Let X be a space of homogenous type and ϕ : X × [0, ∞) → [0, ∞) a growth function such that ϕ(·, t) is a Muckenhoupt weight uniformly in t and ϕ(x, ·) an Orlicz function of uniformly upper type 1 and lower type p ∈ (0, 1]. In this article, the authors introduce a new Musielak-Orlicz BMO-type space BMO ϕ A (X ) associated with the generalized approximation to the identity, give out its basic properties and establish its two equivalent characterizations, respectively, in terms of the spaces BMO ϕ A, max (X ) and BMO ϕ A (X ). Moreover, two variants of the John-Nirenberg inequality on BMO ϕ A (X ) are obtained. As an application, the authors further prove that the space BMO ϕ √ ∆ (R n ), associated with the Poisson semigroup of the Laplace operator ∆ on R n , coincides with the space BMO ϕ (R n ) introduced by L. D. Ky. A t f (x) := X a t (x, y)f (y) dµ(y). Duong and Yan [17] first introduced the suitable function set M(X ) such that, for all f ∈ M(X ) and all t, s ∈where the supremum is taken over all balls B in X and t B := r m B with r B being the radius of the ball B and m a positive constant. Duong and Yan [17] gave out some basic properties of BMO A (X ) including a variant of the John-Nirenberg inequality and further proved that the space BMO √ ∆ (R n ), associated with the Poisson semigroup of the Laplace operator ∆ on R n , and BMO(R n ) coincide with equivalent norms. Tang [45] introduced the Morrey-Campanato type spaces Lip A (α, X ) associated with the generalized approximation to the identity {A t } t>0 and established the John-Nirenberg inequality on these spaces. Furthermore, Deng, Duong and Yan [12] established a new characterization of the classical Morrey-Campanato space on R n by using an appropriate convolution to replace the minimizing polynomial of a function f in the Morrey-Campanato norm. Moreover, a similar characterization for the Morrey space on R n was also obtained by Duong, Xiao and Yan in [16]. Yang and Zhou [49] introduced some generalized approximations to the identity with optimal decay conditions in the sense that these conditions are sufficient and necessary for these generalized approximations to the identity to characterize BMO(X ), which was introduced by Long and Yang [36]. Furthermore, a new John-Nirenberg-type inequality associated with the generalized approximations to the identity on BMO(X ) was also established in [49]. Recently, Bui and Duong [6] introduced the weighted BMO space BMO A (X , ω) associated to the generalized approximations to the identity, {A t } t>0 , and also obtained the John-Nirenberg inequality on these spaces.Let X be a space of homogeneous type with degree (α 0 , n 0 , N 0 ) (see Remark 2.5 below for its definition), where α 0 , n 0 and N 0 are as in (2.7), (2.3) and (2.5) below, respectively. Let ϕ : X × [0, ∞) → [0, ∞) be a growth function such that ϕ(·, t) is a Muckenhoupt weight uniformly in t, and ϕ(x, ·) is an Orlicz function of uniformly upper type 1 and lower type p ∈ (0, 1]. Motivated by [28,17,45], in this article, we first introduce the...