Interview with Lance Beauchamp

Stephen: How long have you been the director for the BCM?

Lance: I have been the director for the BCM for 10 and a half years but I was in Jacksonville for the first 3. So, I’ve been here at FSU for 7 and a half years.

Stephen: So, there’s multiple BCM’s spread throughout Florida?

Lance: That’s right, there’s one in the Pensacola area, there’s one in Tallahassee area, Jacksonville, Tampa, Orlando and Miami.

Stephen: What does a midweek service here consist of and look like?

Lance: So, we do Tuesday nights at 7 and typically it’s made up of a student led band that leads worship and then a speaker will come and give a message, either me or someone from a local church. Sometimes we have a student speak and we kind of let everyone else know what kind of activities that we do throughout the week and what’s coming up later in the semester.

Stephen: So, you guys partner with local churches?

Lance: Yeah, so this is kind of the unique thing about BCM is there are a lot of campus ministries that are just stand-alone campus ministries. So, for example Cru or Navigators or Intervarsity is a standalone campus ministry that’s not affiliated with any church or denomination. Then you go on the other side and you’ve got church college groups that are college ministries of one specific church but then the BCM is kind of in the middle where we are funded by Baptist churches throughout the state of Florida. We don’t represent just one of them but we represent all of them and so I like to think of the BCM as the missional arm of the local church on the college campus.

Stephen: Okay, so how do you guys try to reach new members around the campus here?

Lance: So as a campus ministry we are registered or recognized student organization so we have a president, vice president, treasurer and secretary just like every other club on campus does. My job is to help facilitate ministry that happens here and try to mentor students so that they are better equipped to share the gospel but we believe in the model students reaching students. We think that the best way for college students to be reached is to be reached by their peers. So, what we do is grow students in their knowledge of God’s word but also in their ability to communicate that clearly and just their confidence and their passion to reach their peers because they believe that Jesus is the way to reconcile their relationship with God the father and that if we all need that it’s in comment upon us to share that message with other people. Most of that happens through students that talk to their friends that they already have some kind of relationship with, like their roommates, their classmates, or they work with, or their just friends on campus already and just using that friendship to have spiritual conversations and then we also have opportunities where we create environments where students go and intentionally share the gospel like maybe doing spiritual surveys or we even do a lot of things where we just serve the campus and we don’t really have a specific spiritual thing involved but we just give out a bunch of free pancakes at finals time or during midterms and things like that; we’ll throw an appreciation dinner for the Resident Advisers on campus because we just appreciate what they’re doing and want to have some kind of small token of our appreciation that we can give them but those are just some examples.

Stephen: So what impacts have you made on campus?

Lance: I think one of the things that we’ve tried to do is change the perception of Christianity on the campus. I think a lot of people see Christianity as very judgmental and that’s one of the first impressions that come to mind when people think of Christianity which is sad because that’s not really who we are. I think sometimes we have not represented ourselves as well as we should have so I think one of the first steps that we must take on campus is to start changing the perception and so a lot of that is done through serving the university and expecting nothing in return. Just because of our love for the campus and love for the people on campus, we do these things and so I think we have made a lot of headway through that where different FSU entities know the BCM and know that we care about them and we’re not looking for a handout from them or something in return. I think also we’ve made a difference spiritually in people’s lives because a lot of people come to FSU and them either want to get closer to God or they may have strayed far away from Him and want to come back to Him or their curiosity has been peaked so we try to share the good news of Jesus with them and then connect them with a local body of believers, that being the local church.

Stephen: Have you done any service projects this year or this semester?

Lance: As a matter of fact, we have, just this past weekend we had about 16 students go and do some yardwork for the Women’s Pregnancy Center on Pensacola street, a couple of blocks away from the BCM. They were clearing some parking spots to make new parking spots so a team of about 16 students go help them with that this past weekend.

Stephen: How many new members do you say you get yearly?

Lance: It depends on the year, it fluctuates, the last couple of years have been smaller gains than we’ve had in previous years. I think the last couple of years we probably gained in the Freshman class somewhere around 20 to 30 where as in some previous years we probably gained as many as 50 or 60 in the Freshman class so it just depends.

Stephen: SO, there’s an article on you wall about Students get Baptized at FSU’s Westcott Fountain. What’s that about?

Lance: That was a few years back, I think that was around 2012 or 2013. It all started with a student who came up to me and asked if he could be baptized at Westcott fountain. As a campus minister, as I was explaining earlier that we’re not tied to one church but we are tied directly to the local church and so we also distinguish ourselves as not being church, we’re not a substitute for church, we are the arm of the church on the college campus. Two things that are very distinctive of practices of local church or two ordinances are The Lord’s Supper and baptism. As a campus minister who’s trying to distinguish ourselves from the local church I have not wanted to take up The Lord’s Supper and I have not wanted to do baptism because I don’t want to say we’re not a local church ourselves but practice the very thing that the church does. So, I had a conversation with the student and said if you get your college minister or pastor from whatever church you’re involved in locally to come to Westcott and baptize you, then we’ll do that. Well that also opened the door for me to give a message on What is Baptism? Why should you be baptized? Once I gave that message I had 2 or 3 other students come up afterwards and say I want to get baptized and when they found out that this student was going to get baptized at Westcott, they wanted to get baptized at Westcott so after our Tuesday night service we went to Westcott fountain and had 2 or 3 different ministers from local churches come and baptize those students that went to their respective churches.

Stephen: When I walked in I noticed there were some students in the public area. Is this place open all day?

Lance: Well, I wouldn’t say all day, technically its open from about 9 in the morning until about 11 at night depending on the residents. We have 2 students who live in the building, there’s an apartment style room in the building. Students apply to live there each year and so they kind of have the responsibility of locking up and unlocking the doors. Making sure the building is in decent shape when the staff which is basically me leaves the building. But yeah, we have people who come and hangout all throughout the day between classes and a lot of activities in the evening, some official BCM, some just students hanging out.

Stephen: Do you guys do trainings here, like spiritual trainings?

Lance: Yes, we do. We have a leadership team and the leadership has meetings depending on what level of leadership the student is involved in and they have meetings every week or every other week. We also have spiritual trainings separately which we do about once a month and we hold those on Sunday’s in the evening, we have like a dinner. Those training are anything from knowing how to share your faith to your personal spiritual growth to learning about different world religions and some of the basics of what they believe and how you can engage them in conversation.

Stephen: The office next to yours, is that like the assistant director or an intern?

Lance: The only staff person that we have is me as the director but we are able to pay a student a little bit of money each week as what we call a ministry partner. We have a grad student who is doing that about 10 to 20 hours a week to help me out.

Stephen: How would one apply to be on the leadership team?

Lance: We just put those applications out, typically they come out towards the beginning of Spring semester. Students pick up the application, they fill it out, they sign up for an interview time. They are interviewed by the director and or the student president, the current student president and then between the ministry partner and the director and the student president, the decisions of the leadership team are made somewhere around spring break for the upcoming academic year.

Stephen: Alright, and what does the leadership position consist of?

Lance: There’s a lot of various positions, anything from leading small groups for Freshman or transfers, to heading up social events to officers such as president or vice president to helping coordinate the band that leads worship on Tuesday night. We’re involved with Homecoming and sometimes Dance Marathon so there’s a couple of positions there to help coordinate those specific things. We even have an ‘Other’ blank so we try to think outside the box so if a student come up with an idea for a ministry that we’ve not thought of then we have that on there and take that into serious consideration.

Stephen: What do you guys do for Dance Marathon?

Lance: So last year was the first year we were officially involved with Dance Marathon. We’ve unofficially helped with cleanup afterwards for a couple years and the reason for that was because we believe in the cause so we wanted to help but we kind of plant the seed in our students to get involved and by doing cleanup we thought the students might go you know we should just get involved with more than just clean up and that’s exactly what happened. We had students that said that and so they said we should also have dancers and have a team and everything. So, we said sounds like a great plan, why don’t you head that up and so we had a team of dancers last year that participated in Dance Marathon and we just jumped on another team, we partnered with a fraternity and sorority and that’s exactly what we do with Homecoming. We don’t have a separate BCM team but we partner with fraternities and sororities which is just another way of building a bridge between what many people have the perception of a great Gulf fix between campus ministries and Greek life which I think is an artificial Gulf because I think that campus ministry and Greek life can coincide with one another. I think Greek life is one of the greatest opportunities on campus, there’s a lot that goes into it and there are a lot of dangers in it but we see them as valuable as any else on this campus and we want to do what we can to show our love to them.

Stephen: So then how did you guys do Homecoming this year with the fraternity ban?

Lance: That made for a very unique circumstance, we had already joined up with a fraternity and sorority and then the week before Homecoming realized they would not be able to participate in any Homecoming activities so it was just us. Some events just got canceled because Greek life pretty much just made it happen like Skit Night but there were other activities that we had to pair it down so instead of having an elaborate float in the parade, we’re going to have the Garnet and Gold guys in the back of a pickup truck and we’re going to have other people walk alongside the truck and handing out candy.

Stephen: How did the Garnet and Gold guys tradition get started?

Lance: Back in 1998 there were 2 guys that were involved with the BCM here at FSU and they were trying to figure out a way to get the crowd into a home opener against Duke because usually in football a game against Duke is not the most challenging game and so they knew it was going to be hard to get the crowd into it. So, they came up with a random idea that they were just going to paint themselves up in garnet and gold and throw glitter on themselves and they did it and the crowd went nuts. They decided to do it the next week and so long story short that kind of became a tradition and they get passed on to 2 more guys within the BCM here at FSU every year. In fact when I came 7 and a half years ago, I reached out to the original Garnet and Gold guys just to make sure I understood what their desire for the Garnet and Gold guys was. They said they wanted it to stay within the BCM, 2 guys that were actively involved in the BCM and they wanted them to be held to higher standards, that thy couldn’t just be people who went out there and boozed it up on the weekends. They wanted guys that could represent sobriety while theyre doing that and just have people that have upstanding moral character.

Stephen: That’s all the questions I have, thanks so much for taking time out of your day to allow me to interview you!

Lance: No problem, it was my pleasure. Glad I could be of some help.