All right, I am going to have our interns read eleven books in eleven weeks. Our summer interns are coming in just a couple of weeks, and I want to go through all eleven of these books as an overview, along with a few honorable mentions, which are this pile over here. We might have mentioned a few of those last year, but I am going to start with them. If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California. I have given some disclaimers in previous videos about some of these books; they are not all theology books. The summer interns we get at our church come from Heartland Baptist Bible College, so I am assuming they are getting some theology through their studies in class. These are books that can help them and expose them to some different thoughts out there. All truth is God’s truth. If an author is taking some truth from something he has studied and articulating it for us to learn from, I think that is good. We can use the discernment God gives to see what is God’s truth and what is the lie of the world, but I think there are some valuable things to learn.
Honorable Mentions
This is the honorable mentions pile, and I will not go into depth on them. I mentioned these last year: the trio of books from Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!, Steal Like an Artist, and Keep Going. I really like this series. They are easy, quick little reads, a way to knock out a few books, and fun for the artistic side of producing and getting stuff out there. I have not mentioned this one before: this book was given to me, and I loved it, Praying the Bible. It changed the way I view prayer. It is a really thin little book, without much to it as far as content goes, and you can read it very quickly. But it examines the words of Scripture and how the men of Scripture prayed, and encourages us to pray some of the same things. Why We Sleep, I think I mentioned last year. It was truly a life-changing book, in that it changed my sleeping. It has really been a help to me, and I refer to it quite a bit. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a classic, good for anybody to read, but especially for those going into ministry, like our summer interns. We are not making them read this one, but it is a good honorable mention. Good to Great examines many companies that started good and asks what made them continue to grow and excel, and then pulls leadership lessons from that. The last honorable mention is a book simply called Heaven. It is a really thick book. You might not think there is that much to say about heaven, but I was shocked at how much my view of heaven changed because of this book. It is an excellent book. He does not land dogmatically on any particular view of heaven or the eternal state or the millennial kingdom, but he draws aspects from all those Scriptures and the prophecies of the Old Testament to paint a picture of what heaven will be. I just love this book.
The Eleven Books
Here are the actual eleven books they are going to read this summer. I will go in order of size; they are stacked from smallest to largest, not by thickness but by the book’s dimensions, and that is the order we will go in today. This reading list is not quite as big as last year’s; they had more thick books last year. Based on some of their reviews last year, I made a completely new list. Brother Alex Delid is coming. He interned for us last summer, and he is coming on as a staff intern for a year, and after that he might stay on as our youth pastor; we are committing to this one year at least. I say all that because I did not want him to have to reread the books we covered last year, so I think I have eleven brand-new books here.
The first is on church membership, by Jonathan Leeman, in the 9Marks series. I really like this whole series from a Baptist church in Washington, D.C. They might have a few different approaches than we do, but I love that they do not dismiss church membership as no big deal. I love that Leeman looks at the Scriptures, not one Scripture that says, “Thou shalt join a church,” but all the Scriptures about what it means to be part of the body of Christ: What is it to connect to a family? How much authority does the church have? What is my relationship to the church, and the church’s relationship to me? It is a very good look at a topic not many articulate the way Leeman does here. It is a really thin, easy read, good for anybody who says, “Well, I do not see membership in the Bible.” This shows that it is biblical, and I appreciate that approach.
Next is Make Your Bed. This is a famous book. It made waves when it first came out, and everybody was talking about it, and I was kind of resistant to it at first because of that. But when I actually read it, it was so simple: pithy, quotable, boiled-down truths, ten or twelve of them, each with a lesson from Admiral McRaven’s past in the Navy. He lays it out straight and basically says, “Before you change the world, why do you not change yourself? Wake up, make your bed, do the little things you can do to make a difference in the world, and all those little differences will build into greater differences in the long run.” I appreciate that approach to life, and certainly to ministry, and I would love for our interns to get that kind of grit and mentality. I think Make Your Bed lives up to the hype. It is a very good book.
The Disciplined Life by Taylor is a very helpful, deep, rich, compelling book that makes you think about your own walk with the Lord and why you are not disciplined. It is probing and convicting and gives very good examples. It is written in an older style, and it makes you think on every page; you are not going to speed-read through this book. It is a good one to go through with somebody who is having difficulty with discipline in a certain area, because it looks at the heart of discipline: “Why do I want to discipline myself? Is this just a pursuit of myself? Is this just a self-help book?” No, this is discipline for the cause of Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. So The Disciplined Life is a very good Christian approach to discipline.
Next is Deep Work. I love Cal Newport. I have loved every single book he has written, and recently I have been listening to his podcast and YouTube channel. He goes through the thought process, especially nowadays, with AI kind of taking over the world in a sense, so that we are thinking less, outsourcing our thinking, or allowing our thinking to be distracted from really important things. Deep Work is about minimizing the distractions of life so your brain does not just stay at the surface level. If you stay with a project long enough (not minutes at a time, but turning off all notifications and anything that will distract you, and sticking with something for hours at a time), it allows your brain to develop a new kind of depth that affects your whole life. We talk about getting into a flow state, where time just disappears and you are so locked in that nothing can distract you; once you are in that state, you do not want anything to knock you out of it, and you are upset or aggravated when a phone call comes in or somebody knocks on the door. You might think, “Well, I am really good at multitasking.” Deep Work helped me understand there is no such thing as being good at multitasking. It is just multi-focusing, and your brain cannot focus on multiple things at once, so it is trained to jump from one thing to the next. Deep Work is about shutting off the world and focusing on one thing. Even though he is a secular author, I think it is very good for Christians to view the world as a distraction from the things that matter, particularly in the time of devotions we encourage people to have every single day. There needs to be a focus on what is important, and Deep Work can actually help your spiritual life even though it is a secular book. It is a very good book, and I hope it helps our interns this summer.
Next is The Practicing Mind. I have even been able to use this book in training my kids when they get frustrated: “Man, I cannot get this down. I am so aggravated.” My son with piano, for example. We were talking about this book recently when he could not get past something, with a recital coming up, and he just could not get his fingers to go. I said, “I just finished a book by a piano tuner and piano player who understood that all of life is practice.” You can go through life really frustrated because you are not as good as somebody else, or you can understand, “I am in the process of growing, of getting somewhere I want to be, and part of the growing process is growing pains.” Learning something new is not comfortable, but if I am okay with the uncomfortable valley of getting through it, on the other side I will have accomplished the skill. As a piano player, he knew it takes years of practice and a lot of time to get good at something. When he approached golf lessons with the same mentality, there was a whole group of students learning golf for the first time, and some were swinging and getting so aggravated that they could not get the ball to go straight. But he, a piano player now learning something new, understood: “I am not going to be good at golf on my first day, at my first lesson. It is a process.” I appreciated his approach. I did a full review of it in a recent magazine article. I just love that patient approach to life: slow down, wait, trust the process. This author really helped with that. I read it probably ten or twelve years ago and reread it last year, and I think having our interns read it will be very helpful for their whole lives.
Probably my favorite book of last year was Fearless. It is written by a secular author, as Unbroken was, but it is right up there with Unbroken, my favorite book of all time. Fearless is another military book, a Navy SEAL book, about another man who has a conversion to Christ that changes his whole life and career. He was a drug addict, and he knew he was on the wrong path, but Christ came in and turned his life around and set him on a course to become one of the most beloved Navy SEALs of all time. I cannot give away the end. My friend Donnie Wilson introduced it to me and said, “You have to read this.” I did, and I passed it along to my family, and at Christmastime everybody in our family was reading it or listening to the audiobook and loving it. This is the book I have been talking about most recently and most often. I appreciate and love this one. Some military scenes write out the profanity they used, so in a few cases you might want a censored version, but I think our interns will really appreciate and enjoy it. It is a great story, and you have to read through to the end. I cannot give it away, but Fearless is an excellent, excellent book.
Henry and the Great Society I have not read since my wife and I were on a road trip, maybe when we were moving out here to California. I cannot remember exactly, but my wife read it aloud while I was driving, probably around 2008 or maybe 2010. I do not even know if it is still in print; you might be able to find some copies out there. It is like a little novella, a story of Henry, who lives a simple life, and as technology is slowly introduced into his life, it is pitched as a life-saving, time-saving invention: “This is going to really help you wash your laundry. Electricity is going to change your life and bring lights to the home.” By the end of the book, none of those promises of technology actually pan out, and he yearns for the simpler life he used to have. So it is kind of a sad story. My wife cried at the end, because it feels hopeless and helpless: “What are we even doing with our society? Why can we not go back to a simpler time?” It feels almost sad to read, but sad in a good way. Having read it and examined our own lives, sometimes you have to stop and think: Are we too busy? Are we doing too much? Are we pushing too hard? Is all of this just fluff for no good reason? What is the point of my life? Why am I doing all these things? It has been a very helpful look at life and vacations and the grind and the point of family and family time. It is a very helpful exposé of the busyness of our lives, and I think it will be a real help to our interns. They do not have much choice about being super busy, but I think it will help them with their mentality.
Next is God’s Armor Bearer. I had our staff read it at our last staff planning, at the end of last year, and they could not get over its charismatic feel. I do not know much about Terry Nance, but there is a charismatic, Pentecostal kind of bent to it. It does not come out as much in the theology as it does in some of the stories. He says, “Man, the Holy Spirit impregnated an idea in me,” and he keeps using the word impregnated, so that is the hang-up the staff kept coming back to and laughing about. But God’s Armor Bearer is about the second-man position, the idea that “I am here to serve. I am here to help. I am here to further the mission.” Too many cooks in the kitchen, that kind of thing: if everybody runs their own little circle, the organization does not move forward. So this is about getting on board with each other and with the pastor, moving forward together as a team. I love our team. I love our staff so much and appreciate their heart to work together to accomplish the Lord’s vision for our church. This is a beautiful way to get on the same page, with good mentalities and good tips for being in that second-man position. I liked it more than Wally Beebe’s book on how to be a second man (I forget what it is called), which we read in Bible college and which I did not like so much. This one is shorter, and I like it even better, so it is a good one for interns to read this summer.
Next is Dangerous Calling. I mentioned that Make Your Bed was one of those books that was really popular at first and that I avoided for a while, and this is the same way. It was super popular when it first came out several years ago, and I wanted to hate it because it was so popular. But when I actually went through it, I realized it is a really good book, full of good principles for those in ministry. The danger is not in the sense of falling into sexual sin or anything like that; I am going to do a video on some of the protections we try to set up in our church, and I think there are aspects of that in here. But this is more about the spiritual depth and weight of our calling as pastors. The young men interning for us this summer are coming to intern at a church to train for future ministry. Summer internships are handled out of our missions budget, because we are investing in the next generation of leaders, who will go to other churches somewhere. So I am trying to train them with the mentality of church staff, yes, but also the mentality of a pastor, because I believe these young men coming to serve at our church are going to be pastors one day. They need to be aware of what goes on at church behind the scenes, even some of the struggles a pastor has and the pitfalls he will have to face. This is a good way for a pastor to take the experiences another pastor has written down and train future pastors in that area. They might have read Dangerous Calling before; I am not sure. It is a really popular book, used in many ways. But I appreciate its gospel focus and its gravity. Even though it is a modern book, it has good weight to it. It is a very, very good one.
Next is The Death of Porn: Men of Integrity Building a World of Nobility, by Ray Ortlund; you might not be able to see that title there. It is written by an older gentleman, and it has a grandfatherly tone, as if Grandpa pulled up a chair for a chat across the table. It is not so much about the tactics of staying pure. We use Randy Alcorn’s book The Purity Principle, and I actually just finished a book called Sexual Idolatry, which is better than all of those, even better than this one, but this one was already on my list and ready to go. It is just so good: see her as Christ sees her, see yourself as Christ sees you, and see Jesus as God sees Jesus. It approaches pornography and lust with the idea that “Man, she is a creature of God. You have no right to look at her like that.” So it is a very good approach to what we could call the concepts, the ideas, the spiritual nature of lust. I had interns read it several years ago, and one just recently told me that this approach was life-changing. I appreciated that, and I want that same openness, and want to be a help to our interns this summer, in such a dangerous area, so we are going to focus on that one.
The last one I am going to have them read is my book on Baptist baptism. It is just a booklet now, here at our church. We had it for a conference back in January, but I have not fully released it yet: A Case for Baptist Baptism. We want to talk through its theology and use it as a conversation starter among us as young men looking to articulate some of the things our fathers passed to us. What does that mean for our generation? What is Baptist baptism all about? Does it matter? Who is allowed to baptize? Who determines what baptism is, what it means, what you are identifying with, and all of that? I try to tackle that in my book. I have not fully updated it yet. I have gotten good feedback from many people, and some testimonials we are going to add to the next version before we finally release it. It has been a long process; I have been working on it since January, and hopefully this next month I will be able to finalize it and make it available in print. I am not trying to be some kind of expert on it, just trying to put out thoughts I have heard from others for our generation, and I hope it is a help. So this will be one of the books our interns read this summer.
So there it is: eleven books in eleven weeks, one book a week, and I think that includes a week of camp; I am not sure. Pray for our interns, because they are going to be reading a lot. Every bit of their spare time is going to be filled with reading. Even though this is a lighter list than last year’s, they will still be covering quite a bit. Let us know in the comments which ones you think we should add next year, what books have been a blessing to you, or if you have any questions about the ones we covered today. That is it for the video today. We will see you in the next one. God bless you.
