“The whole passion that we have is in the kingdom of God and bringing people into the kingdom and serving the kingdom.”
Ben Ferrell, CEO of BMCFerrell, sat on the other side of the Zoom call, excited to share how God is reaching the world through media ministries. I leaned in. I wanted to hear more.
This year, BMCFerrell is celebrating 50 years of serving ministries, and they received the 2021 Milestone Award at NRB 2021. Over the years, they have built a strong media network to help clients reach the world with the Gospel. They are on a mission to help churches, ministries, and Christian organizations plan, produce, place, and expand their media. Ferrell described the organization’s sweet spot as combining traditional, digital, and social media to come alongside ministries.
“The most rewarding thing to see is when our work helps reach people, and we see lives changed and transformation come through the media ministries that we’ve worked with over the years,” Ferrell said.
BMCFerrell has been a NRB member for over 40 of their past 50 years of ministry. Ferrell said that it’s the relationships they have made through NRB that have made their membership so valuable. At NRB’s annual conventions, the BMCFerrell team gets to see the people that they work with throughout the year, meet ministries, and build relationships.
“It’s the community side that’s important,” Ferrell said. “We don’t look at the convention as a place to do business. We look at the convention as a place to learn and to connect with people.”
Ferrell said that his only regret with his NRB membership was not getting more involved and taking advantage of the resources available to members. He encouraged Christian communicators to join the association and get involved.
Since its beginning, BMCFerrell’s core competence has been helping ministries produce media for response. Ferrell said that they do this by combining direct marketing principles with ministry principles.
“Working with ministries is more than just marketing,” Ferrell said. “[Ministry is] about touching lives—touching them where they hurt and where they have needs.”
With this understanding, BMCFerrell recently launched an immersive online course, “Essential Principles of Effective Media Ministry.” Eleven students made what Ferrell calls the maiden voyage of the course. These students joined the course virtually from Tulsa, Oklahoma where BMCFerrell is headquartered, across the United States, and from around the world.
Through the course, Ferrell and other guest experts help students think strategically about their story, calling, vision, mission, and media plan. Ferrell believes that the “Essential Principles” laid out in this course are critical keys to success in today’s digital landscape. In the course, Ferrell presents the behind-the-scenes journey through the best practices of some of the most successful ministries in the world.
“We’re not trying to tell stories for the sake of sentimentality,” Ferrell said. “We’re trying to bring principles forward and show them the opportunity that exists right now.”
The full course includes 12 main video sessions, 22 guest expert interviews, 12 session guide PDFs, and 4 live interactive workshops.
Although students can purchase the online course and watch the sessions at any time, Ferrell believes that it’s most rewarding to complete the course in community with others. A new course cohort will begin on Monday, September 13. In one month, students will watch three video sessions a week and participate in a Zoom call with other students in the cohort at the end of each week.
“It’s not just for proclamation—preachers and teachers—it’s also for artists, songwriters, and anyone who has something from God they want to bring through the media to touch the world,” Ferrell said.
This course is made for ministers who want to use media to share the gospel, whether they are new to media ministry or they have been doing it for years. But it’s not just principal ministers who should take this course. Ferrell also challenged their teams to be a part of the course.
“We want them to understand the power of their story, their mission, and who they’re called to reach,” Ferrell said.
This course is less focused on giving students a specific media plan and more focused on preparing students with a roadmap of how to move forward—how media ministry works and what direction they want to move in.
In the course, students learn about the parallel between the explosion of media and the explosion in population. To Ferrell and his team, this parallel is evidence that God knew what he was doing and how he wanted to work, and he gave us media as a tool to reaches the masses.
“We believe that media was given to us by God,” Ferrell said. “It’s a gift.”
As people are surrounded by technology and carry their phones in their pockets, Christians have a unique opportunity to “go into every man’s world” to preach the gospel.
Not only has media made the message more accessible to the receiver, but it has also made it easier than ever for messengers to share the message.
“We want to raise up hundreds of thousands of media messengers,” Ferrell said. “You don’t have to have a huge budget or a huge church.”
To find out more about BMCFerrell and their course “Essential Principles of Effective Media Ministry” at bmcferrell.com.
