should God allow for years to come.
The sixth one is financial stability, and obviously that gets at fostering building, self-sustaining churches in ecclesiastical nations. Just so there's a step in that direction, that's how we want to build. With all we have all that's happening globally throughout the world, it's very exciting to see what God is doing and that can help in fundraising and donor development. So just being able to resource the mission that God has given us.
And then the seventh one - all of these are at the core of who we are but this is another way to say - cultivating and maintaining zeal in our churches. We want to be known as people who love Jesus - he's the one that we serve, he's the one that we labor for, he's the one that we treasure, and he's the one that gets the glory. So that works out its way in the local church through fostering application and preaching so that we're applying the gospel to ourself and becoming more like Christ. It fosters itself in our continuationist convictions - to use our gifts to strengthen the church so that Christ is glorified. It speaks to our passion in singing to Jesus and our zeal in leading our churches. We want to be a zealous people for Jesus regardless of where the church is located throughout the world.
Those are our strategic points - we looked at them again and said we're not going to change a thing. It's interesting as I looked at these, again, they do stand on their own, but they also are related to one another as well. So theological education probably affects everything else. It affects a theological understanding of all those other points. But here's another example - without ecclesiological clarity, a missional risk will lack focus, the proper focus it needs. Here's another one - relational development is somewhat dependent upon leadership development because we need leaders to take initiative to build a nation that fosters relationships among churches. These work independently, but they're dependent upon one another. We just think that these global strategic points govern how rapidly we expand and even where we expand. So, a couple of examples - we will be slow to adopt and plant churches in a nation where we don't have a trusted, discerning, theological sound dependable leader - like a Jeffrey Joe in the Philippines. Another point, we will be slow to expand in a nation that doesn't have some plan to step towards financial stability and self-sustaining ability.
That's just a couple of examples how it governs us but it does focus what we do as a leadership team as well. So we spent a lot of time on that. It was a really good discussion, just kind of flushed out a little bit more. And I wanted to mention them because I think one of the weaknesses - I was saying this to the leadership team and I put myself at the top of the list on this - I don't think we've done as good a job communicating those strategies consistently so that every pastor, church member in Sovereign Grace understands how we're building strategically and what that means.
We looked again at a cross-cultural missionary initiative we're putting in place and dropped into another discussion and really categories of a missionary elder - an ordained elder that is sent as a missionary. A recent example would be Juan Solano, who was ordained as a pastor in Sovereign Grace in Costa Rica and is now in Lebanon as a missionary. He is a missionary pastor - a missionary elder. Then there's a missionary worker - one who will not be ordained. Maybe it's a nurse in your church who has a burden to go serve in some cross-cultural setting to use the way she's been trained and gifted to serve, whether that's a short term or certainly for more of a long-term stay, all for the means of advancing the gospel. So, we dropped in those definitions. The pastors will be hearing more about that at our council of elders meeting. So that was an exciting discussion as well.
We planned a global leaders retreat next June in 2026 where the leadership team will be with our strategic global leaders to flush out that strategic point of leadership development. We planned, in much more detail, our pastor's conference this fall (November 18-20 with the Council of Elders on November 17 in Orlando). Then we have a pretty good solid plan for our 2026 pastors conference because that will be our Pastors and Leaders conference, where we are ask churches to bring leaders - your small group leaders, your ministry team leaders, your emerging leaders, your worship leaders, et cetera. We've got a really good list of breakout sessions defined, and we're now going to begin ask pastors to teach those. We got a good list of main session topics and we got to think through who's going to preach those. We’ve got a pretty good plan in place because we want to open registration for the 2026 conference much earlier because it requires many leaders to have to plan to take time off work to be able to come. The dates for the conference in Orlando in 2026 are November 11 through 13 – which is a Wednesday through Friday. We chose it Wednesday through Friday because we got the input of the executive committee and they thought those dates were probably best.
I had Jeff also give a theological evangelical update that was fascinating, which I won't take any more time to drop into, but those are just some of the things. There was much more that we covered this week at the leadership team retreat.
Benjamin Kreps:
Excellent. So you found a place that can accommodate the big conference?
Mark Prater:
Yeah! It'll actually be in Orlando where we will meet this year and had our conference last year.
Benjamin Kreps:
Wonderful. Everyone who has been tracking along with what's going on globally in Sovereign Grace knows that this is all something that God has been doing. He's brought friends from all across the globe to us and these partnerships have been formed and really it was incumbent on us to figure out how to navigate and work through this surprise of all kinds of new opportunities. And that takes leadership, that takes work and thoughtfulness, and you guys have been doing that and serving us so well in it along with everything else you're doing on the leadership team. So thank you, Mark. Thank you for everybody who was on the retreat. We thank God for our leadership team and we thank you for checking out the podcast. We'll see here next week, Lord willing. Bye for now.