If there’s one thing Roy Ice has, it’s vision. While he performs his regular duties as Pacific Union College’s campus chaplain, such as meeting with students and helping to plan worship programs, Ice is always thinking about ways to revolutionize ministry. That’s what salvationcoach.com is about.

Salvationcoach.com is Ice’s website where people can download and listen to his podcast, a digital broadcast of inspirational talks. Ice first got the idea to create a spiritual podcast during fall quarter of 2005 while watching then-student Dustin Comm’s success with the PUC radio podcast, which discussed campus events.

In his 15 years of ministry, Ice has noticed that many young adults come to him with the same questions, and that college students don’t have much extra time. “Sixth quarter nursing students barely have time to look at themselves in the mirror,” Ice says. He also observed that it can be scary for students to go to an office to talk about their problems. He says, “I wanted something that would help students be able to wrestle with issues in a non-threatening way.”

Ice spent from June until mid-November setting up the technical side of the site and writing his first series of talks, “Twelve Things to Try While You’re Still Mortal.” The content for these talks comes from the most common questions he has been asked about how to have a concrete relationship with God.

The need for these podcasts is clear—8,000 people subscribed to the podcast in only three months. The bulk of listeners download the podcasts between 12 and 2 a.m., a time when ministry is usually not possible. “The podcast lets us have on-demand ministry,” says Ice. The podcast even attracted the attention of Apple, Inc., when there was such a huge spike in the usage. They contacted Ice to see if they should shift the bandwidth.

Ice’s target audience is the PUC student body. At the same time, he realizes the podcasts can help off-campus listeners. “There is a broader community who could really benefit from the Adventist perspective of Christianity,” says Ice. In fact, out of the 8,000 subscribers, 600 are PUC students, leaving 7,400 off-campus subscribers who found salvationcoach.com through online podcast directories.

Even with the success of the podcast, Ice continues to have vision for other ministry opportunities. His recently published book, also titled Twelve Things to Try While You’re Still Mortal, goes deeper into the principles in his first podcast series and offers a different medium for the message.

Ice also directs his vision inward to PUC. His goal is to “make PUC the most culturally relevant spiritual school” by creating a spiritual environment where God speaks our “current language.” As a pastor who recognizes the value of technology in ministry, he has a good chance of doing just that.