The Antioch Project

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. And I'm here in person with our Executive Director and with a whole crew of guys — some wonderful brothers — because we are at our Spring Regional Assembly in the Northeast Region. And we are working our way through the Antioch Project, led by these wonderful brothers.

Mark Prater:

It's just great to have you guys lead our region through this. It's been a wonderful couple of days for us, and we're finishing up today with the Antioch Project.

So in case folks don't know — introduce yourselves. We'll start with you, Ricky, and move across: what church you lead, because you lead churches, and then also just tell folks what you do in the Antioch Project.

Ricky Alcantar:

My name is Ricky Alcantar, and I lead Cross of Grace Church in El Paso, Texas. And I was one of the guys that helped create the project a number of years ago. So that's me.

Mike Seaver:

Mike Seaver, lead pastor at Risen Hope Church in Summerville, South Carolina. And I help a lot with the neighboring evangelism, leadership, and thinking through how the outworkings of mission in the churches happen.

Joel Shorey:

And I'm Joel Shorey from Redeemer Fellowship in Newark, Delaware. My role is I give the first session on the second day — about advancing, coming out of Acts 13 and the church in Antioch. And then I lead through a lot of the prayer times as well, which is a privilege.

Mark Prater:

And Joel is also Director of Church Planting for Sovereign Grace. And Mike, what do you do for church planting?

Mike Seaver:

I'm the church planting coordinator. So I'm the guy who serves under Joel and makes sure guys are in the process and working with our regional church planting committees.

Mark Prater:

Ricky, you've been on the church planting group for years as well, right? Primarily overseeing Antioch, or do you do anything else now?

Ricky Alcantar:

Yeah, I was doing Antioch primarily before I left the team — sadly.

Joel Shorey:

We would have him back at any time.

Mark Prater:

You would think the executive director would know these things, but that's...

Ricky Alcantar:

I don't want to take credit for work I'm not doing.

Benjamin Kreps:

Yeah, yeah. No, I get it. Well, it is a joy to be here going through the entire project. I actually went through it the first round with you, right?

Ricky Alcantar:

In El Paso.

Benjamin Kreps:

In El Paso, back maybe five years ago. And that included being detained at the border — but we're not at the Mexican border.

Ricky Alcantar:

We can't replicate that for everyone.

Benjamin Kreps:

Yeah, we're legally constrained from actually talking about that on this podcast. No, but it's a joy to be with you, brothers. I'm certainly benefiting so much from the fine training and instruction that we're all receiving. But for those who don't know what the Antioch Project is — what is it? Why did you create it? You were central in the creation of it, Ricky. Talk to us about what the Antioch project is.

Ricky Alcantar:

Yeah. Let me give you the origins — I'm going to start at the Sovereign Grace level, and then the personal level.

At the Sovereign Grace level, the Antioch Project came out of conversations with Eric Turbedsky, who now leads the West Region in Sovereign Grace in California. One of the things they observed was that sometimes churches were happy to have a church planter emerge from their church and then take him through a process to plant — but we had less equipping in the area of how do you create church planters? Eric had the picture of a big pipe. In other words, once a church planter emerges out one end of the pipe, you're like, "Okay, great, we have a process for that" — and many denominations or groups do. But because we're a family of churches, we actually backed further up and asked: what do we put into the pipe? In other words, what creates the context that produces mission, church planters, and those kinds of things? And so discussions with Eric led to thinking about equipping churches to be on mission — to be environments that create missional energy, church planters, people who go on church plants, the kind of church that in the region may not even be planting a church, but they run to get alongside whoever is and support them actively. So just that inclination. That's the macro level.

Now the micro level is this: the Antioch Project is the program I wish I had when I started leading Cross of Grace 15 years ago. Our situation — our local church — had been through a period of financial and numerical decline, and we had identified that one of the areas of concern was a lack of mission mindset and a lack of mission culture. I began thinking and wrestling with: how do I take a church that maybe historically had not been oriented toward mission? It was a warning light to me when I thought, "I don't know how we would ever plant a church. I don't know how we would even get from where we are to planting." And so Eric and I basically built the program that I wished I could have gone through at that time of desiring to be more mission-minded. Now, by God's grace, God used Sovereign Grace churches and other means to equip us and give us what we needed — it felt like I got a piece here, a piece there. But we tried to put together a retreat program that would get guys from wherever they are to being actively involved in mission going forward.

Mark Prater:

Wonderful, wonderful. Thanks for creating it, Ricky — it's really good. Ben and I could talk about how we're benefiting, but I really want you guys to talk about what the Antioch Project actually is. We have our entire Northeast Regional Assembly here — I think about 80 guys — going through it together. And I'll say this again: I'd love for every region here in the U.S. to go through the Antioch Project. So yeah, if a regional leader is listening to this, or reading the transcript, or a pastor who leads a church — what actually happens in an Antioch Project?

Mike Seaver:

Yeah. In the project, the team of us comes in to the assembly, and we have some teaching and a lot of workshopping — we want to take the material, which we base on the church of Antioch in Acts 11 through 13, and we walk through an acronym to pull out the key themes. I'll explain that in a second.

But really, we're functionally walking through this as an elder team together — working through the material with lots of time praying together. And the question throughout is: what is the Lord leading for your next step in missions? So for a lot of guys, it's not going to be, "We're planting a church right now." It's: what is that next step that the Holy Spirit is stirring for that particular eldership, and how do we take that step?

And then Antioch ends — it's a two-to-three-day retreat — but it ends with coaching for those elderships that want it: several months of walking those steps, three to four months of help moving forward. So the Antioch acronym is:

A — Advancing: like the Church of Antioch, we move forward in the mission. The gospel going forward. That's the first place they are purposeful — not just advancing through persecution, but actually advancing by listening to the Holy Spirit.

N — Neighboring: living out mission individually as well as a church; owning the lostness of the community.

T — Training: training and equipping their leaders.

I —  Interdependence — working together with other churches, as well as intercession. They are people of prayer. The church of Antioch is praying and fasting when the Holy Spirit says, "Send Barnabas and Saul."

O — "One Anothering": what does it look like to live out the one-anothers as a church and then facing the community, and how that relates to mission.

C — Christ-centered: obviously, we want Christ to be the center. The church of Antioch is the first place they were called Christians — they were called "little Christs," Christ-followers. That was actually a name given from the outside, like “these guys following the Messiah everywhere." That's what was seen.

H — Hope: there's a gospel optimism of going forward — we're on offense. The gates of hell will not prevail against Christ's church.

Ricky Alcantar:

Yeah. And if I could add — if you look at the pieces of it, there are sort of three directions of ministry. You've got the first two that are aimed outward — locally and beyond. Then inward — health of the church, training leaders, having a one-another discipling culture. And then there's an upward dimension of relationship with the Lord. And all three of those are so important. They strengthen and build each other up. And so if you have a church that's only doing upward and inward, but not outward, one of the things you see is that church is actually not going to be fully healthy inward or upward either — because they're not being faithful to their relationship with the Lord, they're not leaning forward in faith, and their leaders are ingrown and don't have a sense of mission.

And so one of the things that's unique about Antioch is it's not simply, "Here are seven things you should do." It is essentially an ecosystem — an ecosystem that helps a church become healthy. And it may be that the most important takeaway for somebody is not, "I'm going to plant a church next year," but rather, "I actually need to be more intentional about training leaders. That's the holdup for us." So it helps churches identify where in the ecosystem there might be an issue and strategically lean into that.

Joel Shorey:

And the effect as you go through each of those things is a stirring up of hearts across a whole eldership together. We really designed Antioch not just for individuals, but for pastoral teams — because if we say we want to scatter seeds and plant churches, sometimes teams' hearts and philosophies have just settled in. They're not ready to take that seed and let it grow. But the Antioch Project stirs that up in a big way. And we've seen that here this weekend — whole teams are saying, "We are thinking in a new way. It seems fresh to us. We're excited about this." And I think that's where we're going to see the growth happen.

Benjamin Kreps:

My team has experienced that over the last couple of days. We were just talking last night about all kinds of ideas and thinking about how we can more effectively be ambassadors for Christ in the communities where our churches are — even beyond church planting, which actually is one of the goals, hopefully, for some churches. And so there is all kinds of practical instruction that's very helpful. But there's also a lot of prayer. We've been praying after every session, spending extended time in prayer together, which I have greatly enjoyed.

The Antioch project — I think the thing that's most compelling, really at the core of it, is that it's a model we're taking from the Scriptures. We're seeing in the Scriptures paradigms of mission that we're applying to our churches. That includes prayer, of course, as has been mentioned. So it makes sense that we are praying — and praying a lot — in our time together. Why is prayer such an important part of the Antioch Project?

Joel Shorey:

Yeah, it is a big part. And I think it makes sense to just go to Acts 13, because it's while they're praying and fasting that the Holy Spirit speaks and then they immediately send them out.

But just to back up a little: when we're talking about mission, we're talking about the harvest, and how it's plentiful. We always go to Matthew 9, where Jesus has compassion on the crowds, and His first response out of that compassion is to say, "Pray for the Lord to raise up laborers, because the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few." And I just love seeing that: the command is to pray for the sake of mission. And we even see in Christ Himself the example of prayer for mission — before He starts His ministry, He commits Himself to prayer. When He has major decisions, He spends all night in prayer. A major, major example there in Christ.

And then in the book of Acts — not just Acts 13, but throughout the book of Acts — it just demonstrates that it is according to His Word in Matthew 9: it's in prayer that the Holy Spirit raises up these men and opens up these doors of opportunity. It is fundamentally what we should be doing for the sake of mission. We've got to plant churches, yes. We need new leaders, yes. We need to neighbor and all of that. But all of that will not happen without earnest prayer to God.

And so there are a few sweet things in the Antioch Project. Listening to these guys teach is fantastic and guys are eating it up. But I have heard from our region this weekend — more than anything else — an appreciation for the prayer times. Because, guys, we all know we should be crying out to God together, not just briefly, but in an extended way: "God, we need You to do it. We need You. You alone are our defense and righteousness. Oh God, how we need You." So spending time that way, just calling out and saying, "Lord, none of this will happen if Your Spirit does not help us" — I think that's exactly what God intends for us. And I think our souls really resonate with it when we do it.

Mike Seaver:

And what I love as we pray — and this has happened in other years as well, like last year when we were in the Southeast Region — as you pray, we're in continuity with the Antioch church, and the Holy Spirit puts prophetic senses and words of knowledge on brothers' hearts. And then there are mission-type things, as well as just personal ministry times. It's a really sweet time together, just ministering to one another. Guys are very encouraged as the Holy Spirit works, as He always does.

Mark Prater:

Yeah. I'm so glad you intentionally built prayer in — not just once, but after every session. It's been really sweet. Let me just give you one example. Yesterday, as a region, each man sitting in the Antioch Project prayed for one unbeliever that they know and are reaching out to. Our region didn't follow your instructions exactly — it expanded to several names each. And to hear all the brothers in the Northeast pray for specific people by name — it was moving. And it's just another reminder of why prayer is so important to mission.

And by the way, just a shout-out to Joel, who leads a quarterly Sovereign Grace prayer meeting. There was one just this week. I send out quarterly prayer requests, and each of you receives those from me. But Joel takes those and does a one-hour Zoom meeting. If you're interested in that, join the next one — please contact Joel.

Joel Shorey:

Come pray with us.

Mark Prater:

So you've been doing the Antioch Project for about five years — do I have that timeline right, basically? What fruit have you seen over those five years? And don't limit it to just churches that have been planted — speak to the overall fruit that you've seen.

Ricky Alcantar:

Yeah, just a handful. I would go personal, eldership, and regional.

Personally — this is very moving. A few years ago when we did the Antioch Project in Louisville, there was a brother who came in discouraged and skeptical, because he knew his church should be doing more in the area of mission, but he thought, "Am I just going to get beat up for not being more on mission?" And, "Is it going to be unattainable?" And then after the retreat, he wrote this very kind email and basically said, "I left refreshed and encouraged for the mission. I see now things I should and can do to take steps in this area." Which I just thought — that's exactly why we're doing this.

On an eldership level, we've also seen it equip guys to have conversations as an eldership. One of the unique things about Antioch is that ideally it's not just the lead pastor — it's all of the elders praying and thinking together. Now, actually, one of the elderships I think it really affected — and Ben was right there early in the consideration of planting Jeremy — when you guys were going through Antioch. That's right. And so that was really exciting.

Benjamin Kreps:

Just to own a piece of that church plant.

Ricky Alcantar:

Yeah. It was really exciting because it was live — it was like, "Ben's coming in with a process. What about this? What about this?" And so we kind of worked through it together. And then getting to meet Jeremy — this is actually the first time I've gotten to meet Jeremy Hetrick and spend time with him. So it's cool to see this guy I was praying for all year in the Antioch process was there.

And then just last year, we did this in the Southeast Region, based in Orlando. And I heard from Josh Murphy about the effect on the region. One of the things he said was: "It's giving us a common language to talk about mission in our region, and some common things we're all working on together." And he basically said, "This is going to help unify us and pull us forward." And I thought — man, that's huge.

Joel Shorey:

In addition to everything Ricky just said, the fruit from the initial project is that it stirs up missional thinking broadly — not just for church planting. Our heart is for church planting, and I think that is a primary fruit that will come out of this. But my team went through the entire project four years ago. We wanted to plant a church, but we didn't have the guy yet. We still hope to before we hit our ten-year mark — praying for that.

But after the Antioch Project, we had our coaching with Greg Dirnberger — one of the best coaches — and he was meeting with us on a monthly basis. The coaching is him just asking good questions that move an eldership step by step farther down the road of mission. As we talked about our desire to plant but said, "Greg, we really don't have anybody yet," he very wisely just said, "What area of mission can you take steps toward?" And it was just that question that made us kind of not set church planting aside, but shift it to the left a little and bring up another missional opportunity — to care for our Chinese community, which we had a heart for but had not taken any active steps toward.

And as a result of that, we have an active Chinese ministry at Redeemer Fellowship now. It's a growing ministry, and it's something I had an ambition for in the future but hadn't prioritized because I was really focusing on the church planting thing. I just praise God that that is a fruit from this time — that even as we continue to have desires for planting a church, we still have this other active ministry that has come about because of it too.

Mike Seaver:

I think Antioch gives guys the space and time to think and pray about mission — to kind of pull back from normal life for a few days and dream a little bit. Listen to the Spirit, pray, and just see — like yours, Joshua: you thought it was this, but actually it's that. And we've seen that a number of times. And then with coaching, you're just walking month by month. I've had some where it's more about leadership training — "Oh, I thought this was the guy who might be a future church planter for me, but I think I need to pour into this other guy. And here's what that's going to look like over the next year."

Mark Prater:

Yeah. What these guys are saying is really why I would love for every region here in the States to go through the Antioch Project. On a big picture level, they are equipping us for our mission — which is, as a reminder, we exist to advance the gospel of Jesus Christ by planting and strengthening churches throughout the world. And I love it when elderships go through it together. There's something sweet about a region going through it together, because you can pray for one another as elderships. And we believe that out of these Antioch Projects, church plants will come. So regional ordination committee — guys who sit on that from different churches — they'll have been through it together and they get to rejoice: "Hey, we prayed for this, and look what happened." So it can really strengthen and unify not just a church, but a region, in reaching the lost with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So I hope you hear my encouragement: contact these guys and go through an Antioch Project in your region.

Benjamin Kreps:

So what I take from that is Mark just gave you permission to pastor your regional leader until you have these guys in for an Antioch Project retreat.

Mark Prater:

That's right.

Joel Shorey:

Can I just say real quick — our appreciation for Josh Murphy and Rob Flood for taking a regional assembly and allowing us to come in is a big deal. We do not take that lightly. So thanks to those guys. And if you need a recommendation from them, just call them.

Benjamin Kreps:

Yeah. The reality is not every church will plant a church — and so that's not to condemn anyone, that's just the reality of things. But every church is called by God to participate in the mission, to see the gospel advance until the earth is filled with the glory of God. And you guys are helping us do that. And especially as a region, it really is unifying. We've experienced this unifying dynamic while we have learned together and been stirred together.

So thank you, brothers, for your excellent leadership. Do consider engaging with the Antioch Project — you will benefit from it, in all manner of ways. That's a guarantee. So thank you, guys, for joining us and for the way you're serving us and Sovereign Grace. Thank you all for checking out the podcast. We'll see you here next week, Lord willing. Bye for now.