BEMA Discipleship
BEMA -1: What Is BEMA? (2024)
Transcription Status
2 Dec 24 — Initial public release
27 Nov 24 — Transcript approved for release
What Is BEMA?
Brent Billings: This is the BEMA podcast with Marty Solomon. I’m his co-host Brent Billings. Today we’ll be talking about how BEMA came to be, what it is, and how it works. So welcome listeners and welcome Marty.
Marty Solomon: Yes. Welcome listeners to the beginning of what hopefully is just a fantastic journey. So yeah, it’s good to get this thing started.
Brent: And this is a new iteration of the material. Some people may have been listening for a while. If this is your very first episode of BEMA, you’ve never listened before and you’re hearing what we’re saying right now, you don’t really need to worry about it too much. But there was a previous iteration of this podcast that started in 2016. And that was—that came out of this teaching material that was updated actually pretty regularly. And we just felt that it was time to come back and revisit stuff. We’re gonna make it easy to tell if you’re listening to the new thing. We’re gonna have new music. We’re going to talk about all of the details of what this means later on. But if you’re binging these, you might get halfway through Session 1 and you’re like, whoa, the music is different. You just ran into the old versions. And we just haven’t updated those yet. We’re doing this week by week. So, just be aware if you’re going through the podcast quickly, you might run into that. But at this point, we’re just going to start by assuming you’ve never listened to BEMA before. And then we’ll come back at the end of this episode and talk about all of the realities of what this update means.
Marty: Absolutely. That makes a ton of sense. And you’ll get used to this dance too. And for all those people that do catch up to us, you’ll find ways to tell I think in the show notes, like Brent said, we’ll talk about this later in the episode, but I think you’ll be able to tell if there’s an old episode linked, you know, you’re on a new one. And if there’s no old episode, you’re probably on the old one. So you’ll have a few ways to figure out where you’re at in the journey, where you’re at in history.
Brent: Yes, lots of markers. So let’s start by talking about what set BEMA in motion. Where did this whole podcast come from? BEMA Discipleship? Like what is all of that? What does that mean? Where did it come from?
Marty: Yeah. Years and years ago, I had my own crisis of faith. I know today the things that we talk about, the words we use, words like deconstruction, are words that are really popular. That’s the kind of phase I was going through. And we were even using back in 2016, Brent, when we did this original, we were using the word deconstruction, but it wasn’t the buzzword back then that it has become more recently. But that’s what I was going through. I was going through this time where the story that I had been handed, it wasn’t working for me anymore. This is way back. This is—I’m fresh. Well, I’m in the middle of college, like, I’m in my early 20s, real early 20s, mid-20s.
Brent: What year are we talking about?
Marty: This would have been like 2003, 2004, 2005. It’s right when the window when I’m really hitting a wall spiritually. So this was a while ago. And I didn’t have space in the church back then to process those things. I had questions, but questions weren’t really encouraged in the faith spaces that I was in. All the spaces that I was in seemed to have answers, and they seemed to all be saying the same thing and the same answers. But those answers and the way that they were packaged and the way that the theology was systematized, like it wasn’t working. There were some things I had, some hangups that I had, and I was trying to get to the bottom of that. And I was struggling. And I’ve always kind of viewed it as God’s providence.
I was introduced to a few different teachers along the way that helped me start to have some handles, and it helped me change my experience. One of those main teachers you’ll hear me talk about often was Ray Vander Laan. And I got to travel with Ray to Israel and Turkey in 2008, and again in 2010. And Ray was connected to the church that I grew up in, my home church. I didn’t really know that when I was growing up, but I had some opportunities that most people I think probably didn’t get to have. And I didn’t have this deep relationship with Ray, but I was around Ray a lot. And that ended up being a huge influence to me. I mean, Ray gave me a bibliography. Not only the experience that I had with him in Israel and Turkey, and this incredible teaching that changed everything, but Ray also gave me a bibliography of who to study and what kind of books to read and what to be looking for. And he just taught me how to view the Scripture through a different lens. And the lens that we were using was a more Jewish lens. And it wasn’t because we were trying to be Jews. It was because the book was a Jewish book. It was written by Jewish authors. It was written to a Jewish audience. It was written into and out of a Jewish world. It was asking Jewish questions, like everything about the Bible. Even the New Testament is largely a Jewish conversation. And yet I had been trained in Bible college—I had been taught to view the Scripture through a very Western classical theology. And that Western lens bumping up against an Eastern world was where a lot of that dissonance was coming from.
So I went to Israel and Turkey and I came back with things that I wanted to share. I’m naturally a teacher, just with my passion and my giftedness that I have. I’m a teacher. I want to teach things. And so I came back and I had this desire, I had this passion, I wanted to teach others what I had been learning. I also wanted to experiment. I had these experiments I wanted to try, things that I hadn’t experienced, but based on what I was learning, I felt like we should be trying some of these things, mainly around the conversation about discipleship. What could discipleship be? What was I used to, but what could discipleship become in ways that I hadn’t even seen necessarily modeled before? And I can remember years before, I had been recruited by Impact Campus Ministries. And at the time, originally, that’s just not where I was at. I didn’t want to do, I always called it “Youth Group for Big Kids,” is what I called it, Brent Billings. I didn’t want to do Youth Group for Big Kids. I didn’t want to, why would I want to do campus ministry? I don’t want to do that. I was in pastoral ministry. I wanted to plant churches. That’s what I wanted to do.
Brent: Well, and there are a lot of different styles of campus ministry.
Marty: Sure, yeah.
Brent: So I think that is kind of what it is in some, you know, sometimes that works for a group. It’s not what you were going for.
Marty: It’s not what I wanted. And yet over the next year or two, at some point, kind of after I came back from Turkey, I’m really trying to process what it is that I’m going to do. And I’m frustrated at some point. And I remember having this prayer time with God where I was essentially saying, God, I just want, I want people that are old enough to make their own decisions. Like they’re not high schoolers at home with their parents, like they’re on their own. But I also need them to not have, like, a mortgage and a marriage and a career and three kids. Like I need them to be autonomous, but mobile. And I realized that, oh, golly, the college, the young adult college age demographic is exactly who this works with and who it works for. And so that’s what I did. I started working.
I got hired at Impact Campus Ministries. I started working there as a campus minister, and I was a teacher. And so I started a study. That was how I wanted to do, that was how I was going to approach campus ministry. And so I started a study. I called it BEMA. And originally, this was a two-year study. These college students would come in twice a week. I was on the University of Idaho campus on Wednesday and Friday. I was on Washington State University on Tuesday and Thursday. So twice a week, these students would come in and they would sit in a 90-minute class with me. And over the course of two years, we would go through Genesis to Revelation—basically just trying to use that same Jewish lens, asking Jewish questions, kind of unpacking our understanding of the Bible, and kind of reconstructing what we might call a hermeneutic. That would be a big biblical theological word for how we interpret the Scriptures. How do we reconstruct a Jewish hermeneutic centered around those different questions? And that class, that Bible study, was happening within a larger ministry, Impact Campus Ministries.
So those students were a part of a study, but that study was a part of kind a larger community where we went to church together, and we had community, we had relationships, we were discipling students. Our ministry was really bent on spiritual formation, like we were trying to teach each other how to pray, and how to Sabbath, and how to fast, and like, what does it mean to follow Jesus and the spiritual disciplines? Like, that was a part of, so BEMA was just a part of, kind of, a larger thing. And that’s what led to BEMA.
Eventually, I get hired to serve as president of the campus ministry, and I have to start traveling a lot. Brent, you were actually in the study for your second go-around when I stepped into this new role. And I just, I was in town, I was out of town, I was in town, and so we decided to try to flip the classroom and put the content online so that whether I was in town or out of town, the students could get the class every Thursday. The content would be there every week, whether I was there or not. And so we were just, we were using a podcast venue, and we weren’t really even trying to start the podcast, like start a podcast, we were using podcasts to talk to a group of college students. And that kind of, that just morphed and changed over time.
Brent: Yeah, that spark, like, created a need for a way to distribute. It’s like, I think most people are like, well, I need to, I need to distribute a video. It’s like, well, you just think of YouTube, like we needed to distribute some sort of teaching and it was mostly audio based, like we have a few visuals, you’ll see some presentations and pictures and diagrams and stuff that we’ll share along the way. But mostly, it’s just teaching over audio. And so just podcast was a natural format to distribute that.
Marty: Right.
Brent: And it just happened to be, you know, publicly accessible for anyone who found it interesting.
Marty: And we knew that people would and that was cool. But we were never really thinking that that’s what we were doing. We weren’t trying to. But yeah, it was an interesting little journey.
Brent: So going back to the Jewish hermeneutic idea. Yes. Like, why? Like, is this just new in the church? Is it you were just in the wrong circles? Like what? Where did this whole idea come into play?
Marty: Yeah, you know, a lot of people will say when I travel around and do meet and greets, or I meet people from all over and one of the most common things that I hear is, how come we don’t know about this? This is such a, how come we don’t know this Jewish hermeneutic thing? It’s so new in the church. And my response to that is, yes, it is. And kind of, it’s not really new at all. Like we have relatively, we’ve known about it for a relatively, a little chunk of time. It started kind of back, I mean, we have this historical timeline, like somewhere in the early 20th century, like early 1900s, the world of textual criticism is alive and well, and we’ll talk about this more in Session 5 when you get there, but right at the end of the body of work here. But the world of textual criticism was kind of connected to more liberal theology, like people associated textual criticism with those people who don’t really believe the Bible. But there was a world of study, of archeology, of history, of learning, and that continued to evolve and we continued to learn things. Somewhere in the 50s, Brent, we found these things called the Dead Sea Scrolls that changed a lot. That was a big deal.
You know, 10, 20 years after that, a lot of things were happening. Scholarship was learning all kinds of stuff. The whole world of Biblical academia was growing. There was a guy by the name of Jacob Neusner that comes along and he’s just, we’ll talk about it more in depth in Season 5, but he really kind of opens up in a lot of ways. He connects these worlds of Christian scholarship with Jewish scholarship—worlds that had been separated for centuries, all of a sudden start collaborating and working together. And that leads to other thinkers, people like N.T. Wright. And that’s been around. That’s been around for 30, 40 years, and it’s been impacting slowly but steadily the world of biblical theology for the last two or three decades. And so it’s not really super new, and the Internet is doing a whole lot to spread this.
So I mean, it’s growing, and it’s not confined to one denomination or one faith tradition. That’s part of what makes it so exciting is you have Pentecostals leaning into this. You have Baptists. You have non-denominational. You have mainline. You have Catholics, and they’ve been in this for a long time. And so you really have all these Jesus followers, and it kind of transcends those denominational lines and barriers. But this worldview and this perspective, it feels new to a lot of us because the first time that we run into it. And it is new, but at the same time, it’s not brand new. And we’ve been growing. In the last century, we’ve been growing a lot as a church and as a group of people learning about how to view the Bible historically without having to chuck out our convictions that it’s inspired, that it’s authoritative, that it’s the Word of God. I hold to those truths very, very passionately, and I don’t have to get rid of them just to think critically and to think historically and to ask good questions about the Biblical Text. And that’s what, in a lot of ways, this study is about.
Brent: Yeah. Just like this idea of an awareness. I mean, how many people, Marty, have you heard? Can we even count? How many have I heard say, oh, man, I wish that I had learned this sooner? And I know exactly how everybody feels because I was 26 when I started studying with you, and I felt it already at 26. We have people who have listened and have studied at 70 years old and like, I wish I could have known this. So it’s just like this idea of raising up this new generation that has the awareness and has the tools to ask these questions and to study these things. That’s a huge part of what we’re doing.
Marty: And there’s so many beautiful partners out there that are also doing this, like people like The Bible Project, that I’m not even sure that they were up and running at the level we know them today when we got started in 2016. They were around. They were there. But the things that are well-known and the resources that people know about today, things like that, it’s not just the BEMA podcast. There are so many beautiful tools and resources. Dr. Michael Heiser, who is now the late Dr. Michael Heiser, but the work that he did—like there are so many resources that people are becoming more and more aware of. And that’s what’s beautiful.
Brent: So with that as our foundation, what else are we trying to accomplish here, Marty?
Marty: Yeah. You know, again, we’ll circle back around to this when we’re all done, but we’ll start by, you know, I often talk about the Four Pillars of BEMA. There’s four big ideas that hopefully this study is kind of always getting at. And hopefully by the time you’re deep into this study, you’re like, yes, those four things, I have experienced them and heard about them over and over and over. So the first thing I would say is the four pillars. The first one of those pillars would be the Text. And by the Text, we’re going to use, whenever we say the Text, we usually mean the Bible. Almost always, that’s what we mean, the Bible, the Text with a capital T. It is the Bible. We want to have a better familiarity with the Bible. We don’t want to run away from the Bible. We don’t want to reject the Bible. We’re not trying to say, oh, the Bible, that’s just old, it’s irrelevant, it’s such an ancient barbaric book. No, the Bible is this beautiful source of wisdom when we know how to ask the right questions and read it correctly. So the Bible is central to what we’ve always wanted to be about.
The second thing is community. So the first pillar would be the Text. The second pillar would be community. The podcast is not community. The podcast is going to try to be a connecting point for community, and we’ll talk about that later. But the podcast is not community in itself. The podcast is just a podcast. But what we are wanting to learn about through the podcast so that we can be committed to it outside of this study is a commitment to community. And by community, we don’t just mean relationships. We mean radical fellowship with people that see the world differently than we do as part of what we find in the story of the people of God in both Old and New Testaments, especially in the community of Jesus.
So the Text would be pillar one. Community would be pillar two. The third would be discipleship. I want to encourage us throughout our study to think differently about what discipleship means, what it’s referring to. We use the word discipleship in the church a lot to talk about a lot of different things, almost all of them really good things. But maybe discipleship to the world of Jesus and the Bible, maybe discipleship meant something else. So we’ll get to that more in like Season 3, Session 3, but we’ll talk more about that as we keep going.
And the fourth pillar would be wrestling. We want to change a posture of questions and doubts and thinking critically in the Bible. I started at the beginning of this story saying I didn’t have a space for that. The church is getting better. We’re getting better at that. We’re getting better at providing those spaces and the posture that we have towards doubt and questions. But when I was younger, I didn’t have a space like that. And this whole journey, this whole study is designed to give us a space and show us how to have a more healthy, more appropriate posture towards doubt, both my doubt and the doubt of other people, questions, critical thinking. A lot of us are raised in a Christianity that makes it feel like there are questions and answers and you don’t question the answers because they’re the right answers. Well, wrestling is a pillar of what this study is. So we have questions and we have answers, but then we question the answers and we think critically and we keep unpacking those things and we keep learning, we keep growing, we keep evolving. And so wrestling is that fourth idea.
We named this thing The BEMA Podcast. We maybe should have even called it the bema. Bema is, like, maybe the more appropriate enunciation of that Hebrew word. And everybody is often like, oh, yeah, I know about the bema seat and they’re thinking of the Greek word. There’s also a Greek word that refers to the same thing. So a Hebrew word and a Greek word, bema—the bema platform or the bema seat. And it’s often used in term of the judgment seat, as where usually people talk about the bema seat. That’s not how we’re talking about it.
Bret: Which is part of why I feel good about pronouncing it a different way.
Marty: Exactly. I kind of like I’ve always loved that, too. It’s kind of a mispronunciation and I’m good with it. But BEMA, is it refers to—there was a platform in the center of these ancient synagogues, the synagogues of Jesus’s day. The whole community would come and they would gather around the BEMA, and the BEMA was in the middle of the synagogue. And you would stand. It’s not a big thing. It’s a small little elevated platform, two or three inches sometimes right in the middle. Just a small little square that you stand on—might be made of wood, might be made of stone. And it’s on this square that you would read the words of God. That’s where you would read the Torah, the parasha and the haftarah readings and the portions of the synagogue. You would read God’s word from the bema. And I loved what that symbolized for me.
The bema was like all four pillars. Obviously the bema was about the Text. You don’t stand on the bema and preach a sermon. You only stand on the bema to read the words of God. When it’s time to preach a sermon, you get off the bema because only God’s words have that elevated. I wanted to study that elevated the place of God’s words rather than our words. It was community. The whole community gathered around the BEMA. So I had community in bema. I had discipleship. It’s around the bema. It’s after the bema that the rabbi would take his students every single day in that study room or in the halls of the synagogue, and he would teach and then he would lead his disciples out. And the bema was a place of wrestling. Once you heard the words of God, you sat in community and you wrestled with what those words meant as a community together. You didn’t hear one person in charge tell you what to do and think. You all together as a community wrestled together with what to do and what to think.
So that’s what, that’s what BEMA was. Hopefully along the way you hear us talk about what we might call spiritual formation. You’ll hear me talking about things like the spiritual practices or spiritual disciplines. We’re going to talk a lot about things like Sabbath. We’re going to talk a lot about things like prayer, generosity, hospitality. And there are these things that we’ve been doing for thousands of years—Christian practices that facilitate that work in our lives. We call that spiritual formation. I’m being formed spiritually. Hopefully you’ll hear us talk about that. Hopefully you’ll hear us constantly refer to college students like they’re always going to be kind of on the tip of our tongue. They’re going to be on the tip of our mind. We’re always going to be thinking about, like, how does this relate to college students? How am I inspired by this younger generation? This whole thing is designed to be pointed at and to be a gift to younger people that are literally going to go—they are building the world that we’re going to live in tomorrow. They’re already doing it today. And I want them to have a particular relationship with the Scripture and a particular spiritual formation to guide them on that way. So hopefully hear us talk about college students.
And hopefully you’d hear us talk about like why this all matters. One of the things we’ll say is the sanctity of vocation. And what we mean by that is there’s something that we do every day. We might be a stay at home mom. We might be an artist. We might be an engineer. We might be a business owner. We might be a pastor. There’s a million things that we do, but there’s something that we do every day. We get up and we have a nine-to-five typically. You probably listen to this podcast on your way to and home from work. And I love to connect the dots between the things that we learn in the Text and who we are every single day because the things that we do matter. It’s holy and it’s sacred. And so hopefully that’s another part of our conversation as well.
Brent: And so then how is this journey going to work as far as like, what do you mean by session or season? Why do we have it broken up the way that we do? How are you supposed to do BEMA? What does it mean to engage this material?
Marty: Yeah. So I would start by the body of work itself. It’s just a study. It’s not the wholeness of spiritual formation itself. It’s just one piece of it. It’s a study. And that study is going to revolve around five sessions. And those five sessions make up the main body of work, the BEMA Corpus, if you will. Session 1 will be Torah. So Session 1 will be 32 episodes, 31 episodes. We’re just going to walk through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And we’re just going to kind of go through the Bible somewhat chronologically. It’s going to get a little weird here and there and how we order it, but we’re basically walking through the history of the biblical narrative. So Session 1 is Torah.
Session 2 is going to be the rest of what we often call the Old Testament or the Hebrew scriptures, the Tanakh. So Session 2 is going to be the prophets and the writings. So we have Torah in Session 1. We have the prophets and the writings in Session 2.
Session 3 is going to be the Gospels. We’re going to walk through, we’re going to set up the Gospels, the historical context of Jesus’s life and ministry, and then we’re going to walk through the life and ministry of Jesus.
That’s going to lead us to Session 4. That’s going to be Acts. We’re going to call it the Early Church. It’s the early church seen in the book of Acts and all those letters from Paul and James and John and the writer of Hebrews and Peter and even Revelation. We’ll do a big—we’ll end Session 4 with a great study on Revelation.
And then I think it’s Session 5, very short session, but an important session on church history, some 10 or 11 episodes, where we’ll talk about how did we get from the biblical day, the biblical story, what happened in between the ending of Revelation and where you and I sit today in our own context. And we’ll talk about that, that journey as well.
So that’s the five sessions. Along the way, we discovered throughout this journey, Brent, we started to encourage people to get in discussion groups. And it’s been such a rich part of the journey because it adds the community element to that. And so there are discussion groups. We don’t run them. I don’t, I don’t run them. We simply facilitate the connections. There’s a map on our website. You can go to and you can click on the groups tab. And there is a map there that shows groups of people all over the world that listen to the podcast and get together on a regular basis to talk about what they’re learning. Or maybe it’s somebody that doesn’t have a group, but they want to start one. Like you can get connected to people that might be right in your backyard. And that’s the discussion groups. And we’ll even link a video, Brent. I did a, I did a BEMA FAQ video and there’s a lot of those, but one that’s relevant here. I made a video that we can link in the show notes to this episode, which are usually located at the bottom of that podcast player somewhere, but you can link in the show notes there. There’s a video, “How to Do BEMA,” and it might spend a little bit more time diving into depth there of what it means to kind of do this study and what that could look like for you.
Brent: Yeah. And just on the note of things to know, as you get started on this journey, bemadiscipleship.com is the website. If you ever can’t find the show notes for some reason in your podcast app, go to the episode page on the website. It will all be there. And you just scroll down and all those links will be there. Sometimes it’s nice, especially when there’s a presentation to bring up on a larger computer screen anyway, to see those pictures better. If you have the opportunity, we’re not here to prescribe like, oh, you, you can’t listen to this while you’re in the car because you need to sit down and focus and take notes like—you don’t have to do that.
Marty: You actually recommend binging, Brent.
Brent: I do. Yeah. I would recommend going through this as fast as you can, because one of the ideas is just to have that entire view of scripture as one big narrative that God is telling and have that whole idea, and then go back and do the deeper study.
Marty: Yeah.
Brent: But like, it also shouldn’t be a burden. We’re not trying to burden you. Like we realized at this point, there are a lot of episodes in front of you, and this should not be a burden. Like this should be a joy. This should be a way to draw closer to God. And so like, we’re just, we’re going to provide as many resources as we can, but don’t feel like you have to do everything. We’re going to recommend a lot of books. We’re going to point you to a lot of resources and other materials outside of our podcast. You don’t have to do all of that stuff. And I would say it’s almost impossible to do all of that stuff because there’s just so much out there.
Marty: Indeed. There’s also a bunch of our social media platforms, like we don’t, we don’t get crazy. We’re not trying to build a platform or be bonkers about that. But if you’re on social media, we have a Facebook page. We’ve got a Twitter, or an X, handle out there. We’ve got our Instagram. We have a YouTube Channel. We haven’t utilized a whole lot, but we do hope to do more of throughout the future. So we’ve got those socials for BEMA. You can find us there. I would recommend finding Impact Campus Ministries. BEMA is not its own thing. BEMA is a part of a larger ministry that I actually run. I’m the president of Impact Campus Ministries. That’s actually my day job. BEMA is a part of my day job. And so BEMA is a part of Impact Campus Ministries. You can find that site off of our website, or you can just go to impact.com and learn more about impact there. What other kinds of things can you think of?
Brent: We also have a monthly email newsletter called the BEMA Messenger, more or less monthly. We don’t guarantee that it’s monthly, but it’s pretty much what it is. It’s not a huge thing that you’re going to find, but if you’re like, well, I’m just starting. How do I know what’s going on right now? How do I know if Marty or Brent or whoever is going to come visit my town? How do I know if there’s an upcoming trip or something that I want to be a part of? The BEMA Messenger is the way to be up to date without having listened to the most recent episode.
Marty: Yeah. It’s a great recommendation. All the new stuff, the things that you need to know for today are located there. Another place you can go is martysolomon.com is my personal site. And there you can find my YouTube channel. You can find the podcast. You can find all kinds of things, interviews that I’ve done, guest appearances, sermons that I’ve given. There’s an archive of that there. You can find my schedule where I’m going to be. It’s another place that you can go if you miss the monthly newsletter or you’re not signed up for that or you just need to know right now, like what is Marty’s schedule? You can find that there. You can also find my book. I wrote a book. Some people, by the way, Brent, I’m finding they like to read the book first and then start the podcast journey. Everybody’s different, but sometimes they’re like, give me the 200 page version of the podcast because the book is really the podcast in a book. So give me that and then I’ll go through the deeper dive. And so there’s that out there too. And you can find that on my site as well.
Brent: And if you’re like, well, I would like a shorter version of this material, but I also am not good at reading books. You can get the audio book version too.
Marty: You can. I read it myself.
Brent: Read by Marty. Yeah.
Marty: There you go. Yep.
Brent: Okay. Well, that, that is our intro. That is our, what is BEMA answering the question, what it is. So if, if you’re a brand new listener, you’ve never heard BEMA before. You can be done now, but we do want to, we do want to go on and address a few things for people who have been listening since years past. And they’re like, why is this different? Why are you rebooting the episodes? So we want to go over a few of those things.
Marty: Yes, this, this is a reboot. And so there’s a few things I want to let you know right off the bat for everybody that’s been panicking for the last 20 minutes. You will be able to find all the old episodes. If you’ve been with us for—since 2016 or whatever that is, and you’re like, oh, I know he said something in, or I like the older, I just want to hear like, whatever that is, you will be able to find the old episode. It will be linked in the show notes of the reboot, the corresponding reboot episode. It’s not going to be easy. Like it won’t load in your podcast app, but if you really want to find it, there’ll be a file that you can find and download. If you really want to find the old episode that will be there in its original glory. So if you want to hear the old stuff, it’ll, it’ll be there, but there were reasons for this reboot. And I’ll just, I’ll just try to quickly just run through some of these. First of all, there were things I just got wrong. Can you believe that Brent? We got some things wrong. There were just some mistakes. There were some errors. I was just wrong about things. And we want to clean that up. Hard to believe, but true.
Brent:It’s been eight years and, like, you used to recycle this material, as you said previously in this episode.
Marty: Yep.
Brent: Like this was a two year class. So every two years you were fixing mistakes. You were incorporating new things that you’ve learned. You were finding new resources to add to the conversation.
Marty: Absolutely.
Brent: It’s just time. It’s overdue. Really.
Marty: Yeah, it really is. We wanted to be able to clean up our language as well. Like our cultural consciousness has evolved. Like a lot of things have changed since 2016, just culturally, like the world that we live in for us here in America, things have changed since 2016. A lot of things have happened and we’ve grown in our, just our own cultural consciousness and our language. I want to, I want to clean that up. We’ve evolved Brent. I’m not the same person I was in 2016. Are you?
Brent: No. Yeah. I mean, I have, I have kids now. I didn’t have kids when we started—
Marty: —and boy, we’re changing.
Brent: I would hope after eight years though, we haven’t just been sitting still and doing nothing. Like, we, we have grown.
Marty: We get to Season 6 and eventually we, we widened the team out. It’s no longer, like for five seasons, it was Brent and Marty. It was Brent and Marty, Brent and Marty. And it probably took us way too long, but I woke up eventually in Season 6 and said, this needs to be bigger than Brent and Marty. And so we added a few new voices. We added Elle Grover Fricks and Reed Dent and Joshua Bossé. And they get added like 250 episodes into this journey. And that’s a shame for anybody starting their journey. They need to hear those voices. They need to, they need to meet those people. We need to have a more robust, more diverse teaching team from the get-go. And so part of our reboot is introducing you to the larger teaching team and some, some different voices earlier in the journey.
Brent: And that doesn’t mean our journey is going to change. We’re still going to basically step through the same stories that we covered before. We’re going to do it in the same number of episodes. We’re not, I mean, if we’re being honest, the episodes will probably end up being slightly longer than their original versions, but we’re trying to really keep that original journey intact as it was.
Marty: Yup.
Brent: And then just bring in the extra voices, the extra perspectives, hopefully just come away with a fuller, richer understanding of the same thing that we’ve been talking about the whole time.
Marty: Yeah. We’re, we’re really committed to, we know that for so many of you, this journey was intentional. It was intentional on our part, the way we designed it. And it worked because of that intentionality. So we need to keep that. We need to not do more with episode one, two, three, four, five. We need episode one, two, three, four, five to essentially kind of be the same so that we can go on the similar journey because we didn’t open the fire hydrant, and we didn’t open it on purpose. And so we don’t want to do that now either. So the journey is really going to try to be, we’re going to try to preserve that experience.
And when we did the original, we were assuming a lot of things because we weren’t trying to “start a podcast.” We were assuming college students. So we never said college students out loud because we were assuming that that was our audience. We were assuming spiritual formation, Brent, because all of the students that came to my study were also a part of a larger thing where we were praying together and, and, and doing life together. And it wasn’t just a podcast and a study. It was a part of a large. And so we were assuming spiritual formation. We were assuming college students. And those are things we don’t want to assume anymore because there’s so many of you that aren’t in that same context. And so we want to speak more directly to those things.
Brent: And things like we were assuming you were going to come to class and watch a video that we talked about. Right. We were—we were assuming that you were going to go to Israel and Turkey with us at the end of your two year cycle of study. And those are just assumptions that we can’t make anymore.
Marty: Anybody that wants to read, like if you’re like, man, I really wish I knew that story better. We’ll put a link in the, in the show notes to this episode where you could, you could read, we have a, we have a link that basically tells the story of BEMA. What was it? How did it get started? You’ll enjoy some of the photographs that are in there of Marty with a shorter beard, with darker hair and, you can read more of the story there. But what are some of the other things that we’re going to refine Brent along the way?
Brent: Yeah. Like even I was, as I was preparing to record today, just looking at like, oh, the way I even introduced the episode was slightly different. And the description I had for this episode is different than what I said in my introduction of the episode. So a lot of those things are, are things that we were figuring out back then. And we have, like, a set way of doing it now. Even our, our own rhythms and how we interact with each other, our voices, our recording environments, we’re in different places with some, some of the same equipment, but we probably like if you, if you’re listening to one of these new episodes and then you jump to the next episode and it’s an old version, you’d be like, wow, these guys sound completely different.
Yeah. We’ve, we’ve grown in our equipment, our studio environments, all of those things have changed. Our communication methods are another thing. Like we talk about, we talked at the end of those episodes all the time, like join us in Moscow and Pullman and it’s like, Moscow, Russia, no, not Russia. Like again, another one of those assumptions we were assuming mostly people who lived on the Palouse and people like, what is the Palouse all, all of those things that we said and like, get a hold of us on Twitter. It’s like, well, we used Twitter a lot more back then, um, back when it was actually just Twitter and not X and, and just social media in general has shifted so much since we started. So these days we’re just saying like, go to bemadiscipleship.com. That’s going to be the most up-to-date way to get in touch, whatever that is, we will have that on the website. So use the contact page. And if something changes, whatever the contact page has is going to be the best way to get in touch. So all of those things are just like, okay, we’ve, we’ve been doing this for eight years. We’ve learned a few things and we have a better perspective on what the future could potentially hold and try to try to be prepared for whatever it might be. We don’t know what it is, but we know that it could be a number of things. And so we’re trying to just, like, set ourselves up for better success.
Marty: And I can think of two just quick final things, uh, Brent, one of those, we already mentioned if you’re looking for the old episode, it’ll still be there. Just look in your show notes. There’ll be a link there to the old episodes.
And the final thing that kind of grew over time, we weren’t doing it originally. And then we finally kind of figured it out was transcripts. And that was really helpful for people for all kinds of reasons. Um, largely the deaf community wanted transcripts, which that was actually our driving. Like that was the thing that got to me. That’s what grabbed a hold of my heart, um, and got us moving on transcripts, but they’ve been helpful for people in lots of situations and contexts. And so we’ve done all the transcripts for the first five sessions, the body of work has transcripts that are all linked in the show notes to each, uh, respective episode. Our hope is with the reboots, we will also be doing transcripts in the midst of production and hosting those and posting those. If something happens where that’s not the case, the old transcript will still probably get you a lot of, of, you know, get you where you want to go, but we do hope to be producing new transcripts for the reboot episodes as well. You should find those in the show notes as well. And we just know that technology these days—AI boy, AI was not a thing in 2016.
Brent: Yeah. Technology is moving so fast. This stuff is getting so much better these days, Apple podcasts or YouTube with the auto-captions, like there’s just stuff where there’s, there’s auto-generated options for when we don’t have something available. So that is there. I would say if we are making a version of our transcript available, we probably are doing that for a reason, especially it’s like—I mean, I was just, I was messing with a video of my son from a trip that we took and, uh, Instagram auto-generated the caption and Darius was saying, “I really liked that cougar,” but the caption was, “I really liked that poop.” And it’s like, okay, well, that’s a pretty big difference! We’re going to have some of those moments where it’s like, well, we do want to be able to control that if we can. So we’re hoping that we’ll have our own, but you know, it, it is actually a fairly substantial work to do that. And so when we don’t have that available, at least you have those other options to fall back on. And, who knows, within a couple of years, it might even be, it’s like, well, it’s not even worth it for us to do it because the technology has improved so much. So we’re keeping an eye on that. But if we do have a transcript available, it’ll be in the show notes. And if we’re making it available, that’s probably because it’s a better option than whatever the auto-generated one is.
Marty: Yeah, that’s true. It is amazing how far it’s come in just the last year. Like it’s incredible. The technology is getting better and better because those, those captions used to be real bad and they’re getting, they’re getting better with it. But well, who knows how, how that will catch up and if we’ll ever be able to anticipate our poor Hebrew pronunciation of Hebrew words that we share in every episode, Brent, that’s the thing that gets us.
Brent: Yeah. And that’s the challenge is, is we’re, we’re saying things in other languages and we’re probably saying those things in a wrong way or whatever. And so that’s where, that’s where the transcript has a tendency to trip up because we’re just using, I mean—it’s almost like jargon, but it’s not exactly that, but those are the challenges for any kind of transcript and, and a captioning thing is, is understanding those weird terms that aren’t really part of normal conversation, but are normal for us.
Marty: Absolutely, man. You were right about going a little bit longer on the new episodes, but we had a few more things to talk about this time, but yeah, yeah. Worth it. I’m excited to be on the journey afresh, anew. We’re taking out all of those assumptions and we’re, we’re trying to be more clear about what’s going on and what we’re doing and why we’re here. So that’s it. I do. This one is substantially longer than the original. I think going forward, most of the episodes are going to be not that much longer than the original, but—
Marty: I hope.
Brent: I do. I do as well because I have to edit these parts. And so, yes, but we like, we have a team,
Marty: Yes, we do! Like we have more people. We have, not only do we have other teaching voices, but we have other people who are helping us behind the scenes. And so, that’s what’s making all of this possible, really.
Marty: Absolutely.
Brent: But just to close it out, once again, go to bemadiscipleship.com. Everything is there. The show notes, the groups that we talked about, any events that we have coming up, the BEMA Messenger, the contact page, it’s all there. So thanks for joining us for the first time on the BEMA podcast. We’ll talk to you again soon. Bye.