Well, a few weeks ago we had our annual missions revival, and we always try to follow up with the missionaries afterward to hear how we can improve for the next year. Their responses shocked us this year; I will share them with you later, church. But in today’s video I want to share some of the behind-the-scenes of how we prepared for the missions revival and what we did leading up to it, even going through some of our computer files to show some of the preparations, and to show why I am thankful for you, church, for being an organized church, a church that is ready and prepared and loves missionaries. If you are new here, I am Pastor Ryan Rench, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California. Our missions revival in 2025 was the only multi-night meeting we had at our church this year, and I wanted to go through our files from the past couple of years, 2024 and 2025, to show the things that go into making a missions revival a spiritual meeting. Right now we are in the preparation time for our fall festival. By the time this video comes out, we will have already had it, but a lot goes into any event, and we do not want to do just the human side and make sure it is a good event, humanly speaking. We want it to be a spiritual meeting. We want to see God show up and work. A lot of what we will go through is administrative stuff and graphics. I will not show all the emails and correspondence back and forth with the missionaries; this assumes the missionaries have already been selected, already have their transportation arranged, and have already been briefed on some of these things before they get here. These are things like orientation booklets, the prayer guides we give our church leading up to the event, and the different postcards we send to the missionaries. This may be kind of a strange video, but I want to go through it line by line.
The 2024 Revival Guide
This is our 2024 folder. I will not go through the missionary guide just yet, but here are some graphics from our 2024 missions revival. I want to start with the revival guides we hand out to our church. This is the 2024 booklet we give to help our church prepare for the missions revival, and we encourage every church member to get one and read through it. It goes over a little of the previous year and what we were able to do: we gave every missionary a ten percent raise, and a twenty-five percent raise if they visited, and we took on three new church planters the year before. So it is a bit of a missions update from the previous year, and it encourages the church to prepare by reading through the booklet, so that when the missionaries show up, it is not, “Oh, we did not even know you were here. What is your name again?” No, we want our church to know the missionaries’ names, having already prayed for them and prepared their hearts to be open to whatever God has to say through the missions revival.
In preparing for the missions revival, we also take a missionary love offering, which covers all the travel expenses and the love offerings, so that while the missionaries are here ministering to us, we can give to them in return. Then there is the faith promise commitment. We want to prepare the church to look ahead to the next year and be praying for several weeks about what the Lord would lead them to do in weekly or monthly commitments to missions. Before the missionaries arrive, we want our church members to contact the missionaries and let them know we are looking forward to having them. Through our Sunday school classes, we have an arrangement where each class rotates through the missionaries each week, and each class contacts a different missionary. We distribute postcards, cell phone numbers for text messages, and emails (those have been removed here), and we encourage our church family to contact the missionaries. Here is a prayer guide. In our prayer times leading up to the missions revival, we want to pray for the world, for our church, and for ourselves: personal prayers as well as big corporate, national prayers. We want God to do something through this meeting. One prayer focus is our Wednesday night prayer times, and our Sunday school classes are praying, but we also add four prayer meetings in people’s homes throughout Temecula, Murrieta, and our Southern California region. On two Tuesdays and two Thursdays leading up to the missions revival, we encourage our church families to find a home close by here in the valley and go there for a night of specific prayer for the missions revival. Here are the different hosts, and we have sign-up sheets at the back of our sanctuary for people to sign up for the cottage prayer meeting they will attend. We encourage our church family to be at every service. This is the one time we ask everyone to take everything else off the calendar and focus on being part of the missions revival: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The Sunday services run pretty much as normal, but on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we focus each night on a different missionary and their mission field. We have an up-close time with them, a question-and-answer time with the missionary, and then that missionary preaches the evening service, and it is just a wonderful service. I enjoy those up-close times every night. There are some pictures from the year before.
The missions revival booklet also focuses on helping the church family get to know our missionaries. There is a little bio on each of them, where they serve, and a bit about their country, a full spread in the booklet. In 2024 we focused on foreign missions through our missionaries the Bolascos, to Spain, and then on our missions trips, which are an aspect of our missions budget. In 2024 we were preparing to go to the Philippines in 2025, so we looked at all our missionaries in the Philippines area. Those are the missionaries listed there, and we were able to visit a couple of them in 2025. So our focus then was on missions trips and on the field of the Philippines, and that was a wonderful time. Then the Levier family: another focus of our missions budget is our church interns, our summer interns, and Brother Levier was our very first summer intern. He and Garrett Gyoso were interns way back in, I think, 2013, and he was able to come back about ten years later to represent our internship program and show how he had been ministering for the past ten years, partly as a result of the training we provided through our summer internship program. So he and his family came out and were part of our missions revival. There is a list of the past interns as well, a breakdown of the offering goal and where it goes, and a scan-to-give code. That was the missions revival guide we give to every single church member.
Prayer Cards, Meals, and Nightly Booklets
Leading up to the missions revival, as I said, there are prayer times. Our Sunday schools would pray for missionaries, and we gave out these cards with the missionary’s picture, so we would already be familiar with them, and their contact information on the back: a sample email to send, a number to text, ideas for how to pray for them and ways to encourage them. My family has been on the receiving end of something like this at missions revivals, and it is so helpful to know the church is ready for you and actually looking forward to your being there. We wanted our church to prepare in ways that show our missionaries, “We love you. We care about you. We want you here. We know your name, and we are looking forward to having you as part of our services.” So there are different designs here. There are Chipotle order forms; I will go over that when we get to the missionary orientation booklet. There are the cottage prayer meeting prayer guides; each host is given a format to pray through, and they can sing some hymns at their cottage prayer meeting if they like. Every night we have a meal so our church members can sit across the table from the missionaries and spend some time with them. We also want to make sure people do not miss the missions revival because they have to rush home and get dinner and it is just too hectic. We want to be able to say, “Hey, come to church, have dinner before church, and come straight to the service at seven o’clock.” So our meal is about six o’clock, and the service is at seven each night. Here are some of the graphics we used as placemats. Then each night we had a missionary booklet. The booklet we talked about before was the prep guide handed out weeks in advance, but each night, for whichever missionary was preaching, there was a booklet with even more details on who the missionary was, the schedule for that night’s service, some notes to fill out, and some questions to ask. There are more stats and details about the missionary. Sometimes we put a special missions song or theme song in the booklets those nights, but each night had its own booklet focused on that night’s missionary. Here are some photos from previous years; it was fun to see those. Then there is the same booklet, and some social media follow-up posts. There is a full brand here, all the colors and graphics we used. I think sometimes it is just fun to see behind the scenes.
The Missionary Brochure
There are our missionaries. Oh, this right here is our missionary brochure. I want to open it up in full here, actually partial screen, so you can see exactly what is going on. Let me remove that sidebar. There we go. This brochure is not a trifold; it is folded in half and then folded in half again, and it covers all our missionaries. Here is the front cover, and the back panel is here, and when you open it up, you see this inside spread with the various breakdowns of our missions budget. We support several different areas, not only church-planting missionaries. On the inside panel, when you first open it up, it talks about monthly giving, which goes to four broad categories. Foreign missions includes church-planting missionaries, in yellow, and missionaries serving national pastors, in light green. We would also call foreign missions the work among some people groups here in the United States that are not foreign fields but foreign peoples right here in the US; a few missionaries focus on groups like that. In orange we have US church planting, domestic missions, reaching our Judea and Samaria. We support Bible colleges, which supports many, many future ministers all at once. And then we have church helps ministries, which we will get to in a bit. That is the breakdown, and in our missions revival we like to focus on various aspects of our giving. We always want to include a foreign missionary in our missions revival. We have redacted some of their names, since many come from closed countries. Our foreign missionaries are listed there in yellow, and we support many of them at various levels; my dad mostly took people on at around $100 a month, we have tried to increase that over the years, and certain ones receive a higher amount. Up here on the inside fold is the US church planting. Many of these are the California church planters we took on the previous year. There are some long-term church planters and others who are almost self-supporting, all represented by these dark orange dots. The Bible colleges we support are the bluish-gray dots, and the dark blue dots are things like CLA, Jehovah Jireh Ministries, missions directors, prison ministries here in the United States, magazines, and ministries like that. I just enjoy this missionary brochure. We try to keep it as up to date as we can so our church members know exactly who our missionaries are, and that brochure is out there all the time. On Sunday evening we have a handout that goes over all our missions dollars and budget numbers and encourages people in faith promise missions, explaining what faith promise missions is. In 2024 I followed much the same format I use year after year; this is the one sermon I repreach every single year, from 2 Corinthians 8:9: here is what faith is, here is what promise means, here is what missions means. That is our Sunday evening handout.
The Missionary Orientation Booklet
Going on to 2025… let me find the orientation booklet. Okay, before I get to 2025, I said I would go back to the 2024 missionary guide booklet. When the missionaries arrive, we go through an orientation to help them get acclimated to Calvary Baptist Church, to the schedule and what will be expected of them, to set them up for the week and answer as many questions up front as possible so they know exactly what to expect. Our missionary guide booklet goes over all of that with them. Here is the 2024 one; it matches the theming of everything else from 2024. It has a little welcome note from us, introduces them to each other, and shows what we are trying to focus on with our missions budget. It says, “Look, when you are preaching, let the Holy Spirit guide you. Do not come expecting to change our church or to drum up a bunch of money.” Some of the missionaries do this every year, almost every week if they are in lots of missions conferences, but to our church this is new. It is a once-a-year thing, a serious week. So we ask our missionaries, even if it might be old hat to them, to diligently give of themselves to bless our church. If they have any questions, we give them all the contact information. We want them to know we love and appreciate them, and we have given them some spending money. But we are also intentional about building free time into our schedule. I traveled with a singing group, and sometimes churches that want to be a blessing schedule every second of every day full of activities. Many missionaries are young families with babies and little kids, traveling all the time and trying to get homeschool done, and it is super difficult to fit a different church schedule into your family routine every week. So we ask hardly anything of our missionaries during the daytime. We intentionally build a lot of free time into the schedule. We have a couple of brunch and lunch times with the adults and provide childcare on one of the days, but there is a lot of free time, and we give them opportunities to explore the area, making sure they have transportation if they want to check out Southern California. There is contact information so our missionaries know exactly where to turn. If they have videos and displays, they can set them up at a certain time with a certain person, and we go through all of that with the missionaries ahead of time so that we are all set and ready to go.
For a couple of years in a row, the lodging was what we called our missionary mansion, a beautiful, huge Airbnb out in our wine country. We did not let them drink wine, but it was a beautiful mansion where all the missionaries could stay together. In 2025, our missionaries already had other arrangements; some had family in the area, so we made different arrangements this time, and they did not stay in the missionary mansion. But here are the lodging house rules and what to expect from the Airbnb, and then what to expect on Sunday: how far the drive is and how much time to give yourself to get to church, what to wear, what the expectations are at our church, the schedule for that day, and prayer meetings. In the morning, during Sunday school, the missionaries go door to door, spending about ten minutes in each of the children’s classes, giving a brief lesson or bringing in some visuals to encourage the kids to pray for the missionaries and excite them a little. At 10:30 is the worship service, where the missionaries introduce themselves, and there is an expectation of where to sit. This year Brother Arnold Bolasco preached, the Leviers did junior church around that time, and the other missionaries filled in wherever they wanted to go. Afterward there was a lunch, and this helped them know how to plan. The evening service was a potluck down in the fellowship hall for the church, and that was when we talked about the commitment cards for our faith promise missions. Monday there was a brunch at 10:00, a fun little time in Old Town Temecula, and then a free afternoon. Tuesday was very similar: a time together, a free afternoon, and then the evening meal and the evening service with its focus on a different mission field. Wednesday was the same: a free day. There is a warning about Southern California traffic. If you are coming back into Temecula and you leave anywhere after about one o’clock, traffic gets exponentially worse. So we warn our missionaries: if you think it is an hour’s drive home at eleven in the morning, it is certainly not an hour’s drive home at five at night. It is going to be a three-hour drive home. So prepare for that, and do not be late to any of our services. Then Thursday is departure, with some Airbnb checkout ideas. Then what to expect for meals; we always check with the missionaries about dietary restrictions. There are a few fun things to expect, the question-and-answer time and what they might expect from it, and getting to know each other: we list all the other missionaries’ names and their children’s names and ages so the missionaries can get to know each other throughout the week as well. We list the staff, all our kids’ names, our associate pastors, and who does what and who goes where. I think it is good for the missionaries to know what to expect and get their bearings when they come into a church. A little further down are the commitment cards we use, with the breakdown: if you gave a dollar a week, that would translate to about half a month of support, and if you gave $250 a week, that would be 120 months of support, so you can see where your dollars are going if you give a certain amount. Here is the fellowship hall layout: how many tables we need and where the pulpit goes. That really helps year after year, so we do not have to rethink exactly what is going on. We can print some of these things, and the teenagers can set up the tables and chairs on a Wednesday night after church to prepare for the missions revival. Here is one of the songs we sang as a kind of theme song, “The Perishing Millions.” What a great song this is. We sang it almost every night, maybe not every single service, but many of the nights for the past couple of years. What a great song.
2025
Then here is the 2025 guide. It has a lot of the same information. That is a Word document, just for the new year, with a lot of copy-and-paste from previous years, but we update it for that year’s missionaries. Then the missions revival prep guide for 2025. Okay, here is the missions revival booklet. This prep guide follows the same format as the 2024 prep guide, but with updated graphics, with Brother Zach running it this year. So, a similar format. Here is a note, the prayer guides, the cottage prayer meetings and their hosts, and the revival schedule. One thing I liked about this year is that we focused on our Jerusalem, the Temecula Valley. Here are some statistics about our valley and our city. For the fall festival we are in right now, we wanted to carry on the momentum from the missions revival, not just focusing on world missions out there somewhere, but on world missions right here with the neighbors next door. So that was the first focus. Then in Judea and Samaria we have our US-based church helps ministry; the Johnson family is there, the West Indies field director for Macedonia World Baptist Missions, which is an aspect of our missions giving. Then the Beal family ministers in Latin America, and there is a little about the countries they serve in. We built this into our missions revival to help our church think about the things going on in our Jerusalem; we do not want to lose sight of it. On the back cover there is the giving goal and the breakdown of the offerings. We could go into all of these in more detail, but I wanted to show some of the behind-the-scenes and talk about the missions revival after the fact.
What the Missionaries Said
As I said at the beginning of the video, we sent our missionaries a follow-up email thanking them for being part of the services and asking whether there is anything we can do to improve. Our missionaries said things like, “I thought the conference was run perfectly well.” Now, that is not true, but we appreciate the kind gesture. They said, “I think everybody should learn from your church. Seriously, we cannot think of anything that did not go well.” That is a tribute to Brother Zach, who oversaw the missions revival this year and did a great job. Another of the missionaries said, “Excellent conference. You all did a wonderful job logistically. You should write a manual.” I do not think we are going to write a manual, but here is the next best thing: just how we as a church try to prepare for our missionaries. Another missionary said, “Honestly, this was the smoothest missions conference we have attended.” So either they have not been to very many, or we are just very honored by that, or they are lying. That could be it too. I do not know if we have honest missionaries or not, but they are certainly kind, and we are so thankful for them. And we are thankful to you, church, for being such a gracious host church to them. Thank you for loving our missionaries. I love seeing that as a pastor, seeing our church love on our missionaries. They should be our heroes; that is the kind of hero we want to set up in front of our church. I am so thankful we had a great missions revival this year. If you have not seen our other video breaking down all our missions budget numbers, we will include a link to it. But that is all for today’s video. Keep on growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. God bless you.
