The Baptist Tabernacle sits in the civic center of Los Angeles, a few blocks south of City Hall and not far from the Federal Building on South Hope Street. From the outside it looks much like other small inner-city churches in the neighborhood, but its footprint is far wider than its building. The congregation that gathers there each Sunday is pastored by Dr. R. L. Hymers, Jr., and the sermons he preaches are translated, posted online, and read or watched by pastors and missionaries in places where few theological schools exist. Sermon manuscript and video pages in forty-six languages, from Arabic and Armenian to Yiddish and Yoruba-adjacent tongues, are posted at sermonsfortheworld.com, and new manuscripts are added every Saturday evening. The church's mission statement is plain: to provide free sermon manuscripts and videos to pastors and missionaries throughout the world, especially the Third World, where there are few if any theological seminaries or Bible schools.
The Civic Center Church and Its Founding
The Baptist Tabernacle was founded in 1975 by Dr. R. L. Hymers, Jr. Its fortieth anniversary was marked in December 2015 with a service that is still posted in the church's video archive. From the beginning, the congregation was small in number and intentionally placed in the civic center, an area of Los Angeles better known for courthouses, government offices, and freeway overpasses than for parish life. Dr. Hymers has described the call in simple terms: inner-city evangelism, week by week, from a downtown pulpit.
Three other addresses shape the church's footprint. The mailing address for correspondence and book orders is P.O. Box 15308, Los Angeles, CA 90015. The published phone number is (818) 352-0452, which rings at the pastor's home office in the San Gabriel Valley, where he writes most of the manuscripts that are then shipped or uploaded worldwide. The phone is also the line used for ordering his printed books, all of which are sold at cost; the pastor takes no royalties from any of them, and receipts are reinvested into publishing and advertising new editions.
Dr. R. L. Hymers, Jr.: From California to the Civic Center
Dr. Hymers's path to downtown Los Angeles passed through several very different corners of the Protestant world. He is a graduate of California State University, Los Angeles (B.A.), Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary (M.Div., Southern Baptist), San Francisco Theological Seminary (D.Min., United Presbyterian), and Louisiana Baptist Theological Seminary (Th.D., Baptist Bible Fellowship). Louisiana Baptist University later awarded him a Doctor of Literature degree. He and his wife, Ileana, are the parents of two sons. The pastor has been in ministry for sixty-two years.
Two formative influences shaped his preaching. The first was a long tenure as a member of the First Chinese Baptist Church of Los Angeles during the pastorate of Dr. Timothy Lin, the well-known Chinese-American evangelist. Dr. Hymers preached memorial services for Dr. Lin and preached alongside him at the same church for over twenty-three years, and the sermons posted from those years carry many of Dr. Lin's doctrinal fingerprints - a high view of Scripture, a strong stand against easy-believism, and an expectation that the local church be a serious, praying community.
The second was the late Dr. John R. Rice, the editor of The Sword of the Lord and one of the most influential American fundamentalists of the twentieth century. Dr. Hymers has written that he became a fundamentalist by reading Rice's books and sermons, and the church's weekly bulletins, sermons, and printed books repeatedly return to Rice's themes: Biblical inerrancy, the blood of Christ, soul-winning, separation from compromise, and opposition to what Rice called "decisionism" - the practice of leading inquirers in a prayer without teaching repentance and faith.
The pastor's stated doctrinal positions are twofold: he holds a Reformed view of conversion (monergism, the necessity of the Spirit's drawing, and the certainty of effectual calling) and a premillennial dispensationalist view of prophecy and the end times. He preaches expository sermons, verse by verse, with a sustained interest in the book of Genesis, the Gospel of John, Isaiah 53, and the pastoral epistles.
Dr. Christopher L. Cagan: Pulpit Partner
Alongside Dr. Hymers stands Dr. Christopher L. Cagan, the associate in the preaching ministry. Many of the Sunday morning and Sunday evening sermons posted in the archive are credited to Dr. Cagan rather than Dr. Hymers, and the two are co-authors of the church's two most widely circulated books, Preaching to a Dying Nation and Today's Apostasy. Dr. Cagan also maintains his own track of sermon manuscripts at sermonsfortheworld.com, and his work on the doctrine of conversion is particularly aimed at pastors who, in his judgment, lean too heavily on altar-call techniques borrowed from Charles G. Finney. He has preached the funeral sermons for several members of the congregation, including that of Eloise Roop, and is treated in the church's own materials as a partner rather than an assistant.
Pastor Jack Ngann and his wife Sheila, who were married at the Baptist Tabernacle in 2012 and whose wedding video is still posted in the archive, also preach from the pulpit and contribute manuscripts from time to time. Daniel Hymers, the pastor's son, contributes sermons as well.
Sunday Services and the Centrality of the Word
The church gathers twice on the Lord's Day, in the morning and again in the evening, with a pattern that has been consistent for decades. Each service is centered on expository preaching and congregational worship in the fundamentalist Baptist tradition. A typical Sunday includes prayer, several hymns, an offering, a brief welcome for visitors, and a sermon of roughly forty-five to sixty minutes. Communion is observed several times a year rather than weekly, and baptism is by immersion. The pastor and his wife, Ileana, take part in the services; Mrs. Hymers has on occasion read Scripture and shared brief testimonies from the platform.
Visitors who arrive for the morning service will find a small, plainly furnished auditorium with the kind of mid-century flexibility that allows the room to be reconfigured for weddings, funerals, prayer meetings, and the Wednesday prayer gathering. Services are in English. There is no live nursery advertised, and children typically sit with their parents; visitors with small children are welcome to step into the foyer if needed. Dress at the Baptist Tabernacle is conservative in the historic Baptist sense - suits and dresses for the morning service are common but by no means required, and many of the regular members wear business casual. Visitors from other traditions are received warmly, and the church's published literature repeatedly emphasizes that it seeks to follow the model of the Jerusalem congregation rather than that of any modern suburb.
A Library in Forty-Six Languages
The single most distinctive thing about the Baptist Tabernacle is its global library of sermon manuscripts and videos. The full archive is free to download. There is no copyright: anyone may print the manuscripts, preach from them, translate them, or email them to others, with the only request being that the URL www.sermonsfortheworld.com appear at the end of any copied sermon. The manuscripts are also sold in a single ZIP file for offline use, and a phone app allows installation on mobile devices.
The languages represented include English, Spanish, Chinese (both Simplified and Traditional), Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Burmese, Cambodian (Khmer), Chichewa (Malawi), Creole (Haiti), Czech, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Khongso Chin, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Laotian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Odia, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi (India and Pakistan), Russian, Sinhala, Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Yiddish. Some of these indexes list only a handful of recent sermons while others run into the hundreds, with the English, Spanish, Chinese, and Korean archives being the largest. Manuscript and video pages exist for more than a thousand distinct sermons stretching back to 2007 and earlier.
A typical translated sermon page lists the title in the target language, the title in English in parentheses, the date, the AM or PM service slot, and a link to a downloadable PDF or ZIP. Recent sermons are posted each Saturday evening. Older sermons have been left online without re-editing, so the archive doubles as an unintentional historical record of the church's preaching over two decades.
Doctrinal Foundations
The doctrinal commitments of the Baptist Tabernacle are spelled out across hundreds of sermons and several books. They can be summarized in seven points.
First, Biblical inerrancy. The Bible is the verbally inspired, infallible, and inerrant Word of God, and preaching at the Baptist Tabernacle is treated as exposition of the text rather than illustration drawn from it. A series of sermons on Isaiah 53 (the suffering servant) is presented as the clearest Old Testament picture of the atonement, and a separate series walks through the book of Genesis one chapter at a time.
Second, the Reformed view of conversion. The church rejects the popular "decisionist" model in which an evangelist leads a seeker in a prayer and counts that prayer as the moment of salvation. Salvation, the church teaches, is the work of the Holy Spirit through the Word; the sinner is drawn, convinced, and renewed by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Tares and wheat may look identical for a season, but only the Spirit-given faith endures.
Third, the centrality of the local church. Salvation is not a private transaction, and conversion is meant to end in baptism and membership in a real, visible congregation. The church's own experience of being a small body in the civic center of Los Angeles is offered as evidence that a faithful few can do more than a complacent many.
Fourth, premillennial dispensationalism. The church reads the prophetic portions of Scripture through a dispensational grid and expects a pretribulation rapture, a tribulation period, the return of Christ, and a thousand-year reign.
Fifth, the reality of spiritual warfare. Many of the church's sermons describe a literal conflict with demonic powers and call believers to a life of fasting, prayer, and Spirit-filled witness.
Sixth, an unusual emphasis on the Jewish people. The church hosts a Hebrew-language Bible study and has produced sermon materials in Hebrew and Yiddish. Two pages in the archive, headed "Good News for Arabs!" and "Preaching to the Lubavitchers and the Orthodox Jews," reflect Dr. Hymers's long-running conviction that evangelism must reach Jewish neighbors with both sensitivity and clarity.
Seventh, a high view of the family and of traditional Christian marriage. The pastor and his wife celebrated their wedding anniversary on the platform, and weddings and funerals of church members are held in the auditorium. Two wedding videos - the marriage of Jack and Sheila Ngann in 2012 and the marriage of Leslie and Jin Hymers (the pastor's son and daughter-in-law) in 2013 - remain in the online archive.
The Campaign Against "Decisionism"
More than any other theme, the church's preaching returns to a single diagnosis: contemporary American and Western Christianity has been hollowed out by "decisionism," the evangelistic method associated with Charles G. Finney in which an altar call is treated as the moment of salvation and a "prayer" is treated as the act that converts. Dr. Hymers argues in Preaching to a Dying Nation that this method produces false converts, that the resulting church membership is largely unregenerate, and that the Western churches are therefore "dying." The book Today's Apostasy, co-written with Dr. Cagan, is a companion volume that lays out the alternative: patient exposition, prayer, fasting, evangelism that expects to wait on the Spirit, and a church membership made up of those who have been genuinely converted.
These arguments appear not only in print but also in long preaching series. A sermon titled "Sandemanianism" engages the older Scottish critique of decisionism, and several sermons titled "Battle Cries" treat the issue as a present conflict rather than a historical curiosity. Visitors who come expecting an evangelistic crusade may be surprised at the breadth of these arguments; visitors who come wanting to think through what conversion really means will find a great deal of material.
Prayer, Fasting, and Revival
The church keeps a regular weekly fast day on Tuesdays. Several sermons posted in the archive include notes on how to fast, and the practice is treated as ordinary rather than exceptional. Wednesday evenings are given over to prayer, and a sermon on fasting notes that Tuesday is set aside so that members can approach the Wednesday prayer gathering with clearer minds and quieter hearts.
The pastor preaches repeatedly about revival, defining it as a sovereign outpouring of the Holy Spirit that restores gospel preaching and true conversion in a church that has drifted into routine. A long series titled "Sermons on Revival" runs through more than twenty installments and addresses the meaning of revival, the people God uses in revival, the hindrances to revival, and the marks of true revival. Another series treats loneliness as a pastoral problem with biblical solutions. The tone of these sermons is plainspoken and Reformed: revival is the work of God, not the achievement of a campaign.
Books That Travel the World
The pastor and his associate have produced more than fifteen printed books, most of them small enough to fit in a coat pocket and priced at cost so that they can be mailed anywhere. Preaching to a Dying Nation, Today's Apostasy, The Church That Will Be Left Behind, A Puritan Speaks to Our Dying Nation, The Great Falling Away, and Ruckmanism Exposed are all sold through the P.O. Box and are also free to read online in PDF form. Back to Puritan Revival, written with an Indonesian co-author, is published in Indonesian for distribution in Southeast Asia. The Blessings of My Life, a sermon preached on his sixtieth anniversary in ministry, is posted in over a dozen language archives.
The book From Darwin to Design, co-written with Dr. Cagan, describes Dr. Cagan's intellectual journey from atheism to Christianity and his conversion through the apparent irreducible complexity of the natural world. The book is recommended by the late D. James Kennedy and is available through online retailers. Preaching to a Dying Nation and Today's Apostasy are also available free of charge at sermonsfortheworld.com.
Reaching Jewish Neighbors
For many years the church has run a Hebrew-language Bible study and has produced resources aimed at Orthodox and Lubavitcher Jews in the Los Angeles area. A page titled "Good News for Arabs!" links to a free book by Dr. Hymers on evangelism in the Arabic-speaking world, and another page links to a sermon preached to a Lubavitcher audience. An Orthodox Jewish Bible in PDF is offered for download. The intent, in the pastor's words, is to take the gospel to every neighborhood group, including those whose religious traditions set them apart from typical evangelical outreach.
What Visitors Should Know
Anyone considering a visit to the Baptist Tabernacle will find the following practical notes. The church meets at 1329 S Hope Street in the civic center of Los Angeles. There is metered street parking and a small lot; Sunday morning parking is easier than Sunday evening. The morning service typically begins at ten o'clock and the evening service at six o'clock. Both services run about ninety minutes. Visitors who prefer a quieter experience may find the evening service smaller and more reflective.
Those who live too far to attend in person can watch recent sermons on the church's video page or its YouTube channel; older sermons and the full manuscript archive are free to read, print, and forward. The pastor is also available to correspond by email and to take phone calls about doctrinal questions, requests for prayer, and orders for the printed books. The church's address is P.O. Box 15308, Los Angeles, CA 90015; its email is rlhymersjr@sbcglobal.net; and its phone number is (818) 352-0452.
For those who come from other traditions, two things should be borne in mind. The first is that the preaching is unusually long and unusually direct. A visitor should plan to listen, take notes, and expect the sermon to close with a clear call to repentance and faith, but not with a hurried altar call. The second is that the church's posture toward Roman Catholicism, the charismatic movement, the seeker-sensitive movement, and several prominent American preachers is sharply critical. Visitors who would find that posture unwelcome will know it before they come; visitors who find it bracing will find in the Baptist Tabernacle a community that has thought carefully and prayed hard about the state of the Western church and is willing to say so plainly.
In a downtown Los Angeles neighborhood better known for its courthouses than its churches, the Baptist Tabernacle continues to gather twice on the Lord's Day, to preach the same gospel its pastor has preached for more than sixty years, and to mail those sermons around the world. The congregation that sits in the pews on South Hope Street may be small. The library that the church sends out each Saturday evening is not.