Sovereign Grace Executive Director, Mark Prater, with Dyonah Thomas, Senior Pastor of Grace Life Church and key leader in West Africa. Dyonah is the first ordained Sovereign Grace elder in West Africa.

An excerpt of a recent West Africa update from Mark Prater:

The best way to summarize what happened at the first Sovereign Grace Churches West Africa Pastors & Wives Conference is that a family of churches was born in West Africa known as Sovereign Grace. Attended by about 80 pastors and wives from 6 different West Africa nations, 2 of them French speaking, God worked to truly forge a family of churches.

Dyonah Thomas has established key leaders in different nations to help build Sovereign Grace in West Africa. Samuel Kotee, Senior Pastor of Saving Grace Fellowship in Conakry, Guinea, Morlai Kamara, Senior Pastor of Sovereign Grace Life Church in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Roland Blackie who is the Senior Pastor of another Grace Life Church in the Monrovia, Liberia area. Each of these men, along with Dyonah, led through the main sessions at the Pastors & Wives Conference.

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The post Our First SGC West Africa Pastors & Wives Conference originally appeared on the Sovereign Grace Missions blog on August 29, 2023.

Ephesians 3:10 - “so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known…”

Redeemer Fellowship celebrated our five-year anniversary on September 9 this year. God has been very good to us as a young church family in Newark, Delaware. As I think about the past five years and all that God has done, I can’t help but pause and celebrate the gift that church planting is and how powerfully God uses it for his glory. 

I don’t even mean to celebrate a particular way of church planting (though I wouldn’t want to do it with any other denomination than Sovereign Grace!). But rather, I want to celebrate the act of church planting in any form. Whether in perceived ‘strength’ or ‘weakness’; whether with 30 or 300; whether near or far; the planting of new Gospel preaching churches is a primary and powerful way that God continues to do his good work in this world and in our lives. 

Church planting multiplies the manifold wisdom of God. 

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Joel Shorey is the Lead Pastor of Redeemer Fellowship, Newark, Delaware, USA.

This post originally appeared on September 24, 2023 on the Sovereign Grace Missions blog.

I can imagine several possible responses to an article with a title like this one.

• “Oh great. Another extrovert clueless to the fact that God made people different.”

• “Yes! A word of admonishment to the frozen chosen.”

• “Come on. Just let people worship God undisturbed.”

• “Why do we keep talking about this, anyway?”

It’s that last question I feel aware of most as I write another article on what we do with our bodies in congregational worship. Haven’t we talked about this enough? Aren’t people just going to do what they’ve always done? Isn’t it more important to focus on what’s happening in our hearts than what we do with our bodies?

Good questions. But the Bible doesn’t give us the option of minimizing or ignoring what we do physically when we gather as his people in his presence. It matters.

But why? Whether you lift your hands high on Sunday mornings or keep them below your waistline, God gives us at least three reasons why it’s important to display the worth of Christ with our bodies.

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This article written by Bob Kauflin, Director of Sovereign Grace Music, was originally published on Desiring God, September 21, 2023.

Sunday August 20, 2023 was a historic day for our growing family of churches in Mexico. It had been over 10 years since we had sent out a team to plant a church, but on this Sunday in an unprecedented event we prayed and commissioned two men to plant two churches. Through God's initiation four years ago, he sovereignly sent us 2 men from different parts of the country to be discipled and trained in order to go back to their respective cities to plant churches.

As part of their training, both men went through and participated in all of the ministries of our church in Juárez. They also covered much theological study and preaching workshops as well as participation in a year-long Leadership Discipleship group.

Keep reading to learn more about the church plants in Huajuapan, Oaxaca and Reynosa, Tamaulipa, including photos and more details on the men and their families on the Sovereign Grace Missions blog.

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Carlos Contreras is lead pastor of Sovereign Grace Church, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and key leader for Sovereign Grace Mexico.

The post Church Planting in Mexico first appeared on Aug. 28, 2023 on the Sovereign Grace Missions blog.

Recently on the podcast, Ben and I spoke about sound exegesis and our complementarian convictions. Once again I recommended a valuable resource: Eikon, A Journal for Biblical Anthropology by CBMW.

Here is an excerpt from the podcast on why I highly recommend this resource. I’m very grateful for CBMW to publish a journal that is so solid exegetically to defend and even prove complementarianism from scripture.

First of all, we as pastors have to be able to teach and to show and even protect our complementarian convictions biblically. We just don't want to say it's a value that we have. We have to be able to prove from scripture the complementarian values and the theology that we embrace.

So the main point there is we've got to know our Bibles, we've got to be pastors and men and women, members of our churches, who understand why we embrace complementarian theology because that's what the Bible teaches. So that's very, very important. Let's have sound exegesis.

In the podcast, I recommend three specific articles in the Spring edition of Eikon that are responses to trends in flawed exegesis with the egalitarian position that begin to embrace same-sex relationships and marriage. I hope you will read them to better understand our biblically-based complementarian convictions:

Misunderstood Mutuality: Responding to Ronald W. Pierce and Elizabeth A. Kay, “Mutuality in Marriage and Singleness” By Denny Burk.

Yet Another Attempt to Justify What God Forbids: A Response to Cynthia Westfall, “Male and Female, One in Christ” By Andy Naselli.

Rejecting Gender Essentialism to Embrace Transgenderism? A Response to Christa McKirland's article, "Image of God and Divine Presence" By Colin Smothers.

I'm very excited to share this mission video with you because it highlights just a bit of the good gospel work being done in the Asia-Pacific part of the world. You will hear from Jeffrey Jo (Philippines), JP (India), and Songhwan Kang (South Korea). You will also get a glimpse of our first Sovereign Grace Asia-Pacific Pastors & Wives Conference in Manila Philippines.  Jefferey Jo led this conference so effectively. The video is posted to our website, as well as below.

Please take 10 minutes to watch this video and rejoice with me over the gospel ministry among our brothers and sisters in the Asia-Pacific part of  the world. Please note that due to the sound quality on the video footage, we included subtitles.

Thank you for your continued investment into our mission—first with prayer, but also financially. Your generosity now is an investment into the training of our future pastors, and it allows us to continue to advance the gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the world. You can also view/download the video here.