Well, we are right in the middle of our missions revival. As a matter of fact, I am dressed for yard work right now; I am heading out to prep for this week right after recording this video. But by the time this video launches, last night will have been our missions banquet, where we went over all the numbers I am about to talk about in today’s video, and we talked about faith promise missions. So today I want to share more about our church’s missions budget. If you are new here, my name is Pastor Ryan Rench, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California, and today’s video is for our church people, to give them a good view of our budget numbers. Your church might give more; it might give less. I was just with my friend who is a church planter in Oklahoma. Their church is, I do not know, ten or twelve years old, and it is already giving more than we are, so I am challenged by that. I know of another church in Oklahoma that gives about $350,000 a year, another church that gives a million dollars a year to missions, and a church in Kansas that gives around $400,000 a year. I do not think we are talking about rich oil-tycoon churches. I know these churches, and they are just simple, faithful givers who care about the cause of Christ around the world. So I am challenged by that. It is not a competition, but we do know that Paul sometimes used comparisons, encouraging the church at Corinth with the example of the churches of Macedonia that were giving. So it is not bad to compare and get encouragement from that. I am encouraging our church with the generosity of other churches I know about, and I hope we can give more to missions than we ever have before.
Some Rough Numbers
So, some rough numbers first. Our church gave around $130,000 to missions in 2024. This year, as of the recording (it is October now), we are on track to give probably about $110,000 to missions. In the last report I got, out of 128 family units, about 72 are giving, and an estimated 40 of those tithe, although we do not know people’s incomes, so I am not positive about that. By the way, I have done a video on the tithe before, going through A. W. Pink’s book on tithing, and I still encourage our people to tithe, bringing ten percent of their increase to the Lord. That is a good baseline for our giving, and it is where I personally set my giving. Then I give to missions and our building and other special offerings on top of that, all by God’s grace. Some pastors check on the giving of their members as part of the oversight of their church, but I do not actually do that. And I bet if we did, our giving would skyrocket.
The Banquet Handout
But I wanted to go through the handout we gave out last night at our giving banquet. It goes over some of what happened in the past twelve months. It starts with an overview of faith promise missions giving, the only sermon I repeat annually. Then this time I went through the past twelve months. The first column, in green, is the giving month by month. October of last year was about $9,000, and it averages about $8,000 or $9,000 a month. The next column is the intern column, for the summer internship we provided the finances for this year. There were two summer interns, and we took an offering for them, so not all of it came out of the general budget. It cost about $10,000 for the summer, but we spent about $4,000, and another $4,000 came from an offering we took up for them, which provided for their down payment and their expenses while they were here. The next column is visiting missionaries. If a visiting missionary comes in, we want to make sure to take care of their meals, their lodging, their travel, their love offerings, and all of that. We do take offerings for any missionaries coming through, and we try to be generous, but the love offerings do not cover everything, so some things come out of our budget. The next column is our missions support. That is the biggest expense, the monthly support checks we send out to all our missionaries, and it averages about $8,000 a month. April is a little higher because of some special offerings we gave at the end of the school year to a couple of the Bible colleges we support, but for the most part it is about $8,000 a month.
Then the Philippines missions trip column says we spent $1,100 out of that account this year, but that is not accurate. If we spread this range out to about twenty-four months, it would show that we were collecting funds, because of the long-term planning we put into any missions trip, especially something overseas. We plan more than twelve months out, so some expenses came before October 2024, and those just did not get recorded in this column. If we looked at the full expense report for the Philippines missions trip, it would show that every dollar we spent was also collected through the fees paid by those who went on the trip. So the bottom-line number on the missions surplus will actually be $1,100 different from what is showing in the far-right column. The total missions column is what we have spent, versus what came in, in the green column, and the surplus-or-deficit column shows the difference between the two. With the Philippines correction and about $250 of other miscellaneous charges, our deficit this year is actually about $6,300 or so, which we have spent from the general fund to cover our missions expenses. I am okay with that. I am fine with spending money from the tithes to accomplish the Great Commission all around the world. I would rather it go toward that than toward some kind of tax or something like that. It is totally okay to use our general fund that way.
But I wanted to show our church these actual numbers because we have missionaries contacting us basically every week, looking to set up meetings, and it is like, “Man, I want to, but I just cannot support everyone.” I just want to be honest with them and tell them where we are financially. Not that we cannot live by faith, but if we took on every single person who came through our church or asked for support and just called that faith, eventually it would reach a tipping point, because literally every single week we are contacted by missionaries. So I am trying to be wise with God’s money here and to follow Him in how we handle our missions budget. You might judge us a little extra hard now that you know the actual numbers, but that is okay. It is God’s church, and we will allow Him to do with the budget as He will.
The Budget Breakdown
Next we have the budget breakdown in our missions brochure. I cannot show that here, because it is for our church. We have missionaries in closed countries, and we do not want to share that information across the internet; we share it just with our church. It is a beautiful brochure with a full world map showing where each missionary is. We have broken our missions budget into several categories, so it is not only foreign church-planting missions that comes out of our missions budget. You see here that our foreign missions is split into church-planting missionaries and those serving national pastors. We have some of those represented in our missions revival this week. Some missionaries, for example, go to a location and work with national pastors, collecting American dollars to distribute to many different national pastors, who can many times do the work better than an American missionary can. So we support ministries like that. Then we support foreign people groups here in the US. I would separate that from our domestic church-planting fund, because these are often foreign-missions-trained missionaries who had to come back for whatever reason. They are still serving that people group, but here in the United States, so we still call those foreign missions. Next is our US church planting, one of the most exciting sections to me. We do not have any church planters in our missions revival this week, but I love giving to church planting, in many ways because of the return on investment, so to speak. We can give to church planters who plant churches, and then those churches themselves become missions senders, forces for the gospel. For example, the church I was at in Oklahoma recently was a church plant that our church was able to help get off the ground by sending offerings, and now their missions giving is more than ours. That is a blessing. I love hearing those stories. Then there are Bible colleges, another section of our missions budget. We focused on Heartland Baptist Bible College in a previous missions revival, and on California church planting and others in other missions revivals in the past. I love our Bible colleges, and I love that through one offering, which goes to the training of hundreds of young people, we can train and influence multiple missionaries and church planters and pastors. I am so thankful for that. Then there are church helps: ministries like camps, those that process ministry funds, legal helps we benefit from as a church, and social helps, things that are not necessarily church-planting ministries. We would call them church helps ministries, and I believe there is a spot for them within our church missions budget.
This chart shows the different breakdowns and the actual dollars spent monthly in each area. $770 goes to Bible colleges, and $610 goes to church helps. Foreign church planting is the bulk of our finances, and those serving national pastors are another subcategory there. US people groups receive about $345, and church planters about $815, for a total expected monthly outlay of about $7,400. For years we supported missionaries at about $100 a month as a baseline. Recently, instead of taking on new missionaries, we increased all our missionaries by about ten percent. It does not sound like much, but if every church could do that, it would be a ten percent raise for each missionary. So we raised all of them up to at least $110. And if they come and visit, we do a twenty-five percent increase instead, taking them up to about $125. I would like to be able to do more, and in some cases we do more than that, but generally we are at about $110 each. So there are the breakdowns of the overall categories, and that shows the actual numbers.
Special Offerings
Beyond our monthly missions outlay, there are special projects we give to: things like Bearing Precious Seed, camp ministries, and Compassion for Ukraine projects, and of course every missionary who comes through our church receives a special offering. So we do take care of the missionaries as they come through, but we want to give more, and that is what missions conferences are for. A good missions revival revives our hearts for missions, to give toward missions and to pray for missionaries. We want to give generously, and our church does. I am so thankful for our church’s generosity in the special offerings that come up in addition to the monthly offerings. People give regularly to missions, and they also give to missionaries as they come through. A missionary from India just passed through our church last week, and I was shocked: just by putting it out there and allowing people the opportunity to give if God laid it on their hearts, the offering ended up being over $1,000 for him. I love that. You just never know who will want to give generously at any given time. So we try to make those opportunities available in addition to the monthly giving of our missions budget.
Faith
Giving is such a privilege, and I wanted to talk about the concept of faith promise missions, though not in that order: I want to talk about faith, then missions, and then the promise side of it. 2 Corinthians 8:9 is the overall text on giving. “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich.” This is the apostle Paul taking up an offering and bringing it back to the needy. These are churches giving outside of their own church to help another church, helping people they have never met. That is all given by faith. Our whole life is about living by faith, and there are several verses on the faith we live by. Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:6: “But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” 2 Corinthians says, “We walk by faith, not by sight.” Matthew 17:20: “And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” Galatians 2:20: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” So our whole life is a life of faith, and of course, if our living is by faith, then our giving is by faith. I bring my tithe by faith, by the grace of God. I give to missions by faith, by the grace of God. I believe God will provide for me. He always has, and I believe He always will.
Missions
The purpose of our missions giving is that the gospel can be taken around the world. The Great Commission is accomplished through missions. “And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.” Acts 1:8: “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judæa, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.” That is our theme phrase right there, the last part of Acts 1:8, “the uttermost part of the earth.” There are needy people all over this world, and their greatest need is the gospel. So we try to help outside our church to a great degree. Over the last twelve months, our total budget was about $644,000, and I think $109,000 ended up being the total given to missions. Earlier in the video I said $110,000 is what we are on track for; that is based on the last twelve months. So seventeen percent of the overall budget goes to missions. I have seen budget reports from church surveys that look across the budgets of thousands of churches, and often a missions budget is around five percent of the overall annual budget. So I am thankful that, comparatively speaking, our church and many independent Baptist churches like ours have a great heart for missions, and I am thankful for the high percentage we want to give. I am talking about taking the gospel outside our church. That is the missions side.
Promise
On the promise side of faith promise missions, part of it comes from the apostle Paul presenting this offering to take back to Jerusalem and saying he would collect it in about a year. He told them he would be there in about a year, so they could start collecting the offering on the Lord’s Day, on Sundays. This is why we meet on Sundays, and this is why we have offerings on Sundays. When I was preaching through 1 Corinthians 16, I was convicted by their taking an offering on Sundays. For a while I had my giving auto-drafted out of my account, and it just happened on whatever day of the week that day of the month fell on. But I said, if I want to give the Lord the firstfruits… I am not saying this is for everybody, but this is what the Lord led me to do. I wanted to give the firstfruits on the first day of the week. I wanted the first thing that comes out of my bank account every single week to go to the Lord and be part of the offerings on Sundays. So I switched my regular giving to be drafted on Sundays instead. Some would even have problems with that and say you need to bring physical cash, but that is a whole different argument. I am just talking about the promise side. 1 Corinthians 16 says, “Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I have given order to the churches of Galatia, even so do ye. Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him, that there be no gatherings when I come. And when I come, whomsoever ye shall approve by your letters, them will I send to bring your liberality unto Jerusalem.” So he said it is on the first day of the week. As we live by faith and give by faith and collect by faith on the first day of the week, our Sunday offerings are a chance to give to the cause of the Great Commission all around the world.
So for us, the promise side of missions is just a simple commitment card that we hand out, which helps us plan ahead for the future. There is no place for people’s names on it. It is just between them and God, a commitment made between our church members and the Lord: “I want to promise to give this much per week, or this much every single month.” I remember as a kid stepping out in faith and promising God, I think it was a dime, and then the next year I tried to increase it. I think I have tried to increase it every year since I was a little kid, since I first learned about faith promise missions from, I think it was, Brother Homer and some others who came through our church and introduced the concept. Maybe it was a dime, then a quarter, then fifty cents, and I made it to about a dollar a week.
My Little Blue Bible
I have this little blue Bible here that I got from my grandma. It is like going down memory lane as I look through some of the pages. This little blue Bible has all kinds of little notes inside: “Presented to Ryan Abraham Rench by Grandma Rench on my seventh birthday, 9-12-93.” I had all these verses written in here from different sermons that spoke to me, verses of the Bible that jumped out at me, things I wanted to remember, different pages of the Bible, different comics, and church records of different dates. But in the back, I was always encouraged by this: I kept a running tally of the amount I gave to church. Every year we would get the financial report from our church of what we had given over the year. Brother Schmidt was our financial secretary, and he would send the letters, and I felt so official because I got a letter with my name on it as a little kid. I think I was ten years old when I got my first one. So I would get that report from Brother Schmidt and see what I had given that year, and here is the tally, right here in the corner. I just kept it. 1996 was $65 for the whole year. That was my giving. Every time I filled out an envelope, every time I put my name on an offering, they tracked it, recorded it, and sent me the report. $65, and I was ten years old. The next year, 1997, was $78. 1998 was $86.85. 1999 was $177.28; I was thirteen years old. It is so encouraging to see that number grow every year and see God provide. As a teen it ended up becoming something like $5 a week. Then I got into college, and as a poor college student I still committed at the missions conference. I remember being so burdened to give to missions, and it was $20 a week, and I was so poor, just so poor. But God always provided for my missions giving, and that was in addition to my tithe, ten percent of all my increase, all the money I made. Ten percent was given to the Lord first, missions was above that, and God always provided for me. So I am just praying through our missions revival that God helps our church do more in the coming year, in 2026, for the cause of Christ around this world. I want it to be a wonderful year of missions, of the cause of Christ being spread, of the Great Commission being accomplished to the uttermost part of the earth. I love you, church. Thank you for being generous. Stay generous. That is all for today’s video. Till next time, keep on growing in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. God bless you.
