Well, these days it seems like everyone is starting a new podcast or a new YouTube channel, and it seems like just as many people are shutting theirs down, either because of a small one going nowhere or because they have grown so big that they have reached the phase of burnout. But here we are, starting a YouTube channel. I have Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in mind, and one of the principles he uses is “begin with the end in mind.” So here we are. This is going to be our take on long-form video content, and I want to use this video to talk about why we are starting this channel, who it is for, what we can learn from the content of these videos, and then address the question: will it continue? Is this going to be something that is sustainable? Hi, my name is Ryan Rench. I am the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California, and this channel is primarily to help our church people, but even if you are not from our church, I still hope you find the content helpful. I am glad you are here. Let’s get started.
Why Are We Starting This Channel?
First of all, why are we starting this channel? Well, I have three main ideas for it. The first is spiritual growth. As I was going into 2024 and thinking about what can help our church, I wanted our church to grow deeper in their walk with the Lord. A lot of the things that we were planning on adding in 2024, I found, were centered on this verse, 2 Peter 3:18: “But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen.” The theme that I pulled from that is not so much growing in grace, but growing in the knowledge of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and I just shortened that to “grow in knowing Jesus.” That is what we want for this YouTube channel. The second reason we are starting it is because of the team we have right now. Brother Christian Saldana is on staff, and he is incredible with video, and Brother Zach Roberts worked as a Bible college student full-time editing video. We have a lot of people in our church that can help with all the moving parts, and so I feel like right now I need to steward the expertise of the team. Most people start solo and then build the team from there, and we are kind of going the other way around. It feels like we have the team, so we must do this. At least that is how it feels to me. The third reason we are starting this is because we want to help people. I get all excited about books and the Bible and all of that, but I realize that when we have a book in our book rack from a former Roman Catholic priest from the 1800s, I get that not everybody in our church is going to be as excited as I am about this. But even if they do not read this booklet, they still might watch a long-form video. Even if they are not into reading, we want to go help people in this new kind of digital public square where people are living. This is where they are, and so we just want to help people, and hopefully we can help you through this.
Who Is This For?
That brings us to who this is for. Well, primarily this channel is for our church. I always approached our youth group that way when I was a youth pastor. If I would write things that could help our teens, if I would teach things at the level of our youth group, then I would try to format them in ways that I could send out to others. So we would put local church first in our content, and then if it can help beyond our local church, well, to me that is just gravy. The church that I pastor, though, gets my best. If I can do things that can help the individuals of our church, then that is going to help our church. That is going to grow us in spiritual ways, and that is what I want. If I can help the individual, that helps our church. I do not want to do things that will just help “the church.” No, helping the individual is helping the church, because we are made up of individuals.
What Are We Going to Learn?
The third question I want to cover is: what are we going to learn? What kind of content will we be covering? There are a couple of streams of content. The first is book reviews, and the second is Bible studies. I am going to start with book reviews. Like I mentioned, not everybody is a reader, but if you could watch a ten- or twenty-minute summary of a book, at least you will still get the content from that. Like I said about our booklet on communion, it goes through the Roman Catholic teachings on communion and compares them to our Baptist teachings on communion. If you know somebody that is a Roman Catholic and you can explain the difference to them, you would have a booklet as a reference, but you could also use this video to show the difference. So we want to provide content like that, book reviews of pretty much all of the books that we have in our resource desk. That is what we are going to slowly work through. That will be book reviews first, but then it will be book studies, studies through books of the Bible that we have preached through at our church. So when something resonates with you in a sermon, you will be able to either go back to the sermon recording itself or go to the follow-up video that covers the same passage in a format that is made specifically for video, in this kind of one-on-one interaction, rather than in a sermon format that was for a particular church, where I am not looking at the camera but looking at the congregation, that kind of thing. So I am pretty excited about this new channel.
Will This Be Sustainable?
Like I acknowledged in the beginning, it is going to take a long time to get some traction, and really that can lead to some burnout. So the last question that we have today is: will this be sustainable? Will it actually continue? I believe it can. Already for us in church work, we are used to the grind of that weekly deadline. I mean, for us, Sunday is always coming. I have got to have a sermon ready. People are going to come to church, and I have got to have something to give to them. For us, that is Sunday school at 9:30, where I am teaching our young adults class, and then the morning worship service at 10:30, and right now I am preaching through the book of Ephesians. Our evening service is at 5:30, and I am preaching through the book of James right now, and on Wednesday nights we are preaching through a series on marriage. So we are used to a regular content calendar already. We are already in this kind of content-producing machine right now, and we just want to use these videos as another way to help people grow in knowing Jesus. It is not just stopping with the live service on Sundays. I mean, you came and heard the live sermon, but then we want people to be able to continue with the content past Sundays and Wednesdays, and we really want this to help our church bring the Bible home. That is what we are all about. Now, if you have watched this far, if you have seen a couple of the other videos and you are saying, “Oh, that is not me,” well, I totally get that. It is not for everyone. But if you do want to get in on this ride, can you subscribe below? I think that would really help us out. That will help us get some of this initial traction here. But until then, grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen. God bless you.
