I have a short video for you today, church. Our staff spent a few days last week planning our 2026 calendar, and I am just really excited about the new year. I wanted to give you a little sneak peek at some of the major events of the upcoming year, but we also looked back at the past few years together, and it has been really gratifying to see some of the dreams we dreamed over the past three or four years now being fulfilled. If you are new here, I am Pastor Ryan Rench of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California. I am dressed a little differently today because I was filming another video for our fall festival.
Looking Back
The past few years have been a wonderful journey of incremental progress. I like making a little progress in a lot of different directions and seeing where that leads over the course of years. A couple of Wednesdays ago, I shared some of that progress on our Wednesday sheets. We have shared updates on some of these things in previous videos, but I shared that this past year we accomplished the launch of our Scripture Helps book and the Joy devotional, as well as many Testify Nights, what we call our testimony nights, from some of the men of our church, and the Deeper in the Word Bible Institute. Those classes have been going on every week, three different classes, for the past three semesters now, and that has been gratifying to see. I was looking back at notes from 2022, and it was just a dream back then; we finally launched it last year. Then there are the ministry highlights we are doing on Sunday nights to keep people up to date. I love that we can show the many things happening around the church every week, so on Sunday nights we focus on one ministry highlight per week. That has been a good way to recognize the volunteers in our church and encourage people to jump into the different ministries. There are our weekly YouTube videos, which we have been posting pretty much every week. A couple of weeks ago I missed my first Monday; we did not upload on Monday as we have been, and that was the first time in two years. So there are about a hundred videos listed. Last Christmas we did daily Advent videos, so there have been more than a hundred, depending on how you count, since we launched our YouTube channel and the new social media pages to help us bring the Bible home. Our goal is not just to have a Sunday service, but to continue with the Scriptures all week long, so online connection with the church through ways like this has been helpful and gratifying to see. Then we did the congregational singing emphasis month, with the new song-sheet layouts this year, and it was great to have another full month of focus on congregational singing, the best part of our church’s music program.
Then there was a reinvigorated heart for souls, through the Saturday morning outreach, the missions revival, the trip to the Philippines, and this fall festival emphasis. I am so pleased that 120 outside guests are registered for the fall festival. By the time this video launches, we will have already had it, and we will see how many of those showed up, or how many showed up without registering. I think it is going to be a packed house at the fall festival, and I am so excited for the day, but most importantly I am excited about the church having a renewed fervor for souls. The missions revival was wonderful. The Saturday outreaches we picked back up this year have been so encouraging, with so many people out. The missions trip gave us a firsthand look at where our missions dollars are going, and it changes the way we pray for souls. So I have appreciated this renewed fervor for souls in our church. Another thing we updated this past year was our financial reporting. Miss Shay has done such a good job with that. She is concluding her first full year as financial secretary, so we have not even gotten through a full calendar year with her at the helm, but she has been doing such a good job, and it has been so nice to have clean reports. I appreciate the work she has done in transitioning this year. This year we also added a Southwest church planting conference in Phoenix, which we were helping host, or at least representing the California churches and keeping the need for California church planting in front of our church. We want to keep emphasizing that again this year. We have been focusing on it for the past several years, and we will go to that church planting conference again in June. I am looking forward to that; it was something we started last year. And there has been new staff development over the last couple of years, with Mitch being added this past year, Brother Zach taking over the teens, and Brother Alex interning with us again; we are looking forward to his coming back if the Lord continues to lead that way. So that was a nice look back at the past year.
Looking Ahead
The note a couple of Wednesdays ago went over some of the things God has laid on my heart for the upcoming year, a sneak preview. Maybe that is revisiting our visitation program. I want to take some guys from the church every Saturday on follow-up visits or absentee visits, those kinds of things. We would like to do the fall festival again next year. We have 120 registered this year, and I see that growing next year; that is a great response for us. We had the Christmas play before, but I think this will have an even greater impact on our community, because it is a church service designed specifically around a gospel message. So I am really looking forward to this year, and I think we will plan it again for next year. We want to continue the momentum, as the note says.
We gave out a little bookmark with the things we have coming up in the new year. This will help our church plan ahead and put the things that are important to the church on their personal calendars. If we are called to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, then we should not just fit church events into the gaps of our lives. We schedule the things that are most important, so I believe we ought to schedule spiritual development, spiritual growth, things connected to the church. Those ought to make their way onto the calendar, because they ought to be seen as important. It ought not to be that we schedule sports and work and vacations and everything else first and then see where we can fit church in. A lot of times the mentality is, “Oh, I only had two weekends to go to church this month. Too bad.” Or, “Two weekends I could go to church this year. Too bad.” No, the kingdom ought to take precedence over everything else, and there are church events that will help us grow the kingdom of God and seek first the kingdom of God. So here is a bookmark we have given our church. We would not expect our church members to just show up at the drop of a hat if we threw a church event out there, or guilt-trip people into coming just because it is a church event, if we had not planned ahead for them. I think it would be disrespectful of our church members’ time to just say, “Hey, everyone needs to be at this event. We are having it next Sunday.” If they had prior obligations, we would understand if they missed, and we would not want to make them feel bad. But we want to make sure they have the dates for all our major events ahead of the year, so that as they plan their personal calendars, they can look at the church events and say, “We want to make sure we are here for the missions revival. We want to support the church on Easter. We want to bring some friends to this outreach event. We want our teens involved in summer camp.” That kind of thing requires planning. So as a church we want to present the dates to our church, and if you are a member of our church, we want you to have these dates plenty of months in advance.
The 2026 Highlights
So here is a sneak preview of some of the main events, even before the full calendar, which we will unveil in January. In February we are bringing back our preaching rally, with a theme of dating. It is on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, and we are hosting local youth groups here at our church. I am really looking forward to the ice cream Sunday relationships theme, with an ice cream shop theme going on February 14th. Then on March 1st, evangelist Dave McCracken is coming to preach a multi-night revival for us, March 1st through 4th. April 5th is Easter, always one of the biggest days of our year. That was our biggest attendance last year. I do not know what our attendance will be at the fall festival, but Easter was our biggest day, and I am still thankful for the fruit that has remained in our church since Easter because of it. April 23rd is our ladies’ getaway. This is going to be an incredible trip for the ladies, I guarantee it. My wife has been planning it: a two-night, three-day getaway. It is going to be a good one that the ladies will not want to miss, and the men will want to plan ahead and help their wives get to it. May 3rd is our anniversary Sunday. This will be thirty-nine years, so we are going into our fortieth year, and my goal going into our fortieth year is that we can be debt-free. I want to have an anniversary campaign to help us push toward becoming debt-free by the end of 2026. That is the goal. We want to be debt-free, and that would free up about $9,000 a month to go back into ministry rather than going to the bank. So May 3rd will be a good time to focus on that, building up a good love offering; I hope we can be generous and give toward that. July 20th is our teen camp this year, with Brother Jason Jett as our camp preacher and many, many Southern California churches joining us. It will be a wonderful year, so, church family, mark your calendars for July 20th. September 13th is our missions revival, another multi-night meeting. We will have two multi-night meetings this year, one in the spring with Brother McCracken and one in the fall with the missions revival, September 13th through 16th, which is always a highlight of my year. I love it. Our next video is going to look back at what we did for our missions revival. A few videos ago we talked about our missions budget numbers, but I want to talk about the way our church prepares for it and show all the behind-the-scenes, which will help us look forward to next year too. Next, on October 11th, we have our fall festival, with Bruce Hebert preaching, another incredibly evangelistic-minded preacher. I love Brother Hebert. I think this is the first time he will be preaching at our church; maybe the second, if he preached years ago. He has a big white handlebar mustache, just like my dad, so I think our church will really enjoy having him, and the fall festival will be a huge blessing. Then in November, at a time to be determined, we want to take a mini trip. We are not ready for another overseas trip, since we just went to the Philippines in February, but we want to take a mini trip focusing on church planting again, an area missions trip right here, locally, a three-day focus on something domestic, a church planting trip. So those are the main highlights of the year. I encourage you to stay faithful and stay generous, church. That is all for today. Keep on growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. God bless you, and we will see you in the next video, on missions.
