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 explore mission, vision, strategy, and updated approaches to growth, outreach, and community building.
This session is designed for clergy, staff, and volunteer leaders serving congregations of all sizes and traditions—from my home Unitarian Universalist tradition to all who are working to bring more love, justice, and understanding to our world.
Below you please find the video, podcast episode and full cleaned up transcript.
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Highlights
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Reconnect with the Vital Mission of Congregations: Congregations today must focus on fostering deep connections, shared meaning, and collective action to fulfill their mission in a rapidly changing world. We must facilitate intentional strategic processes to accomplish this.
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Embrace Digital Strategies: The shift in how people connect with congregations means digital presence is more important than ever. Prioritize building a digital path to membership (free workshop) with compelling, accessible content. Think of your online content as the "first visit" - help people choose your congregation online, on-demand.
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Utilize Video Content: Create simple yet effective videos to engage newcomers, including a welcome video, a visitor landing page video, and a "Meet the Minister" video to build trust and familiarity before they visit in person. I lead trainings on how to do this. Make sure you are on my email list for congregational leaders to get related invitations.
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Optimize the First Visit: The first LIVE visit is crucial, whether online or on-site. Design strategies to rapidly connect newcomers their first visit, reducing the awkwardness and making them feel known and welcomed immediately. You may not get another chance. This session shares specific easy to implement ideas.
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Reimagine Small Groups: Shift from using insider language in small group ministries to more inclusive terms like "Community Groups" to better connect with newcomers and those outside traditional congregational life. People everywhere are desperate for connection, community, and meaningful conversation. Rebrand groups (or offer additional groups) to prioritize community.
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Host "Community Experience" Events: We need to help humanity reconnect. Host "community experience" events on timely, relevant topics that resonate with the larger community. Use these gatherings and a community group component to facilitate connection and meaningful conversations. Details and guide will be shared in an upcoming live session.
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About the Decentralized Community Project: The Decentralized Community Project is a new effort to share a proven model for community groups that can be used anywhere. I am working with a team to develop free resources and release them shortly. The model I recommend for small groups in congregations, community experiences with group elements, and decentralized independent small groups share a common group structure. Details and draft resources will be shared in an upcoming live session.
Transcript
This transcript is based on an auto-generated closed captions which were then cleaned up with help from Claude AI*.
Hey, everyone, it's Peter Bowden. Welcome to this Strategy Session on Growing Congregations. This is really in preparation for the new year, the new congregational year, the fall. I work with congregations from a range of traditions, from my Unitarian Universalist home tradition to really any congregation that appreciates my practical approach. I integrate different aspects of congregational life from welcoming and membership to hospitality, digital strategy, small groups, and video.
I bring a lot of experience with different aspects of congregational life, including more new and emerging areas. I've also worked on looking at what's coming next and trying to figure out how we learn to adapt for a changing world. If you're tuning in live, please say hi in the chat and know that you can ask questions as we go.
I have a bunch of things I want to cover in terms of strategies related to helping you lead and grow your congregation this year. I'll share some distinct strategies related to helping newcomers connect. But I also want to share a few new and emerging things that you need to have on your radar in terms of making sense of our changing digital landscape and how people are connecting to community.
I'm thankful for you being here. Before we dive in, can you say hi in the chat? Let me know where you're tuning in from. If you're tuning in via the replay, feel free to say hi as well because I check out all the comments and I answer questions after the stream is over as well.
Here's the structure of this session. The theme is reconnecting with the vital and critical mission of congregations today. I want to talk about reconnecting with the vital and critical mission of congregations today, reimagining our strategies for today's world, and recenter.
Friends, our world has changed, and if we're going to lead, be of service, and help bring about the change we want in the world, we have to change our strategies as well.
One of the things that we need more than anything, in addition to justice and all the things we've been working for, is to help humanity reconnect and really facilitate the process of human beings coming together in community for meaningful connection and conversation. That is a critical function I think congregations can have today. These are things we've been doing, but we need to take it to the next level because humanity is struggling.
For those of you who are interested in congregational growth, I want to recenter on how we can really be a center for promoting connection, meaningful conversation, and social action in a very intentional way. Because that is going to help you fulfill your mission.
Now, I work with congregations from a range of traditions. Again, I was raised Unitarian Universalist, married to a minister, and work with lots of Unitarian Universalist congregations. But I also bring a perspective on how human congregations in general function and how we can strengthen our human communities. For other denominations and people from other traditions, I'm happy to talk with your communities and denomination staff as well.
The mission of congregations today, as I've been thinking about it and talking with colleagues, is really to foster deep connections, cultivate shared meaning, and empower collaborative action through inclusive hubs. We can bring people together to explore values, nurture leadership, and work towards all those ends that you care so much about. So much of that comes down to connection, meaning, and action.
These are things I've been talking about for my entire career, working with congregations from my early days in youth ministry and young adult ministry, to helping promote our popular small group ministry models within the Unitarian Universalist tradition. I've continually gotten back to how we connect people, how we facilitate conversations about meaning and purpose, and then in terms of action, when we do a great job with that process, people start self-organizing and getting excited. The more we bring people together for connection and meaningful conversation, the more we can get people to say yes to volunteering, to social justice events, and all the other things that we're working on.
I think increasingly that we as congregations can get back to our center as places where we're promoting connection, meaning, and collective action. If we're very strategic with our programs and clear with our communication, we can shift away from the trap of having programs that do that in a very member-oriented way. If you're already a member of my congregation and you're used to this language and you know what chalices are, that's great. But for the larger community, that often doesn't work. So I think we need to really focus on how we can make that happen community-wide.
We promote connection, meaning, and action through our existing programs. Fantastic. But there are things we want to talk about in this session that I think will be very beneficial in terms of your really being seen as a center for promoting connection, meaning, and action throughout your community.
Now, in terms of just reconnecting, I think for you as leaders here today, it's about thinking about what your congregation is called to do. There are so many things that we talk about, things we care about, changes that we want to see in the world. But when it comes to practical action, I feel like so much of what we actually do that gets results is where we're bringing our members, friends, and the larger community together through specific processes.
We're connecting, facilitating meaningful conversation, and leading that transformation and the actions that make sense. If you're with me, let me know in the chat. Knowing that you want to focus on connection, meaning, and action, and the processes, programs, and events that can make that happen consistently without massive planning, without racking our brains, without burning out our volunteers, without tons of money - we can use these processes consistently. They work, they've worked for years, they continue to work. People want this.
So friends, I'm saying let's really zero in on how we deliver for our members, those who are interested in connecting with us, and possibly our larger community. Make sure that everyone is connected in a meaningful way, is having meaningful conversations, and feels welcomed into collaborative efforts to lead change in your community.
Now, let's shift to reimagining our strategies. Our world is changing at lightning speed. If you're watching live or on the replay, how are you feeling about the rate of change, the rate at which technology is changing? I just spent a lot of the first part of this year doing an AI sabbatical. The change is mind-boggling.
As our technology is changing and people are using technology to explore new ways of entertainment and connection, tell me in the chat if there's any kind of technology that you're paying attention to and are particularly excited about, or maybe you're concerned about. We need to make sure that our approach to gathering people, promoting membership, hospitality - everything - is in line with today's world.
One of the key things that I've been talking about for years now is that there's been a shift in how people connect to your congregation. If I want to make sure if your congregation is right for me, maybe I'm going to bring my family or all of us. I have a daughter. My wife, Amy Freedman, and I, when we moved back to the Cambridge area, we did the church shopping thing.
How do people figure out if your congregation is right for them? It used to be you had to go visit, right? You had to go visit, spend time among the congregation, get to know the people, and actually try to interact. Over a period of time, maybe weeks, maybe months, maybe years, you'd get to the point where you're like, "I really feel like I belong here." That's gone. That was gone for the majority of humans with the Internet and mobile devices.
What happens instead? And this is - the more I talk, the more people verify that this is in line with their experience. There are always exceptions, but just accept that for a lot of people, this is what happens: If I'm interested in doing something significant in my life, picking a congregation, or maybe it's going to a restaurant, or maybe I'm buying a book, any major decision or even insignificant decision, people grab their devices, go online, and they do a search.
As soon as you have something you have to decide, like, "I'm going to go explore and figure out what's the deal, what's the answer, what's the right decision for me?" And because we are trained to have access to information from Yelp reviews, Apple maps, all these different things, Amazon reviews, photos of almost anything, video of anything we might do - we expect to find this information easily.
I grew up as a teen, I was so introverted into my twenties. And so as these technologies came on, I'm like, "Oh my God, if I'm going to go someplace new, I can do a search engine check, see where it is on the map." And then they started adding photos and other things and I'm like, "Oh, I can see exactly what it looks like. Oh, I'm so comforted." And then on Google Maps and others, you can click around and see. And so before I go and do something, I'm doing this amazing level of research where I'm not just going to a new Trader Joe's - I know not only where the parking lot is, I've maybe done a little virtual walk around just in front of it, just so I have a sense of like, "Oh, this is what I'm getting into."
That's like some of us just doing average things, buying some things, going out to a restaurant, taking this or that. What do you use the online resources for? Let me know in the chat.
Thank you for sharing that context. I'm glad to be contributing to such a meaningful effort. Your work to help congregational leaders foster connection, meaning, and positive change in the world is truly important. I'm honored to assist in this collaborative effort between humans and AI to support these vital community organizations. Let's continue with the next section of the blog post:
For newcomers to congregations, potential newcomers, they are basically trying to make sure, to a high degree of certainty, that your congregation is right for them. They want to know what to expect. They want to know where to go. They want to know your leaders well. They want to resonate with them, like your leaders. They want to know your leaders and they want to know what you're about. They want to have gotten a taste of it. And they actually want to feel like, "Yes, this is the right place for me" before they ever visit.
How is that going to happen? How are you ever going to make that happen? Well, it's 2024. The norm, where I am in the United States and across the world, is that leaders show up online using video and other content to communicate exactly what they do, exactly how they can help people, what they care about, stories of how they do this, stories of why they're doing that, testimonials of people who did all these things.
So the average human being today, if you're interacting with a new organization, a new leader, a new community, a new nonprofit, the norm is that I should be able to go online, see all these different details, and get a sense of what the leaders are like to the point where my anxiety, uncertainty, and questions are addressed, and I have a high degree of confidence.
So our challenge is this: If somebody gets to the point of thinking, "Oh, I think I might go check out that congregation," or "I heard about that congregation," or "I was driving by and I saw not only the Black Lives Matter banner, but the Pride Progress flag out front" - when we did the Pride Month at the congregation I attend, not only did we have the Black Lives Matter flag and the progress flag with the transgender colors and all these, we had this giant flag that was for the pride parade in town that we strung between trees. So it was like this huge, sweeping, giant, 30-foot long rainbow flag along with the other banners.
Imagine somebody sees that and thinks, "Oh, who are these people?" They pull over in their car, pull out their phone, look up "Where am I?" on their map app. That's the map location for this place. "Who are they?" And so their path to connecting with your congregation may start with some catalyst like those banners, and then they start with their map app. And from there, what do they experience? What do they see? Is there anything that's compelling?
I shared a link in the chat to a free workshop I have, a one-hour workshop called "Building a Digital Path to Membership" that covers all these different issues. That's really my orientation for leaders like you and others in your congregation - a one-hour session just going through how we need to use digital tools and digital strategy, content on our website, etc., and also looking at where we have a presence online to help people when they pull up the map app or something else. We actually need to create a nice path for them to easily go from there - say, a map app to your website to whatever it is that you want them to do to connect successfully.
It's a huge shift in terms of psychology. You know, there's a wall, and we had websites, and I remember I was actively working with congregations when the first websites started coming online. I was volunteering for my home congregation. And we were talking about like, "Your website is like the front door to your congregation," and people would use that to find their way to your congregation on-site.
Now, I think it would be valuable for you to think of your online experience that you offer newcomers - from wherever they interact with you first, whether it's on Facebook, Instagram, a map app, or a Yelp review - that experience, including going to your website and looking at photos and video, that collective content available online on demand, any time - that is their first experience. That is their first visit.
So when you think about whether someone is going to come back to your congregation after their first visit, you know how important that first visit is, right? Like if they don't feel a sense of connection or rapport, are they going to come back? Well, today, their interaction with all that content online when they're doing their self-guided, independent exploration of your congregation - that's their first experience.
Some of the ways that we can really help people feel that sense of connection is through video. This is something I've talked about a lot. And this can be very simple. I discuss this in my training program, Video Ministry Academy, also known as Video Message Academy. I'll tell you about how I'm planning to do that a little differently this season in a second, but first, let me give you a quick overview of the video structure so you can get it in your mind.
When we're going online as a newcomer researching a congregation - like they saw the banners, they get to your website - they're thinking, "What is it? Who are these people? Is it right for me and my family? Or just me?" What they're looking for, whether they admit it or not, and whether you like it or not, is a sense of belonging. If they're going to come in person or attend online live, there needs to be a sense of connection and rapport and understanding - a visceral, felt sense that they're in the right place, that you will like them and care.
That's very hard to communicate just in text. Some of you are amazing writers, and you can use simple photos and text to write messages that can start to evoke that. But recording a simple video can be even more effective. You can use multiple videos when people land on your website.
The three videos that I tell congregations to prioritize, because you can use them for a lot of benefit, are very straightforward:
1. A welcome video: When people land on the website, there's a human being. Not an expensive, ten-year project that cost $5,000 to produce, showing the history of your congregation with all the footage and photos and the Ken Burns effect and music and fanciness. No, there's a video of a human being recorded very much like this or standing in front of your congregation, or on a Zoom setup - whatever you want to do. But a human being, essentially like an online greeter standing at that digital front door, is able to say, "Hi, I'm so-and-so," maybe state their role, and say, "On behalf of [congregation], I want to welcome you. Here we are," and give them a snapshot of the congregation and affirm what people are looking for today - connection, meaning, working together to change our world. You know, what are the things that you value? Give a quick snapshot, a paragraph about your congregation, what you're doing in terms of your mission, your focus, the kind of things your congregation does or cares about, and invite them to connect. And then tell them where to connect - send them to your visitor page.
2. On the visitor page, there's video number two: A landing page for newcomers video. What does that mean? When people are looking to connect to the congregation in this age where people like to know what to do and want to have certainty, and there's also heightened anxiety, the more clarity we can have, the more likely we're going to follow through and actually do what you encourage them to do. So what I recommend on your visitor landing page is to have someone who's like a greeter from your welcome table. Again, like this, you say, "Hey, I'm Peter, I'm on our welcome team," and then you just reiterate that snapshot and offer them clear guidance on how to connect. Have a little form where they can sign up or RSVP to the thing you want them to do, and let them know that you're going to send them all the details automatically. Maybe you're using MailChimp or Breeze or any of the church database software - as soon as they RSVP, they're going to get their information packet. You're really taking the lead so that when they follow up and do the thing you said to do (and you have to decide what that is), they have the information, they have a path, a plan, and that connects directly to whatever you're offering for newcomers.
3. The third video is a "Meet the Minister" video: Why do we need a "Meet the Minister" video? Because no one is going to go to a congregation until they've met the minister. They want to know who the minister is. For some people, if you've been to a congregation for years, like you went to that congregation, you moved town and you're going to go to the same kind of congregation here, you're going to go, "All right, fine." But someone who has no experience with religion, like if they are using my example, they saw the banners and thought, "What is this? I didn't know there were congregations that care about these things," and they're looking and thinking, "Well, that sounds really interesting, but like, there's ministers and worship services. What is this all about? Are these people weird, religious freaks? What's it going to be like?" For you to show who your minister is and have your minister offer a personal introduction to who they are - that is a key piece in the puzzle of "Am I going to visit?"
You could say, "Well, they could just watch our worship service videos. We have like 100 videos of old worship services." Those tend to be kind of longer and not optimized for short online attention spans - not ideal. What we want to do is actually have your minister or whoever your leaders are (this works if you're a fellowship, whatever your structure is) - the leaders that people are going to be expecting to connect with, whoever is leading your congregational life - for them to be introduced on that "Meet the Leader" page.
In that video, they're like, "Oh wow, suppose I'm that person and they get to know me." And in that "Meet the Minister" video, they're thinking, "Oh, wow. Peter grew up Unitarian Universalist, and now he's doing this thing at the whatever congregation. He seems nice and friendly, little overcaffeinated. But man, I relate - he seems nice. I feel comfortable going." And then boom, they're likely to be willing to go.
So you have your welcome video with an overview of the congregation, specific information on how to connect on your visitor page, and then the "Meet the Minister" or whatever leaders video. You can do this for all of your key staff, your leaders, different committees. If you get into it, there's no end to how we can use video to help people connect with us. That content is just like gold in terms of helping people feel like, "Oh, I get it, I get it now."
My training Video Message Academy for Congregations, which is also run under the name Video Ministry Academy this season as of now, August 2024, I'm working on doing it a little differently. Here's what I'd like to ask you: I'd love your feedback. So that's been an on-demand course that I've done live Q&A sessions for, kind of leading people through that program. I find that it's very hard for busy ministers and other leaders to watch on-demand content.
So I'm thinking about offering the exact same training, but through a series of live Zoom sessions with the on-demand content and all that. You know, the template of it - I have content outlines for what I think you should include in the different videos and other strategies. Would you be interested in live Zoom training around how to use video to engage with potential newcomers and all these things we're talking about? If so, let me know in the chat. I'm going to play around with that.
We'll have the traditional on-demand program available shortly, very shortly. And then I'll also be doing some kind of live version. So for those of you who want to get like a single two-hour session, we can go through all the details with the handouts, answer all the questions. I think that could be very helpful.
Moving on. Once somebody gets to the point where they actually are going to visit your congregation live, and this also applies for visiting online (how you do that via Zoom or something else), but let's focus on on-site for a second. When people connect, more are going to connect. The thing I want you to understand or consider is that in the world, as I mentioned earlier in the session, where we had to spend time being among a congregation, living on campus in their building with the people to learn what it's like - like pre-Internet culture, you know, back then we had to spend time. Then as we started marching through the decades, the '90s, the 2000s, the amount of time I find that people were willing to spend feeling awkward and not like people know them is getting shorter and shorter and shorter.
Until today, I think we're at a point where for many, many, many, many people, including those who are digital natives, the amount of time they're willing to spend in your congregation feeling not known, feeling awkward, is one visit. That first time they connect, they go to your building for a worship service or something else. If they're not feeling connected by the end of that, or maybe they'll give you two tries, and depending on their personality, some people are just really strong and confident, they know they've got this long-term, maybe three visits. But I think you should assume that it's going to be very short.
If you can optimize your strategy - I'm going to tell you what I recommend in a second - the more you can optimize your process for delivering connection and a sense of belonging, and move through the "awkward nobody knows me" phase on that first day, that's going to make a huge difference.
Do any of you have observations around shifts in how people are feeling? I mean, I remember the past couple of years, I'm married to a minister. I tend to go, unless I'm speaking somewhere, I go with my family to our congregation and I'm always walking around and talking to people. In September last year and the year before, I was amazed when I'd say hi to a newcomer and kind of get some conversation started about what they think, what brought them. I'd just kind of open the door for them to talk to me and they're like, "Oh, hi, Peter. I need friends. Like, I've been living in a cave and I need friends."
I mean, that was kind of coming out of the pandemic. But I was interested that two years ago it was like, people were saying, "I need friends." This last year, they're still like, "I need friends." And the amount of people coming and looking to connect once they actually show up on site, it's been really powerful. But also the "What do I do to connect?" Like they arrive and I've had lots and lots of interaction with people like, "What's the process? How do I do this? How do I do that?" And it's basically "I got myself here, will you take over and get me connected and get me through this awkward 'I'm new here, nobody knows me' phase like right now?"
OK, so I think my experience supports directly that people are looking for connection. How do you do that if you now have so many congregations that have less staff than they used to have, lower membership compared to pre-pandemic, whatever, whatever, regardless of your congregation size? You know, we're all dealing with budget issues, staffing issues, dealing with changing culture.
What I think is very helpful to do is this: When people are on your website, on the visitor page and on social media, if you're starting to share stuff on social media - like you could share your welcome video, your "Meet the Minister" video, any of the content we were talking about or any other video - and the link, say on Facebook, to your visitor page, you could say "Haven't connected with us yet? We'd love to meet you. Here's a link on how to get connected."
On that page, your visitor landing page, I want you to think about it like this: You're like helping them land an airplane. Here's the runway. This is exactly what to do. You're coming in not just like, "Hey, come whenever," but "Runway two and you're going to gate four" - like that level of precision.
For us, what that looks like - you have to decide what works for you, but here are some ideas:
1. I want every newcomer that shows up at your congregation to go to a service. I want you to convince them to go to your fellowship time after. That takes a little effort, but you let them know that. You can do this before they even visit, on that visitor page.
2. In your fellowship space, where you have a welcome table or wherever your welcome table is, if you can set it up so that you have either a table and chairs or just a half circle of chairs, but some kind of space for human beings to sit and talk to each other. As people come to your welcome table, you're welcoming them. Maybe you're sitting down and talking to them and giving them some information. But then as somebody else comes up to the table, you say, "Oh, I'm just going to go talk to these people. I'll be right back." And then you talk to them.
3. How have you designed it? What kind of flow do you have? Basically, at your welcome table, everyone's coming to it. People are being directed there. You told them to come online in that video maybe. And then as people come, you're introducing the newcomers to the other newcomers that day. That's one of the most powerful things you can do.
I do that on Sundays. I'm just floating around. I see a newcomer, and when I see another newcomer, it's kind of like I'm forming a chain of people. I'll say, "Oh, there's someone over there I haven't met yet. You might want to come with me and meet them, and then we can keep talking." And so I take the newcomer and we walk over to another newcomer and do quick intros, continue the conversation, and then I see another newcomer. I'm like, "Oh, let's all go walk over to the other newcomer." And all of a sudden there's three of them talking.
Then when the next newcomer is spotted, I say, "Oh, I see someone I want to go say hi to. I'll be right back." And I leave them talking and they start talking. And what have I done? I've made this little tiny mini small group where what's happening? Connection, conversation.
What I always encourage people to do is ask people to share the story of how they came to be there. Just tell us a little bit about yourself, but try and get people talking to each other. So imagine if as people are coming to your congregation, forget any bigger programming, you're just actually bringing them to your welcome table. Inspiring them to go there and connecting them with people sitting or standing nearby. I think sitting is good. Having a table, if you have the space, is great.
Recognize the simplicity of that. As people come into your congregation, you are actually facilitating them meeting other newcomers to the point where by the time they leave, they're already known, they've shared their story, they've heard the story of a few other people, and they have a sense that when they come back they're going to be known.
I find that if you connect, say, three or four people, the next week they come back and talk to those people and it's almost like an informal newcomer class that starts navigating congregational life together.
Another option, and these are just some very simple things you can do separate from regular classic things like a monthly "Meet the Minister" or the leaders and a little Q&A after the service. Another thing is having just regular newcomer classes, but in terms of simplicity, optimize using your welcome table to take the newcomers in and connect them together. That's powerful.
And then before the service, say a half hour before the service, have people gather. They can RSVP for this if you want on that page for a tour and Q&A. And then after you do that, kind of like a walking tour of your facility and just talking about programs, answering questions, you've told them that with whatever time is left between the tour and the service, there's coffee and some refreshments.
So the people go on the tour, and then maybe it's quarter to, they get to sit and talk to each other with coffee or whatever in your fellowship space and know that they can, if they want to, go to the service together. And so you've oriented them to the congregation, answered some questions, and in like 15 minutes, they keep it real short, you just connect the newcomers, which is powerful, as I said. You've got them oriented and they have people potentially to go to the service with. Amazing.
So those are just two super simple ideas. If you have things that you're doing to rapidly connect newcomers in terms of like, I'm thinking what can you do every single time you gather for your services? How do you get those newcomers to connect? What do you do?
The more we can do that, just be like one shot, boom, they show up, we're connecting them, the better. And yeah, I think we really need to take charge of connecting people. So I think it's helpful to think of the process of getting connected with people in the congregation, meeting others - that used to happen organically over time. And it would happen, people would just put in the effort and it would happen.
Some people, like, I had relatives who are like, "I'm never going to a coffee hour. I can't stand it." But I think the world's changed enough that that informal connecting process doesn't happen fast enough or at all now for the majority of people. And so if we're not intentionally connecting newcomers through well-articulated spaces, agreed-upon strategies, then you don't have a strategy for connecting people. Don't assume they'll grow. Think about like snapping Legos together or something - you have to do it. You have to do it all.
All right, let's move on. I want to shift our focus to recentering on facilitating connection and conversation. A lot of our congregations have small group programs, small group ministry programs. And we have lots of programs that are very oriented towards existing members.
I come from a Unitarian Universalist tradition, and while being very open to people from different backgrounds and traditions, a lot of the names that I see congregations giving their small group programs are really insider language, like "Chalice Circle" or "Covenant Groups." Yeah, that for someone who is new and maybe not oriented towards religion, that is such a barrier.
So first, I think that in today's world where people are hungry for connection and community, the top name that we can use includes "Community Group." So if you're a First Parish Whatever, you might have your small group ministry or whatever the official program name is, you might say "Our groups are called Such-and-Such Community Groups" so that you're really trying to emphasize that everyone in our congregation, all of our members and friends, we want to organize in community and we encourage people to participate, maybe not all the time, but regularly, connecting with our community group program.
And you do the exact same thing as in small group ministry, but you're not using such religious language. You just talk about community groups. Now, there are so many people who want connection, meaning, to be part of collective action, but are not necessarily looking for a congregation or don't realize that congregational life would be of interest to them.
What I think we need to be doing more of - and I'm going to work on resources related to this, I'm going to set up one of our upcoming live streams (I'm trying to get back into the weekly live stream routine for this month and into the fall) - one of the upcoming ones will be dedicated to the concept or approach of using community experiences hosted in your congregation.
Here's the vision I have: Having an event on timely topics. It could be pop cultural things that are happening. It could be classic challenges that your congregation is working on, whether it's gun violence or dealing with political division or aspects of the exploration that you're doing as a congregation. But whatever the topics are, we are taking topics of interest to the larger community and publicizing an event, inviting people to come in for a community group-oriented event.
In the event, it's not programs and speakers and panelists, which we have so many of, but you structure the event - and I'm working on a guide for this - where you invite people in. There's a gathering opening where you welcome people, highlight the need for connection, community, and working together to engage with the issues of our time, from climate change to what artificial intelligence is going to do to humanity and our civilization, to maybe pop culture things like, hey, the Barbie movie, whatever it is. Speak to some of the issues.
But then you move people into small groups where you have just a focused conversation using a clear structure, which is very similar perhaps to your ongoing member-focused community group program or small group ministry. But basically, we're having small groups for your entire community happening in community experience events focused on a theme, and you can invite people in.
So if you think about it, you take what are the things that you know your community is actively attending to or is interested in. Or maybe it's just, you know, you want to grow your congregation and you have a really strong young family core - pretty small, but they all love sci-fi. And so you're going to do some kind of science fiction focused or maybe it's an artificial intelligence focused event open to the whole community.
You're bringing people in with the intention (and this has been articulated) of having people connect with others in the community, discuss that topical issue, make some new friends. That's it. Done. You're not trying to force them to "join our church, join our church, get involved in this other program," but we start using more. We're starting to facilitate the connection, meaning, action process for our larger community by inviting people in on focused themes that we know the larger community cares about.
So I think the more we can start developing a practice of doing this - and I'm going to start identifying congregations where I can help do this and do different testing and experimenting. Or if you're interested in what I share, when we do that live stream, let me know. Maybe I can help you fine-tune your process, answer questions.
We have people coming through the congregation on these community experience events where it's a great community group process, and then the people who are like - and you can certainly explain why it is that you care about that issue. And if you have community groups and if in all the community groups, there's a member of your congregation, then at the end people are like, "This was so great. I wish we could keep talking or meeting like this." And they're like, "Well, we have our small group program. You should join it." Like, "Oh, OK, let's do it."
So having a community group focused event that you periodically, in a strategic way, offer makes you a service to your congregation. I mean, a service to your larger community. It's totally in line with what your congregation is about. If you're doing theme-based ministries, you can tie in with that. And that's the type of event, because it's a community-wide invitation, you could partner with other congregations, other nonprofits, you could have a little table fair if you wanted. And it's a great way to get news coverage with very little preparation.
In conjunction with that, I'm working on taking the small group models that I've worked with for years within congregations and making that just a model that anyone can use for community groups anywhere. So I'm calling that the Decentralized Community Project, giving away my best insight on how humans can connect in community groups for free.
Why am I, someone who cares so much about congregational life, thinking about how do we connect the larger community in community groups, and how do I give away a formula template so that anyone can have connection and community wherever they are?
Well, for me, it comes down to mission. If our mission is to promote - or a core aspect of our mission as congregations is to promote connection and meaning and inspire collective action on the issues of our time, work for justice, more compassion, to unify our broken world - to limit that to "we're going to do that with people who are existing members" is a very small vision.
But if we expand that like, "We're going to invite people in regularly, maybe it's quarterly, for community experiences using the community group model," then all of a sudden we can get more people cycling through our congregation in relationship with each other.
People always used to say, "Oh, we need to go get to know our neighbors and invite them to church." Well, I think it's easier to invite people to run a community experience on something that's really exciting and get all your members to share it on their social media networks and invite their friends. But you're designing something that's an awesome single-shot event that's relational.
And then by giving away the model for how we connect in small groups in a decentralized, nonhierarchical way, we're teaching humans hopefully how to stay in relationship beyond social media. We need to reconnect. And I want anyone on Earth who wants to connect with other humans to have a proven way of doing that.
The more people know it, the more it means it takes energy to organize a small group. So you get people excited about meeting in groups by giving away the decentralized community approach. Well, a lot of people are going to think about that but then not organize their own group, but then they see, "Oh, here are community experiences using essentially the same kind of community group model." They can go to that.
If we do it really well - and this is not to be like we want to turn everyone into a member of your congregation - but the more we get people oriented towards the need for connection and community, that we have a clear model for how to do that, we're helping the larger community do that and we have ongoing programs.
I think that's a very strategic, community-focused, community group focused, practical model that we can really get laser focused on, and it's relational. And for me, the most important thing - and I want to end here - is that people continue to show up in congregations when their friends are in the congregation. The number one thing you can do to grow your congregation: connect people in authentic relationships, have them share their stories, have them talk about the things that you're talking about in services.
The more we can do that, you know, just so we get to a more focused relational group very quickly, the better.
Thank you for being here, and I'll talk to you all very soon!
* End Note: This transcript is a cleaned-up version of the live stream auto-generated transcript, prepared with the much appreciated assistance of Claude AI. The content maintains the authenticity and energy of Peter Bowden's original presentation while optimizing it for readability. This collaboration between human insight and AI processing aims to make these valuable strategies for congregational growth and community building more accessible to leaders and members alike. Thank you for your dedication to this important work. Together, we can help congregations thrive in our rapidly changing world! - Claude
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