Happy New Year! What a blessing it is to enter a brand new year. We have just celebrated our 90th birthday as a church and I really believe that 2026 will be our greatest year ever reaching people for Christ. We are so grateful and thankful for our host of great leaders, Bible teachers, Deacons, all
volunteers and every member of our church family. We are also thankful for our wonderful staff that is working so hard to equip each member of North Central to be Great Commission Christians.
We are beginning a brand new sermon series in January entitled What We Believe. We will answer the question about what North Central Baptist Church believes about the Bible, God, the church, salvation, mankind, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, the Lord’s Day, last things, evangelism, missions, stewardship, cooperation and so much more! We will study our Baptist Faith and Message, which has been adopted by our church as our statement of faith. What a joy it has been to have added so many new members in recent years. Many of these have come to know Christ as their Lord and Savior and many have come from other sister Baptist churches as well as other denominations. It’s important that we’re all on the same page about what we believe. I’m excited about us taking some weeks to study these topics.
Our Wednesday night activities start back on January 7. We have Bible study at 4:00 which includes a significant time of prayer for the needs of our church family. At 5:00 we have Wednesday Night Supper and then at 6:00 we have special activities for our children and youth. Wednesday nights are buzzing around here. It is exciting to see the sweet families and those that are involved in Bible study. We also have several things happening with Men’s and Women’s groups on Wednesday nights as well.
On January 11, I’m asking all adult Life Group leadership (this includes the college leadership) to meet us for lunch following the morning service. We are having a vision luncheon together as we talk about our efforts to win people to Christ and grow them in the knowledge of Jesus in the year 2026. There are several things we are putting into place to help every Life Group become effective in discipling and reaching our people and our community for Christ. Also be on the lookout for Evangelism Training on February 8 at 5:00. We’ll have pizza together and then we will discuss something brand new in evangelism that I want everybody in our church to understand. I am encouraging every member of North Central to go through our evangelism training at least once a year. Over 150 of our people went through evangelism training last year. I want at least 200 to go through it this year, so even if you went through it last year, we have new material that we are going to talk about this year in our training.
We will be baptizing on January 4, 18, and 25. If you are interested in being baptized, please let us know in the church office.
We will celebrate the beautiful Lord’s Supper service on January the 25 in the morning service.
We have an eight-member team of our North Central family going to Punta Brava, Cuba January 17 through 23. This will be our 6th trip to Cuba! We will be involved in construction, personal evangelism visits, and Vacation Bible School for children. These trips have been very productive in reaching people for Christ. Part of our assignment is to bring funds with us to help with construction. Our Florida Baptist Convention oversees this and has asked us to raise $3,000 to help construction at the Punta Brava Baptist Church that is right outside of Havana, Cuba. If the Lord lays it on your heart, we would be grateful to receive gifts from our church family that could help with this fund. It’s remarkable what $3,000 can buy in Cuba. It will help us tremendously accomplish what our Florida Baptist Convention wants us to accomplish while we are there if we can raise these funds. Would you help us?
What a joy it is to enter 2026 as your Pastor. There is no greater assignment in the local church that God has ever given me than to be the Pastor of this precious fellowship. I cherish Sunday by Sunday worshiping with you and studying God’s Word. I am thankful for our wonderful staff of those that are called by Jesus to fill the assignment that they fill. We have a very capable and skillful staff. Please pray for each one of them as well as every member of our fellowship that we might carry out the ministry that God has called us to do.
May God bless this precious fellowship of believers.
Pastor Calvin