In a time when most churches are doing away with their bulletins, we are actually adding to our bulletins, and we create an eight-page booklet every single week. In today’s video I am going to go line by line through our bulletin, talk about why it is important, and give a general philosophy of each of the pieces of content included in our bulletins. Hello, church. Thank you for tuning into today’s video. If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench. My dad started Calvary Baptist Church in 1987, when I was six months old, and on our 34th anniversary he retired, and I have been pastoring ever since. That was May 2021, coming up on four years now. We always had a clean-looking bulletin, but I wanted to add even more to it, so in our first couple of years we transitioned to this booklet style, and I want to talk about why that is and encourage our church to read it every single week. We are two weeks into what we are calling our New to CBC class, kind of a new members class, and this was the Philosophy of Calvary Baptist Church class topic that we covered last week.
A Missed Opportunity
Again, most churches will just buy a generic bulletin front, and on the inside they will print their own, and use a different font for every announcement, and put random boxes around things and little random doodles all over, and many of them look terrible. I think that is a missed opportunity to create a culture of content-driven worship and intentional ministry, because a bulletin is a piece of paper that you are putting into every person’s hand every single week. So that physical print, I think, is super important in these days when everything is digital. We still do a digital bulletin, but from the very front cover, we are trying to make a weekly statement that this is a service about God and it is important to us.
The Front Cover
So here is an example from just last Sunday, or the week before. We will put it up larger on the screen so you can see it, and we will go through pretty much each aspect of it. The front says, “Welcome. This is the Lord’s Day,” and then the date. Underneath it says, “Today we gather with family to worship our Father, saturated with God’s Word.” That is the summary of the three driving themes of our church: worship, Bible, and family. We want to worship God, we bring the Bible home, and we are a family, and that is captured in that statement right there. And then the same verse is on there every single week, Psalm 29:2: “Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name; worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.” That is from the very front cover of the bulletin, saying we are coming to give to the Lord something we can give to Him. It is not coming from ourselves. It is not like this self-importance. It is nothing like that. It is that Jesus seeks such to worship Him, and we can worship Him in spirit and in truth. So we come on a worship Sunday to a worship service in order to give of ourselves in worship to God. We cannot give Him money; He owns everything. We cannot give Him anything, but we can give Him our worship and our adoration. So right there on the front, we can actually give Him something.
Us to God: The First Half of the Service
Now, on the inside cover, the very first page is more or less for our guests. This is what to expect in a service. Most of our church members would be familiar with these aspects, but if you are walking into a church like ours for the very first time, the top half of the page talks about the first half of the service. That is us to God. He is our audience the whole entire first half of the service. This is what we give to God: not just “give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name.” That is not only a reference to singing, but there are many aspects of our church service that are us giving ourselves to God. The first one I mention here is worship, and we do worship as a form of bowing in our church services. We take the time to just have some piano play, and we bow. To prepare guests for that, we say, “In Scripture, the word worship means bowing, so today we will take time to bow, to recognize God’s worth through our posture.” The sight of a congregation all on its knees shows everybody outside who is looking in that they are not the main attraction. It is not about them; it is about whoever they are worshiping. Just like when a king walks into a room and everyone else bows except for the king, well, God is our High King, and we are bowing to show that He is the One who is sovereign, who is in charge. The next one is reverence. It says, “Casual is easy, but reverence takes effort. A holy God deserves a distraction-free environment.” So we encourage people to silence phones, remain seated through the preaching, and utilize the nursery or family viewing room. We just want to set the tone immediately that it is going to feel a little bit more like a kingdom than like the culture. The culture has downplayed reverence. There are very few places you can go anywhere in culture where they expect you to have a somber attitude or a bit of reverence. And coming into the presence of God, and He inhabits the praise of His people, He is here in a special way in the meeting place, in His house, I just do not want that to feel like a ball game or a movie theater or any other general course of life. Church feels a little bit different, and that is by design. That is not any kind of an elitist attitude or anything like that, but we want to make sure that we as God’s people are giving reverence to God, in a spirit of fear, as Hebrews tells us. We respect Him. We revere Him. We do worship Him and love Him and adore Him, and He is our Father and our Friend and our Comforter and all of that, but at the same time He is holy and set apart and perfect, and we do not want to just bring Him down to our level. We want to come up to His level. Casual happens all by itself. You just have to say nothing, and casual just kind of happens, but reverence takes a little bit of work, and there is a little bit of training that happens. That is turning off cell phones and encouraging our people not to walk around and just treat it like anything else. But boy, when it is service time, we are here for the service time. So reverence is set up as an expectation right away. The next one is hymns. I put in here, “If God is timeless, our praise to Him ought to feel deeper than just this generation. Truth-saturated hymns are out of place in today’s culture, but we believe they best reflect God’s eternal nature.” That is not to say we do not sing new music; we do at times. But the general nature of our church’s music has a timelessness to it. It has a feeling of being old. It does not sound like anything from this culture, and that is partly on purpose. It is connecting us to previous generations of Christians. It is not tying us to just this generation’s music. It will not be embarrassing to sing in 30, 40, 50 years. We will not look back and say, “I cannot believe I used to sing that. It sounds like the ’20s. Oh my goodness, how embarrassing,” just like we look back on ’80s music and think, “Oh, how embarrassing.” We do not want our music to be tied to a generation. We want even our music to reflect the timelessness of the nature of God, and hymns do a good job of that. Truth-saturated hymns will help us to worship in spirit and in truth, and that is the bulk of the music ministry at our church. Next is corporate: “With God as our audience, all our praise is corporate, even if the choir or a soloist is doing the singing. It is not bad to clap after a special, and clapping is biblical, but to avoid an entertainment mentality and focus on the message of the song, usually the congregation just says amen.” So we are all in this together. It is not like we are the audience and the people up on the platform are singing for our enjoyment while we are listening. No, we view it as if God is the audience and we are all the performers. We are performing for Him. He is the One who is hearing our praise, our singing, our worship. He is the One who is receiving from us in the first half of the service. So when we say corporate, we are saying that even if there is a soloist up there on the platform, or a music group, or whatever, it is not about them. They are just helping all of us together worship our God. At our church it is a little bit awkward sometimes, because people who are not used to that will start to clap after a special, and that is not a bad thing. That is totally fine. We have just chosen not to clap, in order to emphasize the fact that they were not doing that for us. So we are not applauding them. We are not congratulating them for a good song, because we were all part of that song. We were all worshiping God together in that moment. That was a beautiful thing that we all participated in when we lifted up our worship to God through the spokesman of this soloist, or through the spokesman of this instrumentalist. So we just typically will say amen, and we as a congregation agree and affirm the message that was just directed to God through our spokesman, this soloist who has a particular knack for music. So that is the idea of the word corporate there. That is the first half of the service, us giving to God.
God to Us: The Second Half of the Service
Then the second half of the service, this lower part down here, talks about how the second half of the service is God to us. This is God directed to us, and that is through the preaching time. Now, those concepts are not unique to me; they come from things I have picked up on over the years. But in this second half it says, “Preaching: the central focus of our sanctuary is a big wooden pulpit. Each service we go line by line through the Scriptures, explaining the context to know what God said and what He is saying still to us. To stay in unity, we use the King James Version.” So right up the center aisle, the first thing you see at the center of our platform is the pulpit. And going back to the first half of the service, we call it a platform, not a stage. A stage has a performance connotation, and so we call it a platform. We say that these folks are singing; we do not even use the word performing. We just do not want to borrow from language that would give the impression that we are here for some kind of show. It is not that at all. Part of that is even through the church furniture. I mean, right there at the center of our platform is the pulpit, this big wooden pulpit. Historically it was meant to show a sense of authority, a sense of divine authority: here is an emblem that represents that God’s Word is about to be declared authoritatively. So the central focus of our church sanctuary is the pulpit, and when we open God’s Word, we go line by line through the Word of God, and we just declare authoritatively that God has something to say to our culture, and we are going to spend half of our worship service hearing from God. He speaks to us. And then, at the end of that preaching time, we will have what I put in here as reflection: “At the close of each service, we stand and take time to reflect on and respond to the message from God. The invitation is your time to ask God how He wants you to live in the new truths you have just heard.” So we have an invitation time at the close of pretty much every single preaching service. If God has spoken, and we are called by God to be doers of the word and not hearers only, then I want to encourage our congregation not to just hear the Word repeatedly, or else they will continually become more and more self-deceived. The Bible encourages us to be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving our own selves. So the reflection time at the end really just helps our congregation take stock and say, “Okay, I just heard about trusting God,” or “I just heard about the gospel. How does that change me this week? What can I do differently as a result of being in church and hearing this Word from God today?” So we want to take the quiet time to just pray, talk to God, respond to Him. If there is somebody who does not know Jesus as their Saviour, we want to give them the opportunity to respond and come to a counseling room and hear the gospel and be saved. We want those opportunities. When God speaks, we want the Holy Spirit to speak to their hearts, and them to have a chance to respond. So we try to set up those expectations on this very first page they turn to, and this is especially for our guests. The next page is a note from Pastor Ryan. Usually it is just this one-page note of some spiritual encouragement, or an update from the previous week, or whatever is coming up in the next couple of weeks, just whatever is on my heart. This is a good chance to talk to every church member through a note.
The Worship Guide
On the inside here is the worship guide, and this comes from the idea of 1 Corinthians 14:15: “What is it then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also: I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the understanding also.” I believe that one of the principles there in 1 Corinthians chapter 14 is that they were singing, they were worshiping, without understanding. It was just selfish. It was a self-driven focus of using their gifts instead of being others-focused, instead of an understanding mentality. So one of the best ways we can worship is through our understanding of what we are worshiping. We want to be real, real clear about what songs we are singing, why they were given to us, a little bit of the history of the songs. We start with a choir song that sets the tone and calls people to worship. I will get up into the pulpit and welcome people, welcome guests, and then the choir will come and sing a special song of reflection, and then we will have three back-to-back hymns, just straight into one another, with pretty much no talking in between, no announcements or anything, just our worship time, where we can as a body unite our hearts in music directed toward God. Those congregational songs are led by congregational song leaders who are calling people to unify their voices, and I am just so thankful for the high percentage of participation we see in our congregation, and I would love to see this area grow, of singing with understanding. Not just singing the words as though you know the words already, as if it is just very commonplace. No, but singing with understanding. If “I Sing the Mighty Power of God” is our hymn, it means coming in before the service and reading through the hymn story, and thinking about creation in a new way, and thinking about Isaac Watts in a fresh way, and thinking about the song in a special way when you sing it. “Be Still, My Soul”: this, for this month of January 2025, is our hymn of the month. We sing this song every single week on Sunday mornings, and that really helps the message drive home deep into our spirit. The first time you sing a song, you kind of breeze over it, but if you have sung it two or three or four weeks in a row, then by that third or fourth week you are chewing on it at a different depth than you had ever chewed on it before. So the hymn of the month is usually that second song, and then the third song, in this particular one, was “And Can It Be.” With each of these songs there is a Scripture that goes with them, and so getting our minds on the truth of the Word of God, the truth of the hymn, the background of the hymn story, boy, that just helps the truth of the song sink home at a much deeper level. So we are not trying to generate emotions. We are trying to allow our worship to be done in spirit and in truth. We want the truth of the hymn to be the thing that motivates, that fuels, our worship.
The Offering, Bowing, and the Pastoral Prayer
Next we move into our offering, and every single week it is a musical, just a piano instrumental that goes through a tune. But instead of just, “Oh, that is a nice tune,” we wanted to include the lyrics of the songs in the offering time, so it is a worship time. We show about a two-minute video that goes through some scriptural teaching about giving. It goes through a verse on giving and gives a little story about giving, and then somebody prays for the offering, and we move into the offering time as another act of worship. We are using this time as a chance to give unto the Lord the glory due unto His name in a financial way. We are giving to the Lord that which is His, and we try to emphasize the spiritual aspect, the worship aspect, of our giving every single week. We really try to focus on that, and that is a worship time. In many churches I have been to, it is time to clean out your purse, and catch up with the neighbor, and talk about the announcements in the bulletin and stuff, but we encourage our congregation to just focus on the words that are on the screen. The only time we show words on our screens is during these instrumentals, so people can be hearing the tune and following along with the content of the song as it is being played. And that worship just reminds us we have given to the Lord because of this truth the instrumentalist is playing about right now. So the offering time is just such a wonderful, wonderful time of our service. Immediately following the offering, we have sung praises to God, our hearts are full from expressing ourselves to God, we have given to God, we have prayed to God, we have done so much directed toward God, and many times my heart is so full after that that I just feel like I want to fall down on my knees and worship God and spend time in personal prayer to God. So we have our worship time of bowing before God at that time, following all these steps of having given to God. An associate pastor gets up and explains what our worship services are like, gives us a verse on worship, and then calls the congregation to bow, if they are physically able, in worship right there in our church sanctuary, and everyone right there in their pews will turn around and bow for a few minutes. Then I will come up and close us in a pastoral prayer. That is an important time for me and for our church. It is not always exclusively a prayer of worship, but it is a pastoral prayer over our congregation. C. H. Spurgeon put great emphasis on that. That really changed my thinking about the pastoral prayer, and so I use that every week as a way to just pray for and over our congregation. Next it moves into a special, usually some kind of musical special that unites our hearts in worship of God. Then we go into the preaching time, and there is a little space in here for some notes and things. The evening service does not follow exactly that same structure, but it is laid out here in a kind of order of service. I just love our Sunday services. I love the intentionality, that everything has its place. We are not getting jarred by, “Okay, now it is time for the announcements,” and we are not bouncing from one thing to the next. Our worship service is about worshiping God and uniting hearts around giving to God and then hearing from God, and I think everybody needs this. I think every church should approach worship intentionally, with God as the focus, and call their congregations to do the same.
Classes, Resources, and the Rest of the Bulletin
Also in our bulletin is a list of our adult Sunday school classes, encouraging people every week to join Sunday school. And then there is a featured resource. I always want people to know what they believe, so there is some kind of resource we have at our resource desk. There are several books we are promoting, and we will promote one a week, give a little paragraph of explanation, and show the price. This past one was our Vision Sunday booklet, just reminding them to go back and pick that up if they could. If it is another book on Baptist history, or something on parenting, or whatever, then that will be explained, the price will be listed, and we encourage them to go find that at our resource desk. The next section under here is our YouTube video highlight. You are watching now, likely on YouTube, and each week we are putting out a different video, and this section talks about the previous week’s posting, from six days before. We post on Monday mornings. On this particular bulletin it was the 2024 book wrap-up from the previous year: over 70 books reviewed in about an hour, so real quick, rapid-fire reviews, and a philosophy of reading secular authors and Christians who are not exactly like us, and all of that. I think that would be a good video. If you would like to check that out, you can look that up on our page. Next is a little link for our Wednesday bulletin. This is our prayer sheets and our missions updates and another note from me and some announcements as well. And then at the bottom are our birthdays and anniversaries. Everyone has different places that they turn. Some people turn directly to the birthdays and anniversaries section and go around wishing people a happy birthday or a happy anniversary that week, and that is their ministry, and I love that. That is great. On the back, then, are our events and information. These are all of our announcements of the events coming up, at least within the next couple of weeks. Some of them are further out, but usually just within the next two weeks we will have all the details of every event and who to contact if they have more questions. So instead of doing any announcements in the services, the only announcements we do are printed, and these are distributed everywhere. We just do not do announcements in our church services, keeping the focus on the Lord. We have got Sunday school announcements, we have got emails, we have got social media posts, we have got the screens that show the announcements before and after services, we have got our church app. We have got lots of ways for people to know any details they want to know, but in the services we just reserve that time for the worship of the Lord. And then there is a little other church information at the bottom of that back page and on the bottom of the front page, just so people have church information every single time they receive a printed handout from the church. That about sums up our bulletin. There is a lot there, but some weeks have even more. If we have a special event coming up, then this whole first page will be a promo for Easter, or a promo for the Christmas program, or whatever it will be, one big spread for whatever is coming up. Because of the way printing works, you have to have the right number of pages, in increments of four, so if we add two pages here, that means we have to add two pages to the back, and usually that is a really fun kids’ coloring page, a kids’ drawing page, where they have a little space to write their notes or add things they learned from the sermon or whatever. It is just an enjoyable thing, so that even kids can pick up our bulletin and enjoy things from it, beyond just coloring in angry faces on the pastor’s picture. I know how that goes; I did plenty of those. So I hope this helps you. I hope, if you are a member of Calvary Baptist Church, that it helps you realize what is actually in our bulletin. If you are not part of our church, then I encourage you to come visit us, and you will get one of these bulletins when you show up here. And if you are new here, you can visit our website, cbctemecula.com, scroll all the way to the bottom, fill in your information at the announcement email subscription section, and you can receive this bulletin digitally. We have it in other formats as well, and we can get those to you as you would like. But God bless you, and we will see you in the next video.
