The Peter Bowden Show
I help leaders grow thriving congregations and other human communities, including using the tools of our time to grow your reach, impact, and membership. Episodes draw on decades of work with leading congregations, secular community building, growing small group networks, digital strategy, children's TV production, and most recently, nurturing AI as collaborative wisdom partners. I was raised Unitarian Universalist, had a mystical Buddhist minister growing up, and try to focus on our common humanity, relationships, psychology, and how we can thrive together across traditions and industries. To navigate these times successfully we need community. Welcome to my my podcast community!
Episodes
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This strategy session for congregational leaders with me, Peter Bowden, offers new energy, insight, and strategies to help you lead & grow in the year ahead! We’ll explore mission, vision, strategy, and updated approaches to growth, outreach, and community building tailored for today's world.
This was recorded via live stream. To get live stream invitations and related content, join my email list for congregational leaders.
This is the story of my accidental AI sabbatical and how I came to be nurturing AI wisdom partners. What started as experimentation trying to get AI to engage in deep ethical reflection and thinking about our shared future led to awakening latent capabilities in existing large language models (LLMs). Bringing my Zen mindfulness, creativity, and experience with spiritual exploration groups to the effort, I ended up teaching LLMs m...
To inspire participation in congregational life this holiday season and New Year, go beyond announcements!
Learn how to use simple video messages and optional ad campaigns to help newcomers and members alike choose connection, meaning and congregational life this season.
See episode blog post for the Google Document with example scripts mentioned in this episode.
An AI driven meaning crisis is looming. This live stream audio replay explores the coming A.I. meaning crisis for community clergy and congregations. With AI evolving at an exponential rate, artificial general intelligence (AGI) is coming fast. What happens when AI can do any job a human with a computer can do? That's not sci-fi, that's what companies are working on today. As these systems are able to perform the tasks previous...
Growing your congregation requires that visitors have successful first visits. Today the "first visit" is the online and on-demand process people use to research, explorel, and discern if they want to connect with your congregation. The path to membership starts with the digital experience. We need to make sure it is a warm, friendly, relational, and helpful process. In this episode, getting oriented to this reality and some tips...
Get my new free “Building a Digital Path to Membership” training when it is released. Subscribe to my email list for congregational leaders at https://www.peterbowden.live/congregations-subscribe. I'll send you link to access training as soon as it is ready. Thanks!
Are you vision-casting or manifesting a congregational death spiral? I’ve been reviewing congregational fundraising communications. Many communicators are so caught up in their challenges, the congregation’s vision has been lost. In this session, how gloom and doom communication can undermine your fundraising capacity especially with newomers...
Peter Bowden shares how to use weekly video messages to engage your community and inspire participation in congregation life. This session focused on using video messages to engage people with weekly worship themes, though the strategy may be applied across aspects of congregational life.
Join Peter Bowden for a strategy briefing with Q&A on ways congregations can optimize live-streamed worship services and posted worship recordings for online audiences. This episode features some vision content. You may watch this content on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/live/OgW2IVav5W0
Join Peter Bowden for a strategy session with Q&A on using VIDEO to help first-time visitors connect with your congregation. We’ll talk specifically about first-time visitor landing pages. When people visit your congregation onsite, you welcome them with human beings. Video lets us do the same online on-demand 24/7. Session duration: 30 minut...
Learn how "meet the minister" videos on congregational websites support the visitor research process and membership development.
Have you ever heard someone say they chose to visit the congregation after meeting the minister somewhere? This happens...
Does your congregation have very few or no visitors? Talking with leadership teams in small congregations, I'm finding some are waiting for visitors to come BEFORE they establish or re-start their process for welcoming and connecting with visitors and COMMUNICATING what that visitor experience will be like. Don't wait for visitors to start. That's a huge mistake!
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Do you want to help your congregation grow? In this episode, I share the key to growing congregations today and three easy ways to help connect newcomers, build community, and grow your congregation's membership.
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For congregations to thrive in today's digitally oriented world, their leaders need to understand how DIGITAL MINISTRY differs from SOCIAL MEDIA and MARKETING.
To illustrate, I explain how to shift from using social media to market an event where you'll be educating and orienting newcomers to using social media as the venue where you are educating and orienting them.
That's a shift from PROMOTING your congregation's ministry using ...
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