I read forty-eight books in 2025, and today I want to go through all of them, really briefly on each, and then give out some of my awards, including my favorite book of the year, some honorable mentions or favorites I really enjoyed, and some really practical, helpful books I have used in our church. If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California. I track all my reading on Goodreads, a website connected with Amazon. It has a bunch of reviews from others, but I just like tracking my reading there. I said this last year in my annual book review video: the Bible is going to be the main focus of my reading. I try to read the Bible four times a year. I got that from my pastor in Bible college, Sam Davison. He had a love for the Word of God that was so evident in his preaching and his life, and that really struck home with me. So I encourage our church to read, and I want them to be readers, but not to read anything more than they read the Bible. That is how I start every day. We just came through a season, at the end of last year and the beginning of the new year, of encouraging our church to kick off the year with a dedication to the Word of God as the primary focus of our reading. So all my awards go to the Bible. It is my favorite book, the most compelling book, the best book of all, and I understand all that, and I hope you do too. But in addition to my Bible reading, I had several different books, and this is the Goodreads website where I track all my reviews. Of all these books, I am going to go over just some of my favorites.
Our Own Books
First, the books we produced in our ministry last year. Well, there is the Bible right there; of course, that is the five-star one. But the books we produced were Scripture Helps; I did a video reviewing the Scripture Helps book we produced for our guest bags this year, and I think it can be a real help to you if you want to read through it and get some resources. What impacted me as a kid was a single page in my Bible that said what to read in time of need, and I expanded on that for this book, which we can give to all the guests attending our church. Then there is my wife’s Joy devotional, which we published through Calvary Baptist Publications this past year. It is not listed here, but we finished it in 2025 and finally printed it in 2026: my latest book, A Case for Baptist Baptism. That is coming out in a further printed version a little later; we are not quite there yet.
My Favorite Book of the Year
The next category I am just calling my favorite book of the year. Not necessarily the best or most well-written, but the book I enjoyed most and then spread around to my family, who have been enjoying it since Christmas: a book called Fearless. It is not a Christian book. It is about a Christian, but as it is about a Navy SEAL, there is some language in it as they record some of the battle scenes. But what an incredible Christian man, who went through a great bout with drug addiction, finally got his life on track, and became a leader among leaders in the Navy SEALs. I do not want to give away too much; you have to read it. It is such a fascinating book. My friend Donnie Wilson recommended it to me, and now I am passing that recommendation on to the rest of you. This was perhaps my favorite, most enjoyable, and most challenging book of the year. I really, really enjoyed it.
Surprising Favorites
The next category is some of my surprising favorites. Shatterproof, by Lauren Sisler: she was blindsided by her parents’ drug addiction, which she had no clue about. It is a kind of warning book about what can happen when pain medications and things of that sort get out of control. The addictions affecting Americans are much greater than most of us have anticipated, and this book exposes some of the underbelly of the whole operation, in what appeared to be a wonderful Christian family, just an average American home, and yet things were going on behind the scenes she had no idea about. So this was a nice surprise for 2025. The next was Exegetical Fallacies by D. A. Carson, a theological book I have heard about since Bible college but finally got around to completing this year. It is very good for examining our methods of Bible study and the fallacies we play into instead of letting the text speak for itself. I was encouraged and challenged by it. I would not agree with everything in it, but I appreciated that it challenged my thinking, and I like that. Another surprising help this year was Transforming Congregational Singing, which I read in preparation for our congregational singing emphasis month. There were many new hymns I had never heard of, many hymn authors I had never heard of, some backstories to hymns, and some good exposure to mindsets that are not very common. There is a movement toward contemporary Christian music more broadly, and that opens you up to some areas I am just not yet comfortable bringing our church into. There is something to cherishing the hymns, and this book helps do some of that. Some people do not like his tone. The author is David Cloud, and some people, if they hear that name, will write off everything because they think he is mean. But I think there are some challenging mindsets we need, and I appreciate someone putting four or five hundred pages into a book on congregational singing. This one was a help to me, and we have it at the resource desk at our church.
Another surprising book this year was Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World, and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. It was really fascinating, coming at the statistics on environmental change and climate change and the things we sometimes get roped into: “Well, you are just conservative,” or “You are just liberal; that is why you think like that.” It was surprisingly positive. In a world where the media tries to hype and sensationalize everything, it goes into education trends, feeding trends, homelessness trends, hunger trends, and environmental trends across the world, examines the evidence behind some of the claims the sensationalists bring forward, and says, “Look, things are not as bad as the media likes to make them out to be.” This is not a conservative book or a conservative author, and it is not Christian in any way, but it was one of those surprising, mind-bending, mind-altering books, and I appreciated the different look. Another surprising book was simply called The Soul Winner, by Charles Haddon Spurgeon. I never used to be a fan of Spurgeon, but everything I read of his nowadays is surprisingly witty, funny, challenging, and convicting, and this one, helping us think of the world as souls, was a very, very good read this year. The last in the surprising section was The Making of a Leader. It is not a book that would resonate with everybody; I just found it fascinating that you can almost formulate the making of a leader. He is fairly formulaic about the steps somebody goes through to become a leader, and I found it interesting that there is a process we naturally fall into, and if you go through the process, leadership opportunities seem to arise. So it is about being intentional in developing that leadership process in people, and I appreciated that.
Challenging and Helpful
Another section, in my mind, is just “challenging and helpful,” books that maybe were not surprising but were challenging and helpful. Here is one I am giving to our men tonight. I am challenging our men to read it within the next three days. It is a short little book called How to Lead Your Family, and it included stories I found convicting, challenging, and helpful, and tips and tricks for how to lead your home as a dad, a guide for men focusing particularly on fatherhood. It is a quick book you can easily beat. If you have not read a book in a long time, this might be one to pick up, and I am challenging our men to do just that. I was reading a book that said, I think, forty-three percent of people have not finished a book since college. This would be one of those books you can pick up and conquer to break that statistic. It is a really, really good one, with many little nuggets along the way. I just enjoyed it so much. The next is Age of Opportunity by Paul David Tripp, a book about parenting teenagers. I have a thirteen-year-old as my oldest, and we are going into the preteen and teen years now. I want to be intentional about relating to my teenagers differently than I related to my elementary-age kids. It is a different phase, a different way of talking and thinking, even the way they respond hormonally. It is a different world, and we want to be intentional going into their teen years. The last one in the helpful-and-challenging category was God’s Armor Bearer. It is by, I think, some kind of Pentecostal or charismatic type of guy, but he is a second man, wholeheartedly devoted to being a second man, a supportive staff man. I gave it to our staff, and they could not get over how many times he said “impregnated”: “You are impregnated with the Holy Spirit,” and, “The Holy Spirit impregnated this idea into me.” If you can get past the weird language, it is a really helpful book. I enjoyed God’s Armor Bearer for that armor-bearer mentality: “I am here to support the man. I am carrying the armor, and it is such a vital role.” It is not just a subservient role; we are making the vision happen, and I appreciated that very much. With the way our church staff is structured (we have done the Working Genius assessment), I am an idea guy, a “wonder” guy, and our staff is full of people who are executors and tenacious. They are the ones who go get the job done. They do not want to have to come up with ideas or wonder where this thing is going; they just want to execute. So I thought God’s Armor Bearer was a good help to them to just get out there and execute the idea. I enjoyed this book, and I believe it was a help to our staff.
Books I Like
The next category is just books I like, books I enjoyed this past year that maybe were not surprising or top of the list, but I just like them. The first is The Wisdom of the Bullfrog. I like anything by Admiral McRaven. He was a Navy SEAL who marched through the ranks and became an admiral. I appreciate distilled wisdom. The Wisdom of the Bullfrog is years of wisdom, each chapter a different wise choice or action or saying passed down over the years. It takes somebody old, with experience and wisdom, and cuts through all the rambling rabbit trails you get in conversation to the heart of what they have learned in life. That is this book, and I appreciated it for that reason. The next is Make Your Bed, by the same author, Admiral McRaven, which was more popular than his others. It comes from what he said at a college commencement: if you want to change the world, start by changing yourself. Start by making your bed. Do not wake up in the morning thinking, “I am going to change the world.” Do something you can do. Make the little decisions and little disciplines of your life actually mean something. Have something you can conquer, and start every day by conquering it. The cover of the book says “Make Your Bed,” and every chapter is another principle like that. I think these kinds of books are very helpful, especially for young people looking ahead at their lives and wondering what they ought to do. I just say, “Well, let us do the things you know to do. Be faithful in the little things, and God will bring big things further down the road.” I just love Navy SEAL stories, and this one was a good help to me. The next is Slow Productivity. I also love anything by Cal Newport. Again, he is not a Christian author, and if you want all my disclaimers about non-Christian writing, you can see some of my previous book review videos. But here is a non-Christian’s perspective on what is basically biblical faithfulness. Faithfulness says, “I am going to be faithful to do what I know I ought to do, and I am going to have the faith to believe it will work out in the end.” Translate that into a business or productivity mindset, and it looks like slow productivity: “I am not making a big splash. I am not hosting a big conference. I may not be making a lot of visible progress, but I am making slow, consistent, steady progress.” I love Cal Newport for always beating that drum; that is the message of Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. You do not have to kill yourself or be so driven to keep up with everybody out there. Just slow and steady, keep on keeping on. I appreciate any book that emphasizes that.
Along those lines is The Practicing Mind, which I reviewed in another video and in our Baptist Times magazine; the last issue had a whole page dedicated to it. I read it years ago. It was written by a piano tuner, and he focuses on the process, not the product, going slowly through the process, knowing that everything is a process. If I mess up or make a mistake, that is part of the process. As a piano tuner and piano player, he knew piano playing was a process and that one day he would get better. Then he applied that mentality to learning golf. All the other students in his golf class were getting very frustrated that they could not hit the ball straight, and he, a beginner along with them, realized, “Well, of course I cannot hit the ball straight. I am in the process of learning the swing.” Applying that to every area of life is a very helpful principle: the practicing mind applied to parenting, to Bible study, to pastoring, to making a routine of coming to church and reading the Bible, that kind of thing. It is a process of growth. We start as infants in Christ and grow to adulthood in Christ. That is spiritual maturity, and it is a process. So I love The Practicing Mind for helping us realize that it is all a process.
The Rest of the List
Going back to the list, I will go to the year-in-review page, which looks at pages read: 16,000 pages, forty-eight books read in 2025. The shortest book was God’s Armor Bearer; the longest was the Bible. Here are some of the highlights and book covers, listed in date order, and I will hit the ones I skipped, going in reading order from the beginning of the year. Leap First by Seth Godin. I had not read a Seth Godin book in a long time, but it was nice to be back to that attitude of a bias toward action: “I just want to get out there and try something. If it works, fine. If not, that is fine too. At least I learned something in the process.” Leap First helped with that. Kingdom Woman I saw recommended at another church, but it did not really resonate with me, so it is on my unfinished list; I did not even finish it. Anointed Leadership is an expository study of 1 and 2 Samuel. I am about halfway through it, because I am almost done with 1 Samuel in my Sunday morning preaching series. Several of my 2025 books were commentaries, and I just did not finish the series, so I have not finished the book yet. Next year’s numbers will be a little inflated, because a lot of my reading went into those commentaries; that is just how the timing worked out this year. So that one is not quite done yet. Mastering the English Bible: The Gospels by David Cloud is another series that will be part of that, so it is on my unfinished list too. I reread Alien Baptism and the Baptists in preparation for my A Case for Baptist Baptism book. It is a little bombastic and not super convincing, but it brought up some helpful historical points, some of them unsubstantiated. Still, if you are new to the whole idea of Baptist baptism, this one was used at my alma mater, and I still found it helpful. There is The Practicing Mind again, and the King James Bible again, reading those this year. I already mentioned Eight Hours or Less, I think the first book I completed last year. It was a productivity book, but for me it was largely forgettable. I think I enjoyed it when I read it, but I did not put much of it into practice, and I hardly remember it, actually.
The next is Designed to Lead by Eric Geiger. I have read other things by this author and by authors he has co-authored with. This was very good for church leadership. If you are in that world, Simple Church was very good, and this one pairs with it. Designed to Lead was not as good as Simple Church, but it was a help for those in church ministry. Making Vision Stick I read years ago and reread at the beginning of this year, and I realized I had never rated it. I am not big on Andy Stanley’s theology, but as far as communication goes, he is very, very good at helping communicate a goal, staying simple, presenting the idea over and over again, and helping people understand and buy into what we are trying to do as a church. He communicates that kind of stuff very well. There is The Making of a Leader again. Next was Meet Generation Z, a book that tries to help older generations (I am a millennial) connect with, relate to, and understand the mindset of Gen Z. There is Gen Alpha behind them, but Gen Z in particular is coming into its own in full force. It talks especially about the movement away from a biblical society. On a scale of zero to ten, where ten is a full biblical understanding, perhaps in our society, especially my parents’ generation, people were at an eight or a seven, and it just took a little bump to get them up to ten, to accept Christ. Now we are starting from what some would call a post-Christian society, and biblical literacy, biblical understanding, is way down at a two or three on that scale. It takes exposure after exposure after exposure to bump them from three to four, five, six, seven, all the way up to ten, where they accept Christ. So ministering to Gen Z is more of a long game, and this was helpful for understanding who they are. Next was Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics. It was interesting but not very practical at all. I listened through it at double speed, and a couple of times found myself going, “Oh, wow. Hmm, that is interesting,” and then not doing anything with it. So it was not a highly rated book for me. I already mentioned The Soul Winner.
The next is The 42nd Generation. It is about the missing generation in Matthew. Matthew lists these chunks of fourteen, and one has only thirteen. I read it in one sitting. It makes some assumptions the Bible does not clearly state. There are some fascinating ideas in it, and I found some of them interesting, but I am not all the way on board with the definitive, dogmatic statements it makes. So it was not necessarily for me, but it does at least take a stab at addressing some of the biblical questions in that generational listing in Matthew. The next is 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life: Identifying and Dealing with Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other High-Conflict Personalities. I read it in conjunction with some counseling, and it was very good for understanding the clinical psychologists’ terms. For instance, “Well, he is a narcissist.” You hear that word thrown around a lot, so what are the actual definitions of these words, and what are the signs? I am convinced most of it is just selfishness, and we have “clinicized” everything. We have put clinical terms on biblical sins, and most of it is just that we are living after the flesh. We focus on ourselves so much. Not everybody is a narcissist; we are just dealing with the flesh, and people are selfish. Some display tendencies toward narcissism, by the clinical definition, a little more than others, granted, and this book helped me pinpoint some exact definitions, but it is not a book I would recommend broadly. It was just helpful for me in our particular situation. Next is The 12 Week Year. I heard it recommended by a YouTuber named Ali Abdaal. It focuses on sprints, twelve-week goals rather than one-year goals, and we do that naturally in our church as we build up to the next event. For instance, we are thinking ahead toward Easter, building toward it, and getting things in place now. So it has been helpful, but you do not need to read the whole book. You can just focus on the next twelve weeks; that is about what the book is about. It was fine. The next was The Dip by Seth Godin, which I mentioned. Then Excellent Sheep, recommended to me by a schoolteacher friend in our church. It argues that the American educational system has created a bunch of sheep who are very good at getting test scores but not the greatest at thinking. That is a problem, but the book does not really offer any useful answers to the problem; it just exposes it. So it was interesting but not altogether helpful. Those kinds of books leave you going, “Oh man, I wish somebody could do something about that.” And here we are at the grassroots trying to do something, winning people to Christ, and that is our answer. I think the best answer is the gospel. So that was a helpful exposé-style book, but not much more than that.
Factfulness I already mentioned. Dangerous Personalities is another I read in conjunction with some counseling situations, not from a clinical psychologist’s perspective but from an FBI profiler’s. So still not technical definitions necessarily, but a gut-level response: here is what this type of person does, or this is a dangerous personality if you have three of these selfish-style characteristics in one person’s personality. It was an interesting book and very helpful, just to see a checklist and go, “Man, yeah, that guy hits eighty-five of the hundred things on that checklist. That is a pretty strong, scary personality, and we have to watch out for that.” Sunrise on the Reaping was about my only fiction reading this past year. Shatterproof I already mentioned. Raising Men, Not Boys: Shepherding Your Sons to Be Men of God was fine, a good little challenge, but not great for me. Exegetical Fallacies I already mentioned. Fierce Women I mentioned… oh, no, I did not. Fierce Women was very, very good. I thought I read it in 2024, but maybe it was 2025. It was excellent, because I am married to a fierce woman. My wife is feisty and powerful and an incredible woman of God. If a fierce woman does not have the power of the Holy Spirit, it is no wonder there is some butting of heads, because men have a natural fierceness, but it is a different kind of fierceness than a woman’s. When you do not know how to allow the Holy Spirit to temper that fierceness, that is where so many marital problems come from. I appreciate being married to a fierce woman. This is not necessarily a personality-trait kind of book, but it does lean toward those who would be characterized as fierce women, talking about channeling that ferocity into things that are good. I am so thankful for a wife who has done that so incredibly well. I believe she is so much more powerful through a personality she has allowed the Lord to use, and it is an incredible combination. I believe God has put the two of us together as complements to each other, not in competition with each other. So Fierce Women has been a help in explaining what some would think: “Oh, I am just such a fiery personality. My husband cannot control me.” Well, he does not have to. There are ways husband-and-wife teams can work together, and it is not a bad thing that God designed you the way you are designed. I love this book for that. Transforming Congregational Singing I already mentioned. A Plea to Southern Gospel Music Fans I also like. I think there is another review out there that does not like it so much, but I like it. It is good exposure to some things. I am not on board with everything in it, and sometimes he jumps to conclusions, maybe, but I like anybody who helps us think about music. There is very little from a Baptist perspective on this topic of music, so I appreciate anybody who is up to the challenge of writing about music, and this book does just that. If you disagree, then have some good biblical basis for your disagreements, not just, “Well, I did not like it.” So that was helpful for that.
Make Your Bed I mentioned. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading goes through different stages in different sections of the book, but basically it says: yes, scan the book; read the front cover, the back cover, the table of contents, the chapter headings, and the first and last paragraph of each chapter; then read the book quickly; then read the book thoroughly, looking for different ideas with each style of reading. I already did that naturally with books, but it gave me a little more structure and a format for approaching a book and trying to get the most out of it. So I appreciated that. Joy, my wife’s ladies’ devotional, I mentioned already. The Story Factor was fine; I would not recommend it. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was the second fiction book I read this year. The Design of Everyday Things is another of those fascinating, weird books you see recommended and try. I really liked it, but it was not useful in the least. It just says that if things are designed badly, or if you mess something up, it is probably not your fault; it is the designer’s fault for not designing it clearly enough. So I liked it. Scripture Helps is our book that we produced here. 101 Bible Questions: I do not know Andrew Farley’s background, and I found myself disagreeing with him theologically in many areas but also agreeing with him in many areas, and I appreciated the simplicity of just 101 questions. The chapter title is the question, followed by probably ten or twelve paragraphs, two or three pages, answering each question succinctly. I used it as the basis for a Sunday school lesson series I taught to our Rooted class, our young adults class, using his questions as a launching point. I used some of his biblical answers in my own study, and then I used those tough questions, which I wanted our young adults class to think through with me and answer from the Bible, and I guided the conversation to the Scriptures and the Scriptures’ answers. This book was the foundation for that. It was not that I recommended the book and said, “Here, go read this”; it was not even good enough for me to recommend that strongly. But as a teaching launch point, it was very helpful. Next was Slouching Towards Gomorrah. I should have appreciated and enjoyed this one more. It is a classic, but not for me. Maybe it was written for another generation, I do not know. Three stars does not give it proper weight, because it was a generational book; it was transformative for the conservative movement. And yet I just did not resonate with it much. I found it important and helpful, but it just was not for me. I might not be smart enough; that is probably it.
The next is The Wisdom of the Bullfrog, which I already mentioned. God’s Armor Bearer, already mentioned. Principles: Life and Work. Again, I like taking these older men who have lived life and distilled it down to essential principles, and that is what this whole book is about. He tried to build his companies on these principles, and it is a fascinating approach to business, decision-making, the stock market, and leading the company. It sounded like such a fierce work environment, where anybody could talk back to anybody, anybody had the right to speak against anybody, and the janitor could call out the CEO, and it was fine. You had to be able to take harsh criticism, because that was making the company better, and not everybody could fit in that environment. I found it so fascinating that he built the company to be self-correcting along the way. It was an interesting book, and I am still trying to find ways to make it practical for a church setting, but it was very, very good. Fearless I already mentioned. The Doctrine Which Ye Have Learned I mentioned in our last video, from our doctrines class. Then Sunday Matters: 52 Devotionals to Prepare Your Heart for Church. We use it as a foundation for weekly family devotions on Saturdays, to prepare us for Sundays. I would not wholeheartedly agree with everything in it or recommend it to everybody, but it was helpful in helping our kids start to think about Sunday as our time of worship. We prepare on Saturday to go to church on Sunday to worship God. Age of Opportunity I mentioned, and How to Lead Your Family I mentioned. And then the last two reviews of the year: I got these right before the end of the year and read through them quickly. One of them is a songbook; I do not know if it counts as a book, but it is on my list of forty-eight, a book of hymns, the little Hymns of Grace. It is a stunning production of many good hymns, with their backstories and some artwork to go with them, just an incredibly produced book. Those were my last two books of the year.
So that about sums it up: my year in books, along with sermon preparation and the little pamphlets and articles and all the other stuff. These were just the books. I hope you go into 2026 with a few of these as recommendations. Maybe you are building a book list this year. There were some in here I would recommend and some I would not really recommend, so depending on where you are, what field you are in, and what your interests are, I hope this provides a few ideas for the coming year. God bless you, and we will see you in the next video.
