The Monochrome

Most church lighting operators run the same handful of looks every Sunday - usually off one or two faders, hoping nobody notices. In this episode, David Henry - lighting educator with over 60,000 YouTube subscribers - walks through two of the most underused features inside the Obsidian Onyx system: Dylos pixel mapping and the cue blender. Pixel mapping lets you drive video content and patterns acr...

Three weeks out from SALT 2026 and a key crew member just dropped out. Luke, Katelyn, and founding team member Joe Angel sit down to talk about what really happens behind the scenes of a conference - the moments that shake you and remind you that none of this was yours to control anyway. They also unpack the heart behind this year's theme, How Great Thou Art, why art itself is getting a seat at th...

Most team conflict isn't a people problem - it's a clarity problem. In this episode, Madi Weubben - Promotions Director at Brentwood Baptist - shares the practical protections every leader should build into the front end of a project to prevent unclear expectations from becoming team blowups. From her love, like, and hate task audit to setting revision caps before a project ever starts, this is th...

Dwan Hill grew up between two worlds - Birkenstocks and FUBU, a rock blues tour with Jonny Lang and a gospel stage with CeCe Winans. For years he felt like the one thing that wasn't like the others. In this episode, pulled from the SALT Conference main stage, the 3x Grammy winner, 2x Dove Award recipient, and founder of The Choir Room in Nashville shares how God used every mismatched piece of his...

Most volunteers know how to push faders. Very few get taught how to actually route and process a channel - and that gap is the difference between a mix that works and a mix that moves people. In this bonus episode, Jeremy Van Valkenberg - formerly of Transformation Church, now leading production at Crosspoint Church in Nashville - walks through the Yamaha DM7 channel strip from top to bottom. Dyna...

Most church websites are built backwards. They look great but send visitors in circles - no clear location, confusing navigation, and zero strategy for moving someone from curious to connected. In this episode, Luke and Katelyn pull from one of SALT's conference workshops on UX, UI, and web strategy built specifically for churches. From building a site map and wireframe before you ever touch desig...

If you opened last week's calendar right now, would it reflect what you say matters most? In this bonus episode, Phil Bowdle - creative arts pastor and ministry coach - walks through six diagnostic questions designed to expose what's actually happening in your week before you try to fix any of it. From what's stealing your time to whether you're protecting Sabbath the way you say you believe in it...

Rick Rekedal spent decades at DreamWorks Animation helping build some of the most beloved franchises in entertainment history - How to Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda, Trolls. In this episode, we pull back the curtain on one of the most talked-about masterclasses from the SALT Conference: Rick's Story Adoption Engine. His thesis: churches aren't losing people because of bad programs or poor produ...

Chad Vegas - former film director at Transformation Church, now with Sony - breaks down the exact framework he used to train camera operators at Bethel, Transformation, and beyond. In this bonus episode pulled from the SALT Community course library, Chad walks through his Chad Sandbox: seven rules that turn a volunteer with a camera into a cinematic storyteller. From matching your camera movement...

Brady Sticker, founder of Church Candy, introduced a framework that stopped Luke and Katelyn mid-conversation - and this episode picks up right where that left off. If 8 out of 10 first-time visitors never come back to your church, the problem probably isn't your Sunday service. It's everything before and after it. Luke and Katelyn dig into the real tools churches are underusing right now - from C...

Most worship leaders would say their first responsibility is to lead the congregation. David Dennis - worship leader and staff culture architect at The Belonging Co. in Nashville - says that's exactly backwards. In this episode, we pull a full lesson from his course inside SALT Community where he unpacks what he calls priestly worship: why the 15 minutes before service may matter more than the ser...

Two church tech directors. Shared parking lot. Never met. That story alone says everything about where the church production world is right now. Toby Walters - founder of Church Gear and author of Sacred Spaces, Modern Production - sits down with Luke to talk about why churches have largely stopped innovating, what a 13-year-old lighting volunteer and a Grammy-nominated tour director have in commo...

Most church creatives won't admit it out loud - but there are days when the work feels like anything but a calling. The deadlines pile up, the revisions feel endless, and somewhere between the last sermon series and the next one, the inspiration quietly disappeared. In this episode, Carrie Loomis, lead graphic designer at New Vision Church in Nashville, gets honest about what creative burnout actu...

17% of Americans say they have zero friends. 56% of unchurched people say they'd come to church if someone they knew just invited them. So why aren't we asking? Luke and Katelyn unpack a conversation with Miles McPherson - senior pastor of Rock Church San Diego and former NFL player - about what it actually looks like for the church to be the safest place for a non-believer. Plus: why the producti...

Every church creative team has talent. So why do some teams execute consistently and others stay stuck in the same loop week after week? In this bonus episode, Darrel Girardier - Executive Director of Ministry at Brentwood Baptist - breaks down the four types of creatives that show up on every church team and what happens when your mix is off. Too many drivers and nobody questions the direction. T...

Accountability and church hurt are not the same thing - but in a culture that has blurred the line between the two, how do you actually tell the difference? Luke and Katelyn sit down to unpack a conversation with author and speaker Natalie Runion, digging into what healthy accountability structures look like, why so many churches have none, and what it costs a team when leaders stop doing the hard...

AI tools can now generate a finished image, a voiceover, or a full music bed in under a minute. But knowing how to use them without losing your creative judgment is a different skill entirely. In this bonus episode, creative director and AI coach Brad Zimmerman walks through his real-world workflow for image generation, AI audio, voiceovers, and video tools - showing exactly how he uses Midjourney...

Wade Joye spent nearly 15 years as the worship pastor at Elevation Church - one of the most prolific worship environments in the world. In this conversation, he shares the moment Pastor Steven Furtick told him directly that he had a lid on his gifting, and that his real calling wasn't to be a worship leader; it was to build them. What followed was years of wrestling with identity, ego, and the que...

Most church leaders have said it at some point: "Failure is not an option." Leadership coach Dr. Andrew Johnston - who has worked with Apple, Walgreens, and the Salvation Army - argues that phrase might be the most damaging thing you can say to a creative team. In this bonus episode, he unpacks Google's Project Aristotle and what it reveals about the one condition that separates high-performing te...

What if beauty isn't the last thing you add to your church - it's the first? In this episode, Luke and Katelyn sit down to unpack a conversation with Cass Langton, former creative director at Hillsong, about what the church loses when it trades transcendence for function. From a songbird carved into cathedral rafters that no one was ever meant to see, to a girl in Beijing who painted the gospel an...

In this bonus episode, Luke sits down with John Mark Clark and Davi Lema from Orange Thread Live for a roundtable on the standout tech they encountered at InfoComm this year. From AI-driven audio cleanup tools that strip out everything but a clean vocal signal, to a transparent LED wall that nearly disappears on camera, to a programming platform that could have saved a past SALT Conference team do...

Darrel Girardier, Executive Director of Ministry Resources at Brentwood Baptist Church, joins the podcast for a candid conversation about one of the most uncomfortable questions in church leadership: how do you actually measure whether your staff is effective, not just busy? From leading indicators and lagging indicators to managing Gen Z employees who've never had to structure their own workday,...

AI is advancing faster than most of us can keep up with, but this episode makes the case that your creative instincts and eye for excellence are more valuable now than ever. Luke and Katelyn break down why the one thing AI can't replace is your ability to define and articulate quality, and how church creatives actually have a unique superpower in the age of AI. Whether you're a daily AI user or st...

Australian singer and worship leader Bella Taylor Smith - who gained recognition on The Voice Australia and led worship at SALT 2025 - sits down to talk about what it's really like to write songs when you feel spiritually dry, how to navigate creative collaboration, and the 3 D's that shape her songwriting process. The conversation expands into a deeper discussion about why busyness is the greates...

Andy Erwin, director of I Can Only Imagine 2 , joins the podcast for a behind-the-scenes conversation about what it takes to make a sequel better than the original — including filming at Red Rocks with only 6 hours and 8,500 fans. But the conversation goes deeper than filmmaking: Andy shares why he intentionally casts non-Christians in his films and how both the product and the process can be vehi...