On October 10, we celebrated the one-year anniversary of The Allender Center Podcast, a weekly feature in which Dr. Dan Allender engages the issues that are at the heart of the work of The Allender Center. When we launched the podcast last year, our desire was to offer weekly, 20-minute glimpses into The Allender Center’s ongoing work of wrestling with the reality of trauma and the hope of restoration at the unique intersection of theology and psychology.
In the last year, the podcast has been downloaded 164,000 times by people in all 50 states and 113 countries. In March, our monthly audience more than doubled as Dan began a series on Trauma and the Church, and we’ve averaged about 18,000 downloads per month ever since. That’s around 4,000 downloads per episode—compared to the industry-wide average of 140-200 downloads per episode.
The highest number of single-day downloads came on April 27, right at the beginning of our four-part Endings series. After Endings, we shared a series in which Dan explores the most common questions he hears regarding story work, and the two series combined for the podcast’s busiest month yet: 19,690 downloads.
“The themes Dan explores on the podcast are crucial to how we live in the world, getting at the very heart of God’s ongoing work of restoration,” says Cathy Loerzel, Executive Director of The Allender Center and Vice President of Advancement at The Seattle School. “We are honored to join so many people in these conversations each week.”
If you’re not a regular listener yet, it’s not too late. Actually, you’re just in time for another milestone, as Dan’s wife, Becky Allender (a regular contributor to this blog), is joining him for a six-part series on Marriage: Leaving, Cleaving, and Weaving—Part Two of that series, which aired last weekend, marked our 50th episode. And if you decide you want to catch up on some of what you missed, here are the five most downloaded episodes so far:
If you have a favorite episode, or you would like to share about how The Allender Center Podcast has impacted you, we would love to hear it—email your story to The Seattle School’s Content Coordinator, Beau Denton, at bdenton@theseattleschool.edu.
We have been honored by the response this last year and by the opportunity to partner with so many of you in the courageous work of wrestling with your stories, engaging the effects of trauma, and pursuing the hope of restoration. Thank you for listening—and here’s to Year Two.