Photo courtesy of Exponential's creative director, Don Smith (pictured third from the right.)
Worship is changing, again. From traditional worship 30 years ago, we first morphed into contemporary with upbeat music replacing hymns. Then 20 years ago, non-denominational seeker churches started cranking up the volume with rock-n-roll concert-style production. Sanctuaries took on theater seating and portable churches sprang up in schools and old movie theaters. People who had rejected the church of their youth flocked to churches that looked nothing like their grandparents’. And today it’s changing again. After decades of cranking up the volume and packing the house with moving lights, the latest shift is taking it down a notch.
Don Smith, Executive Director of Creative Ministries, Hope Community Church, Raleigh, NC
“I think culture changes, right? I would say that the thing that led us in the 90’s and 2000’s to do what we did then probably is the same motivation that would lead us to do things differently now,” explains Don Smith.
Don Smith has a lot of titles. First, he’s the executive director of creative ministries at Hope Community Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. He’s spent the last 27 years working in churches. He is also the creative director with Exponential, a church planting organization devoted to expanding faith communities. Smith has also founded an organization called StoryLabs that consults and teaches leadership teams of churches how to tell their unique story.
He says our culture has changed again and people are looking for something less “wow” and more “real.” “20 years ago, contemporary worship and the seeker church thing was more of the ‘wow, this is not your grandmother's church’ and ‘I never thought church could be like this.’ So now, there's a push to be authentic, to be genuine and true to yourself rather than trying to be a megachurch, even if you're not a megachurch.”
1 of 3
Photos courtesy of Hope Community Church, Raleigh, NC.
2 of 3
3 of 3
Today, he’s advising his team to change lighting scenes only between songs instead of several times within a song. House lights don’t drop to pitch black and rock concert volume is not the goal. Culture has changed and today, Smith says, there’s a great mistrust of manipulation. “My tension is always for it to feel more like art and less like used car salesmen. And I feel like that level of apprehension and skepticism is just higher than it used to be,’ he explains. “So, for me, if a song is communicating a feel or an emotion, because we're talking about fear or we're talking about where is God at this time and the room feels cold and empty, that's art. But if in the middle of that things start strobing and sweeping and moving around and it's, ‘whoa, check it out,’ that's used car salesman.”
Smith imagines outsiders coming into a church with their arms folded. Maybe they’ve come reluctantly. It’s the creative team’s job is to unfold those arms before the teaching pastor ever gets up.
"It’s the creative team’s job is to unfold the skeptic’s arms before the teaching pastor ever gets up."
—Don Smith, Executive Director of Creative Ministries, Hope Community Church, Raleigh, North Carolina
What churches communicate through the building, the worship, the teaching and the people needs to be authentic to them. Smith says people are wowed by authenticity. If the crowd is singing louder than the PA and people are really engaging – that’s authentic. “Authentic worship draws. Like there's something real about that. And people are like, I don't get it, but I dig it, let me see it. Now more than before that's happening. This is who God's called us to be and we want to be that.”
"…the digital side of what we do and the video storytelling that we do and how utilize social media - that's all incredibly important."
Another change is the growth of the digital church and how creative teams are keeping the online audience front of mind. Smith says church is like a highway people are on, but they're switching lanes all the time. “Sometimes they're listening to a podcast, sometimes they're coming to church, sometimes they're coming to every other week. Sometimes they're volunteering, sometimes they're not,” he says. “And so how to keep the message consistent all the way through is important. And so, the digital side of what we do and the video storytelling that we do and how we can utilize social media to do that - that's all incredibly important.”
The online competition for attention is fierce and the quality of church content is more critical than ever. Excellence remains key—but it has to be excellence with authenticity.
“It’s not that the story is being told, it's how the story is being told,” Smith explains. “I think that word manipulation is really the most important thing as people nowadays are expecting to be manipulated. And if they feel like they are, they're just going to walk. There's somebody else out there for them.”
Then added to the mistrust and fear of manipulation, is the fact that people today are coming from a point of view where nothing is true and everything is spin.
“There's no such thing as fact anymore. It's all spun fact - which makes it less factual. So now people come to church with all that in their mind and somebody's talking about an ancient book from thousands of years ago that tells a story of how that should be an authority on how I live my life and who's actually the God of the universe and what is that all about? Of course, there's a healthy level of skepticism.”
Messaging is no longer just about the message from a pastor. It’s everywhere. “Things that are different are sermon topics, songs, song selection, what songs we do and what songs that we don't do and even a little bit of with wardrobe on stage,” Smith explains. “If I can tell you're a worship leader from like halfway across the room, I'm just kind of rolling my eyes a little bit, if I’m being honest. I tell worship leaders that all the time because they pride themselves on being individualistic, but if I can tell all of your worship leaders from across the room, individuality left the room a long time ago.”
Church leaders today may have blown through a list of consultants and read a dozen books about how to grow their churches. But Smith says if you’re not doing what God has called you specifically to do, it won’t feel authentic to you or attendees. “If we do the three songs up front and we do this kind of message and wear these clothes and all the things that you did so people would come and then the weird thing is people came and then you were like, you never got to do the thing that God put inside you.”
"The only marketing that actually matters or counts is your story."
Smith believes not all churches should look and feel the same. There can’t be a formula for reaching everyone because people are different and every person’s testimony is different and God has called individuals and individual churches to reach people differently. “The only marketing that actually matters or counts is your story. I can tell you this church is awesome and that means nothing to you. I can tell you this church changed me and you can't fight that because it's my story,” he says
And that’s the mission behind Smith’s StoryLab. To help churches figure out their individual story based on what God has called them to do specifically – not just what everyone else is doing just so they can grow. “So, let's figure out what it is that God has put inside you and tell that story and be content with the fact that there's a church down the street that likely isn't going do it the way you're going to do it. And they may even attract three to four times more people than you. But that's okay because they're there and there's people that God called you to reach that would never go to that church. And together we get to become the body of Christ, not just in our one building, but the big-C Church, the first Corinthians 12 body of Christ.”
