One month out of every year at our church, we put a special emphasis on the best part of our music ministry, and that is the congregational singing. We have a beautiful choir, some incredible soloists, and good small groups. But I still think the best music we have is when everyone joins their voices together in praise to God. It is one of the only things all of us can do together, and congregational singing makes up the greatest part of our weekly schedule, second only to the preaching. So that is something I want to work on every single year, to help our church remember that this is not just a routine we have to go through. We have got to sing every single time truly as if God is listening, as if He has His ear right up next to our mouths. So we do a congregational singing emphasis month, we produce our own little songbook every service, and we learn some new songs throughout the month. In today’s video I am going to go through the process, show you some of the songs we have chosen this year, and then talk about the month overall.
Hi, church. Thanks for tuning in again to our channel. We try to bring the Bible home. If you are new here, my name is Pastor Ryan Rench of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California. If you are ever in the area, I would love for you to drop by at any service time; I would love to meet you. We even do old-school house calls, so come by and chat about anything you would like. We make these videos for our church to help them continue what they are learning on Sundays throughout the week.
Our Process and Criteria
First I would like to share our process. Brother Zach Roberts is our associate pastor, and he started working on this months ago. In some ways we are always working on our music ministry, always looking for new songs to add to the mix, and they have to fit a fairly narrow set of criteria for me. Over the last couple of years of working with me, he has put together a list. He would put all this work into finding songs he thought would be perfect for me, and then he would put the list in front of me and I would go, “No, no, not this, not that,” and we would talk it through. Over the past few years we have spent hours in conversation, and he is still learning new things about me all the time. I appreciate an associate pastor who is willing to work with me through all of that and not get discouraged when I scrap his labors of love. Here is the list he came up with from these years of working together.
Zero weird phrases. Sometimes songs, new or old, have weird phrases in them that we might rewrite. Older is best, but new is not bad. I like leaning into old music, but I am not afraid of new songs; new music is fine, and all music was new at some point. Doctrinally sound music: we want to be careful about that. There are still some traditional songs we sing that may not be doctrinally rich, and we will still sing some of those, so it is not a hard-and-fast rule for every single song, but I want to lean into music that is doctrinally rich. Not super repetitive. We read through the psalm where “his mercy endureth for ever” is repeated, and repetition in Scripture makes a point, so I am not against all repetition. But certain styles of songs lean toward a repetition that is meant to stir up emotional fervor, and those are the types of songs I totally reject.
“O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever.”
Not too much syncopation. There is a certain style the 2010s and 2020s lean toward, and you hear it all over the place now, and I think it will sound dated in about ten years. I want to lean away from songs that will one day feel like “that sounds like a seventies song” or “that sounds like an eighties song.” I do not want to sing songs that will be dated and cringey in ten or fifteen years, so I am trying to avoid the syncopation tied to this decade and look for more timeless tunes. Super intelligible. I recognize that some of the hymns we sing have deep words and are not always immediately intelligible, but I do not want songs that are deep just for depth’s sake. I sing with choirs, and there is Latin and German, and sometimes that is just for the beauty of the music. But modern music sometimes has a twist of words meant to be poetic that I think is just weird. It is not really deep enough to get your mind chewing on something; it is just confusing, so I want to stay away from confusing words. Gorgeous, moving music. I want everything to be a ten out of ten. Of course we are not singing all tens, but I lean toward gorgeous, moving music, and a powerful thought, not just a powerful moment in the music. I want to lean toward music that gets our minds thinking great thoughts about God. His next note is the source of new music. We want to be careful about the source and who is writing it, and I will talk more about that in a minute. And finally, a timeless piece of music.
From Folder to Songbook
As you can see, we put everything in one folder, our congregational singing emphasis month 2026 folder, and then I move things to the approved folder. If I liked a song, I would mark it and it would go to the approved folder. From there Brother Zach gets them formatted into our bulletin layout, which is about eight by ten, slightly larger than a regular hymnal. You see all these MuseScore files, the MSCZ files. That is a format for music scores; many public domain songs have been typeset by other people, and we can take the tunes and then edit and adapt them to our needs and fit them to our eight-by-ten booklet. We want a consistent format. We want to fit everything on the right page, stretching it out as much as possible but also compressing it as much as possible. Brother Zach and my sister Nicole, our piano player, worked through all this music to make sure it is ready to go, and then they get it into the format that fits our bulletin. From the songs selected, we try to repeat each song about three times throughout the month. We sing some of our favorites on Sunday mornings, and he arranged it so that newer songs are introduced on Wednesday nights and Sunday nights, so that a core of the people get the tune down a little more easily before we sing it on a Sunday morning. Our bulletin for the month is printed at that larger size on big, beautiful glossy paper every week, and you almost feel bad throwing the booklet away each week. But the layout is very intentional.
The front cover says, “Welcome to summer. June is congregational singing emphasis month.” Some of it stayed the same as last year; I showed some of this in last year’s video. This is not any one particular week; this one refers back to Father’s Day, Sunday, June 21st. Here is the layout of the spread we designed this year, and I like the simplicity and beauty of the music pages, as you will see. There are a few key ideas on each page. The welcome page is what we have every week in our bulletin: a little welcome note from me and a little of what to expect. On the left is the worship guide, which shows exactly what is coming up. The bottom shows “Worship in Spirit and in Truth” and gives the lyrics of the offertory, to help people follow along with the song being played on the piano during the offering. Then there is some of the regular recurring information that changes each week.
Then there is a congregational singing emphasis page. We had a page just like this last year and I kept it. We are supposed to be preparing our hearts as we come into congregational singing. We want our hearts prepared, we want to engage our minds in the truths we are singing about, and we want to use our voices as an instrument we can praise God with. We carry that instrument around, and we want to develop it as best we can, so we want to encourage our congregation to lift up their voices in praise to the Lord.
This Year’s Songs
As I said, this month has a nice clean design, and every page includes a few key ideas. The song list includes these brand-new songs: “All Creatures of Our God and King,” which may have been in our old hymnal, so many people already knew it, but it is not in our current hymnal; “Arise, My Soul, Arise,” similarly a song many would know that is not in our current hymnal; “His Robes for Mine,” which I think we have done at camp but had never done in our church, a beautiful song I will talk about in a moment; “I Asked the Lord That I Might Grow,” which I will also talk about; and “Live Out Thy Life Within Me.” These are wonderful songs. From previous years we have “‘Tis All of Grace,” which we talked about last year; “Precious Bible, What a Treasure,” an incredible song we started last year as well; “Here Is Love”; “You Are Always Good”; “The Love of God”; and “Lord, I Need You.”
Back to “His Robes for Mine.” We learned this one this year. It is a glorious tune, and I have come to really appreciate the doctrine in it. Before we even get to the music, each of the pages that includes a hymn has a few things. First, there must be a nice, singable tune; before selecting a song, we make sure it has an easy tune we can sing. Next is clarity on who wrote it, the songwriter himself, and perhaps the person who inspired the tune. Next is the hymn background. It might give background on the songwriter or the context of the song itself, but that paragraph talks a little about the song so that we can sing with understanding. A note on that: for as much as we like to hate on AI these days, it is good as a research tool for hymn backgrounds and hymn-writer stories. I have several books I reference, and I may have shown those in another video, but even when there is not a cool story behind a song, I like to write about the song or the songwriter and include some background information so that we can sing with understanding, according to 1 Corinthians 14.
“What is it then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also: I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also.”
So the page designs include a lot of information without getting clunky: the title, the songwriter, the tune information, and the background. But I also like presenting the hymn as poetry. When you look at “His Robes for Mine” as a poem by itself, it changes how you read it compared with reading it as music. I got this idea from a book I referenced last year called God Sings, which gave me such an appreciation for poetry as a medium for carrying truth in a unique way. Reading a hymn as poetry, without all the line breaks, the music notation, and the hyphens between syllables, puts it in such a different light, and I appreciate this song in a different way when I see it as poetry. Connected to the poetry, under each stanza, are the Scriptures that go along with almost every line of the hymn. Each hymn includes some doctrinal truth, because intentional songwriters anchor their songs in the doctrines of Scripture. So we wanted to show from the Scriptures, line by line, that these are truths directly from the Word of God. That is important to me, because we are teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, and this is a doctrine-rich song, and the page shows some of that doctrine.
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.”
The next page is “His Robes for Mine” itself. This shows the layout of the full spread, the songwriter, the date it was written, and the CCLI information at the bottom. We want to be sure we are legal in everything we do and are not just ripping off free music from somebody without giving proper attribution. “‘Tis All of Grace” is a song we did last year, a glorious song by Isaac Watts. I think I talked about it more last year. There is a newer tune to it, from 2004, with a little chorus added, but it carries an incredible truth: the grace of God. I ended up changing this layout. It started as a one-page spread, I spread it to two pages, and then I had to spread it to three and stretch some of it out, with a little hymn history down the side. “All Creatures of Our God and King” is probably the oldest song we sing, adapted from a poem from the 1200s. “Live Out Thy Life Within Me” was new to us this year, by Frances Havergal. It is a wonderful song with a simple tune you can easily sing. She is the one who wrote “Take My Life, and Let It Be” and “I Gave My Life for Thee.” “Live Out Thy Life Within Me” carries the wonderful idea of getting the truth of God out through my hands, my mouth, and my eyes. My body is a vessel God can use. It is a good song, and I had not known it before. “Arise, My Soul, Arise” by Charles Wesley is a classic, but again it was not in our current hymnal, so I loved being able to bring it back. Its formatting was not totally finished by the time I made this video because we have not used it yet; as you see on the right side, it is not quite tidied up. But “Arise, My Soul, Arise” was a great one.
We did “Precious Bible” last year, so we brought some of last year’s information into this year’s layout. It is by John Newton, the writer of “Amazing Grace.” It is an incredible song, “Precious Bible, What a Treasure,” and I have found there are very few songs devoted to the Bible itself, so I really like this song for that reason. Also by John Newton is “I Asked the Lord That I Might Grow.” The pink outline here is not part of the design; it is just a placeholder, but you can see the words at the bottom: “I asked the Lord that I might grow in faith and love and every grace, might more of His salvation know, and seek more earnestly His face. ‘Twas He who taught me thus to pray.” He goes through the song and talks about the difficulty of serving God and the difficulty of spiritual growth. When he asked the Lord to grow, he did not expect all the pains God would bring him through, and yet it was through those pains to self that God grew him. It is a great song that is just realistic, and I appreciated this one by John Newton. Next was “Here Is Love,” which became the love song of the Welsh Revival. There is a great history behind it and a beautiful tune. A couple of verses were added later, but a couple of verses date from the 1800s. It is not necessarily new to our church, but it is not in our hymnal, and it is a great song for our congregational singing emphasis. The last page just has our events information.
Creativity Inside the Box
Overall, congregational singing emphasis month is just so good. I made this same kind of video last year and went through the songs we did then. In light of that, just this morning I heard from Brother Aaron Mast, the song director at Southwest Baptist Church in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. They are doing a congregational singing emphasis month in July of 2026. They are learning new songs on Wednesday nights, and on Sunday nights they are taking member requests and highlighting why each song is so special to a member of their congregation. I get to be with them in August to talk about congregational singing, and I thought the way they are doing it is a really unique and creative approach. This is creativity inside the box. I love the hymns we sing, I love learning new songs, and I love that there does not have to be some outside-the-box thinking that says, “Throw out everything you have known and let us try something completely new.” No. To keep our song service fresh and alive, we can have congregational singing focused on doctrine-rich hymns. I am passionate about singing truth through these incredible songs and about that inside-the-box creativity. So to our church folks: let us continue teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, and we will praise and glorify the Lord as we sing unto Him. It is an incredible month, and I encourage churches everywhere to try to reinvigorate their congregational singing through ideas like this. God bless you. We will see you in the next video.
