An Invitation and Explanation from Kevin DeYoung

Dear brothers,

I want to invite you to next year’s Coram Deo Pastors Workshop on February 13, 2025.

Following up on this year’s multi-day conference with many speakers, we are planning for a smaller one-day event next year. John Piper will be our keynote speaker, and I will be speaking as well. We will gather around the theme: The Power and Privilege of Preaching: Finding Inspiration and Practical Edification for a Lifetime of Faithful Expository Ministry. Once, again the event will be hosted by Clearly Reformed and Christ Covenant Church.

When: February 13, 2025
Where: Christ Covenant Church (Matthews, North Carolina)
Speakers: John Piper and Kevin DeYoung
Theme: The Power and Privilege of Preaching

I consider it one of the greatest privileges of my life that I get to preach the Bible verse by verse, week after week. At the same time, preaching for years and decades can also be a grind. I hope that this one-day event will help rekindle in us a passion for preaching, re-establish our confidence in preaching, and remind us of practical strategies for improving as preachers.

This event will be geared for pastors of all ages and for students preparing for ministry. We are limiting the event to 500 registrants. We may sell out quickly, so consider signing up soon.

Your co-laborer in ministry,

Kevin DeYoung

Dear brother pastor, 

In a spirit of prayerful expectation, I want to invite you to the Coram Deo Pastors Conference. This new event is hosted by Clearly Reformed (a new ministry I help to lead) and Christ Covenant Church (where I have the privilege of serving as senior pastor). We look forward to filling our sanctuary with nearly 2,000 pastors and church leaders at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina on March 12-14, 2024. 

The aim of the conference is, quite simply, to strengthen pastors. After the conclusion of the Together for the Gospel conference in 2022, a number of us started talking about how we might build on that legacy to provide a venue for pastors (and their wives, if that would benefit some couples) to be edified, inspired, equipped, and recharged for faithfulness in ministry. To that end, I organized a small steering group of friends—Justin Taylor, Ryan Kelly, Greg Gilbert, Jason Helopoulos, and Matt Schmucker—to think and pray about whether we might launch a new conference and what that conference might look like. Coram Deo Pastors Conference (CDPC) is the fruit of those conversations. 

It may not be obvious from the conference schedule, but we’ve deliberately tried to organize the conference with three kinds of messages in mind: expositional sermons (Smith, Piper, Charles), history/theology lectures (Beeke, DeYoung, Finn, Van Dixhoorn), and messages that address current “hot topics” (Trueman, Gilbert). The three panels roughly follow the same pattern: one panel on pastoral ministry, one on the Christian and history, and one on the vexing issue of Christianity and politics. We hope this approach enables the conference to cover a variety of topics while also being clear about what the various messages are trying to accomplish.  

We think there is much to be gained by hosting the conference at a local church (even if that means our space is limited). We will still have a great bookstore, exhibitors, sponsors, and the “feel” of a conference. But we also hope for the “feel” of church. The music will be led by Nathan Clark George, the pastor of worship at Christ Covenant, as he collaborates with other musicians from inside and outside our church. 

I love being a pastor, and I love pastors, which is why I am thrilled to be a part of this new initiative. I hope to see many of you here in the Charlotte area for the inaugural Coram Deo Pastors Conference in the spring of 2024. 

In Christ,
Kevin DeYoung