Nelson Bowen is the Lead Pastor of iNgage Community Church. He was born in Fayetteville, NC in 1989, but raised in the Greater Washington, D.C. area. From an early age, Nelson’s mother began raising him in the church, which earned him the nickname Bishop by the age of 7.
By the age of 11, Nelson’s mother remarried and this proved to be difficult for him to handle. He was eventually expelled from his Christian school and faced a crossroad internally on the kind of life he wanted to live. Nelson spent his senior year in high school devoting his life to Christ, choosing not to play basketball, and devoting that time to learning the word of God on a deeper level.
Nelson graduated from high school in 2007 and enrolled at Salisbury University where he began a bible study. During his freshman year in college, while seeing hundreds of students gather for his study, he was convinced he wanted to be used by God to impact an entire generation. He realized he was spending more time preparing a message than he was studying for a midterm. After two years at Salisbury, Nelson moved to St. Louis to intern at Joyce Meyer Ministries and enroll at Pillsbury College and Seminary. Over the next 6 years Nelson began speaking to churches, youth groups and conferences. Yet, there was a deep desire inside of him to see the community where he went to high school impacted by the love of God.
In 2014, God began to speak to Nelson about the community of Waldorf and shared a vision of leading a community church where people could grow, lives could be transformed, and the community directly impacted. With this vision, Nelson quit his job in October 2014 to devote himself fully to the vision of iNgage. He spent the next two years assembling a team that shared the same conviction in seeing a generation healed and a city changed through the hope of Jesus Christ. One of those team members happened to be Archelle Harrison, whose last name changed to Bowen on July 30, 2015.
