I’ve got a few more articles rumbling around in my head about the rural church, combined with reflections on Hillbilly Elegy. But today I’m sharing about an exciting opportunity that I have. I will be in St. Louis until Wednesday working with a team of guys to select the 12 speakers at the SBC Pastor’s Conference (PC).

I absolutely love the vision for the PC this year. We are going to focus on biblical preaching. No celebrity pastors this year. Not that we don’t love those faithful men of God that are used on a wider scale but we wanted to try something new this year. What if we selected 12 men who were Southern Baptist pastors of medium to smaller churches? And what if we decided to exposit one particular book of Scripture for the whole PC? And what if we intentionally focused on making sure that we had a good slate of minority pastors on the preaching slate?

We are seeing that vision come to fruition. We keep hearing that we are in above our heads. And you know what? It’s true. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that will help us break from the status quo and put together something completely different this year—and still honors God.

So we ask you to pray for us these next three days. We’ve still got a good number of really good pastors to sift through. Pray that we will be given wisdom and discernment. And pray for these men that will be selected. Some of them will go from preaching to 100 people to thousands. Pray that God will protect their souls as they will inevitably be given a bit wider of a platform after this occasion. Pray that we keep our vision, don’t get distracted or bogged down by politics, and that we keep the expositional preaching of our Lord’s Word as the central focus of what we are doing. And pray that we are given grace and endurance as we, together, listen to a ton of sermons over the next couple of days.