The BEMA Story

We know many of you have come to our organization through the work of the BEMA Podcast and may be unfamiliar with the parent organization in which the ministry was founded, Impact Campus Ministries (ICM). Marty Solomon, creator of the BEMA Podcast and President of ICM, is sharing the story of who we are and how it’s all connected.

We hope to bring clarity to questions like:

• Why do my donations go to “Impact Campus Ministries”?

• What does any of this have to do with campus ministry?

• Is my money going to BEMA’s greatest needs?

Where and How It All Began

I (Marty Solomon) started working at Impact Campus Ministries because of a fire in my belly that was lit in Israel. As I learned about the rabbinical methods of discipleship, I struggled to find a way to implement them in the church I was pastoring. I wanted to work with young adults who could make their own decisions, but also have a level of freedom to say yes to opportunities that often elude those of us with families and careers. College students were the perfect demographic.

As somebody with a teaching gift, I naturally created a Bible study that was focused on trying to learn about better and more historically informed readings of the Scripture. I had a conviction that young adults wanted more Bible, not less. But in order to engage it, we would need to openly and directly address some of the abuses and misuses of Scripture they knew too well.

Class started in the fall of 2011 with two students on the University of Idaho campus; that quickly became 6–8 students. Two months later, I had one student begin studying with me at Washington State University. I had almost 20 students after the holiday break. Those groups of students became a tight-knit community of “disciples.” These students were learning and wrestling together, building friendships that were built on common experiences.

Those groups experienced a two-year curriculum that went through the whole Bible and into church history. Many of them traveled with me to Israel and Turkey for scholarship-supported study tours. A few of them joined me in a more intentional, daily discipleship relationship, working alongside me at ICM.

Over the next five years, students would graduate and move on. New groups, filled with new students, would start at the beginning. The groups would grow and evolve, but the college students had a place to be curious and still find spiritual mentorship.

This is where BEMA had its beautiful beginnings.

Birth of a Podcast

In 2016, I began serving as the President of ICM. The duties of this role meant that I would need to start traveling once or twice a month. At first, we attempted to do the dance with our college students, but that became increasingly more difficult. “Is Marty in town this week? I heard he was gone.”

We decided to “flip the classroom” and put the content online. This would ensure the students had weekly access to material—and also enabled us to maximize our time together for discussion (an unforeseen win). When it came to putting content online, the podcast medium seemed to be the cleanest and easiest way to host this learning experience.

I can still remember the day I made the announcement and closed the class with prayer. When I said, “Amen,” Brent Billings was standing in front of me. “I’m going to produce your podcast. You’ll need a co-host. I’ll do that, too.” Without me realizing how those suggestions would shape the future, God was at work.

We launched The BEMA Podcast in the fall of 2016. We knew people would listen from other places, but the design (which you can still hear in the episodes of Session 1 today) was to speak to students on the Palouse.

Realizing the Potential

When we launched the podcast in 2016, we knew it was public. Many people could listen to it, but we never anticipated that such a crowd would be so substantial. We did not design it to those ends and weren’t trying to create a platform of any kind.

One day in 2017, a friend told me that a discussion group had formed in Montana and there was a group listening together. He knew the listeners and suggested we visit to meet them. The whole concept was weird to me, but I was thoroughly intrigued to meet a group of people I had not known before and bond over the content. Someone in their group even applied to come on staff with ICM!

This caused one of our board members to ask me at our All-Staff Conference in 2018, “How are you not keeping track of who is listening to this podcast?!” We began looking at data (something that wasn’t really on our radar before), and by the end of the year we seemed to have over a thousand people listening to the podcast.

Riding the Wave

Now that we knew there was something more going on, one of the words that became very dominant in my mind, heart, and vocabulary was the word “steward.” How were we to steward this content and the influence we had unintentionally created? People were being drawn to consider a better way of reading their Bible.

In 2018, the podcast listenership started to grow substantially, and even more so in 2019. This initial growth came solely from word of mouth; we never marketed the podcast or pursued it strategically. We simply wanted to steward what was in front of us.

We began to see the need for a bigger and better host for the content, and we switched platforms in September 2019, giving us more insight into understanding what was taking place with our audience. We were completely unprepared to discover that we had more than 10,000 listeners and spent the next few months considering how to respond.

Because of the nature of our content, even with the increased listenership, the impact on production was minimal. Yet I was beginning to realize something I should have realized before: Brent Billings was completely underappreciated in his role. For years, Brent had given hours of his time every week as a volunteer to produce and maintain our podcast.

We created a role for him on staff that would benefit BEMA, but also the organization as a whole through his communications skills. My role (and everybody else on staff at ICM) was supported through personal support-raising. I had never asked listeners to give to the podcast because we didn’t need it.

But now, feeling confident in the amount of listeners we had and realizing how the sheer volume of gifts could add up very quickly, we started asking listeners to consider small monthly gifts. The response of generosity was overwhelming and continued to grow.

Seeing the Problem

On one hand, we had never been happier with what God was doing through BEMA—it was incredible. However, in the year or two that followed, we were beginning to sense a problem: We had unintentionally created two separate worlds as we tried to steward this podcast.

BEMA started in a classroom with a handful of college students. The podcast was an effort to get content to college students in a local setting. But now, tens of thousands of listeners, most of whom were not college students, were listening to a Bible podcast. They didn’t have any relationship to campus ministry or much of an idea of what Impact Campus Ministries is. “Why is ICM sending me receipts for a donation to BEMA?”

We had quite a task ahead of us to try and cast the vision to explain who we are and how we got here. We’ve been working on that for some time, trying to discern how to do that well. We hired Brian Truschinger as our Strategy Coordinator to help us get on top of some things while we tried not to let the quality and production of BEMA slip through the cracks.

That pretty much catches us up to where we are today.

So Just What Is This?

Where are we today? What is BEMA Discipleship? What is Impact Campus Ministries? Why does any of this matter?

This matters because our heart for ministry, and my job throughout, has never changed. Impact Campus Ministries is a campus ministry based on spiritual formation that believes if we can impact college students, they are going to impact the world. If we can turn Jesus loose in their hearts and in their lives, the fruit Jesus will bear will be something to witness.

BEMA was born out of this conviction in my heart. This was how I, as a teacher who loves the Bible, wanted to impact students. BEMA was a ministry of ICM that represented my personal beliefs about young people and the Bible.

All of that is still true.

One of our executives recently gave a perfect metaphor. Like Mars Candy Co. makes M&M’s, so ICM facilitates BEMA. Most are familiar with M&M’s and far fewer know about Mars—and yet that relationship is critical.

Our heart with BEMA still lies squarely with the thousands of college students who listen and find BEMA to be a helpful resource. But what about the tens of thousands of other listeners? Do they not matter? Do they not also have a place in our ministry?

Quite the contrary—they could be everything we’ve been looking for.

Dreams for the Future

ICM believes that if you impact college students, you impact the world. We have a conviction that this impact happens through discipleship. This means we need to establish intentional mentor relationships with our graduates that help them understand how to make a difference in their world—through their vocation, their life experiences, and their relationships.

ICM has been building the foundation for a mentoring network that will enable us to connect adult followers of Jesus with college graduates to help disciple them to the impact God is making through them. Eventually we will be looking for a flood of mentors who are willing to be trained to disciple young people all over the world.

If only we had a huge group of people already connected and bonding over a shared experience… oh wait, we do! Perhaps God was preparing pieces we never could have foreseen the entire time. Perhaps this is part of what we’re called to steward together. Maybe this is how BEMA is bigger than Marty or Brent or the teaching team.

So we’re making sure ICM doesn’t disappear under a growing podcast. We’re making sure healthy campus ministry is promoted and set up to thrive. When you give to the “Greatest Need” preference, it’s being used to make sure this vision stays alive and moves forward.

It might be helping the student who is experimenting with their calling in an apprenticeship. It might be helping a campus minister stay healthy and funded while they keep college students engaged. It might be used to reach international students so that we embody the call to remember the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow.

But when you help BEMA succeed, it looks like empowering college students both on and off campus.

And please stay tuned, because our future needs more than just your money. The world will need our college students, I promise you—and our college students will need you.