Salt
Virtual
Wherever you’re watching from, you’re part of this room. SALT is where the creatives of the Church gather to lay down our striving and tune our hearts to grace. Bring your team, pull up a chair, and let’s behold the wonder of our God together.
Every main session and workshop streams live from Dallas, October 14-16, with replays open for 60 days.
All times Central.
Main
Sessions
Soundcheck: Building Consistent Systems and Trust Between Teams
Soundcheck is usually the most rushed, most tense part of the production timeline, and it doesn’t have to be. This session breaks down how to run a soundcheck that’s quick, calm, and consistent, so your tech and worship teams feel supported walking into service with confidence instead of scrambling.
Church Communications Survival Guide
Phil Bowdle
Hacks, Shortcuts, and Time-Savers for When You’re Drowning
Church communications can feel like an impossible job. The asks never stop, the timelines are never long enough, and everything is supposed to look amazing… yesterday. But here’s the truth: this ministry area touches everything your church does, so getting it right means you’re not just keeping up, you’re amplifying the mission. In this workshop, you’ll walk away with real hacks, shortcuts, and time-savers, the practical stuff that helps you get it all done and communicate with excellence, without running yourself into the ground.
AI Automation & Logic: Building Custom Systems That Actually Work for Your Team
Darrel Girardier
Most AI training teaches you to sit down and work with the tool. And if we’re being honest, that’s how many churches use AI today. This session flips the script as we’re sharing custom automations and decision logic that now run quietly behind the scenes of a church team’s daily work, from internal workflows to how they personalize communication with their congregation. You’ll see what was actually built: the systems, the logic behind the decisions, and what broke before it worked. You’ll leave with a real blueprint for building AI tools your team can actually rely on.
LED Walls 101: How to find the Right Screen for Your Ministry
Stephen Brokalis
LED Screens can be a powerful tool for worship environments, broadcast, and creative storytelling, but finding the right system can feel overwhelming if you are new to the technology. This session will break down the key specifications, terminology, and practical considerations churches should understand before investing in LED.
Navigating Church Tech Leadership: 10 Mistakes We Should Never Make
Dennis Choy
Church production may not be the most important ministry in the church, but it might be the hardest. Every weekend, tech leaders are expected to deliver excellence, solve impossible problems, lead volunteers, manage expectations, and somehow stay spiritually healthy in the process. Drawing from over 30 years of ministry experience, Dennis Choy shares practical lessons, painful mistakes, and hard-earned wisdom to help church tech leaders avoid common traps, build healthier teams, and remember why God called them to this work in the first place.
Building a Design Pipeline: From Design to Final Destination
Brad Zimmerman
It’s Monday morning. The sermon graphic and notes that looked great on Sunday’s screens now need to become an Instagram post, a lower third, a YouTube thumbnail, and an email header. If you’ve ever spent hours rebuilding the same design four different ways, or been handed a graphic from another ministry and asked to “”make it work”” everywhere, this workshop is for you.
Purpose, Pressure, and the Inner Life of a Worship Leader
Brian Taylor
Leadership has a public side and a private side. For worship leaders, the public side gets a lot of attention. The private side determines what you bring to it and how long you’ll last. Purpose is what gets you started. Your inner life is what keeps you going. Whether you’re coming back from a hard season or running well and trying to keep it that way, the work is the same. This session will help you develop a foundation that holds up under the weight of leadership and deal with the pressure that will try to erode it.
Session
A
Thursday at 11:00 AM
Soundcheck: Building Consistent Systems and Trust Between Teams
Soundcheck is usually the most rushed, most tense part of the production timeline, and it doesn’t have to be. This session breaks down how to run a soundcheck that’s quick, calm, and consistent, so your tech and worship teams feel supported walking into service with confidence instead of scrambling.
Church Communications Survival Guide
Phil Bowdle
Hacks, Shortcuts, and Time-Savers for When You’re Drowning
Church communications can feel like an impossible job. The asks never stop, the timelines are never long enough, and everything is supposed to look amazing… yesterday. But here’s the truth: this ministry area touches everything your church does, so getting it right means you’re not just keeping up, you’re amplifying the mission. In this workshop, you’ll walk away with real hacks, shortcuts, and time-savers, the practical stuff that helps you get it all done and communicate with excellence, without running yourself into the ground.
AI Automation & Logic: Building Custom Systems That Actually Work for Your Team
Darrel Girardier
Most AI training teaches you to sit down and work with the tool. And if we’re being honest, that’s how many churches use AI today. This session flips the script as we’re sharing custom automations and decision logic that now run quietly behind the scenes of a church team’s daily work, from internal workflows to how they personalize communication with their congregation. You’ll see what was actually built: the systems, the logic behind the decisions, and what broke before it worked. You’ll leave with a real blueprint for building AI tools your team can actually rely on.
LED Walls 101: How to find the Right Screen for Your Ministry
Stephen Brokalis
LED Screens can be a powerful tool for worship environments, broadcast, and creative storytelling, but finding the right system can feel overwhelming if you are new to the technology. This session will break down the key specifications, terminology, and practical considerations churches should understand before investing in LED.
Navigating Church Tech Leadership: 10 Mistakes We Should Never Make
Dennis Choy
Church production may not be the most important ministry in the church, but it might be the hardest. Every weekend, tech leaders are expected to deliver excellence, solve impossible problems, lead volunteers, manage expectations, and somehow stay spiritually healthy in the process. Drawing from over 30 years of ministry experience, Dennis Choy shares practical lessons, painful mistakes, and hard-earned wisdom to help church tech leaders avoid common traps, build healthier teams, and remember why God called them to this work in the first place.
Building a Design Pipeline: From Design to Final Destination
Brad Zimmerman
It’s Monday morning. The sermon graphic and notes that looked great on Sunday’s screens now need to become an Instagram post, a lower third, a YouTube thumbnail, and an email header. If you’ve ever spent hours rebuilding the same design four different ways, or been handed a graphic from another ministry and asked to “”make it work”” everywhere, this workshop is for you.
Purpose, Pressure, and the Inner Life of a Worship Leader
Brian Taylor
Leadership has a public side and a private side. For worship leaders, the public side gets a lot of attention. The private side determines what you bring to it and how long you’ll last. Purpose is what gets you started. Your inner life is what keeps you going. Whether you’re coming back from a hard season or running well and trying to keep it that way, the work is the same. This session will help you develop a foundation that holds up under the weight of leadership and deal with the pressure that will try to erode it.
Session
B
Thursday at 1:30 PM
Console Design to Set Your Engineers Up for Success
Sam Naifeh
Is consistency the enemy of creativity? It doesn’t have to be. We’ll explore the decisions behind building a console file that scales. We’ll look under the hood at workflow, routing, group processing, gain staging, and other mixing techniques through the lens of consistency, flexibility, and maintainability. The goal isn’t to build the same mix everywhere, but to build a scalable system that enables every engineer on your team, regardless of experience level, to deliver a compelling one.
Becoming a Bridge: Forging Trust Across Ministry Teams
Alexis Leon
Every ministry team has its own priorities, pressures, and way of seeing the world. The problem isn’t that those perspectives are wrong. The problem is that we often expect everyone else to think and operate the way we do. When that happens, communication gets messy, frustration grows, and teams start pulling in different directions.
60 Second Storytelling
Ashton Tucker
If you’ve ever wondered why some social media videos grab attention while others are quickly swiped away, this session is for you. 60-Second Storytelling is designed for anyone using social media to share a message that matters. Discover a simple storytelling framework that will help you create engaging short-form videos that stop the scroll, connect with your audience, and inspire action.
Crafting Documentaries That Inspire Change
Patrick Clark
Many ministry films are forgotten within minutes. The stories that stay with people are the ones that make them feel something real.
In this workshop, you will learn how to craft documentaries that move beyond information and create genuine emotional connection, clarity, and action. Through a real-world case study of an award-winning documentary created inside our church, we will break down the entire storytelling process from discovering the right story to building tension, capturing authentic moments, shaping emotional impact, and guiding viewers toward meaningful response.
This is not just theory. Throughout the session, you will both hear the strategy behind effective documentary storytelling and see it in action through film clips, visual breakdowns, and behind-the-scenes examples woven directly into the teaching.
Whether you are creating films for generosity initiatives, vision campaigns, testimonies, outreach, or ministry storytelling, this workshop will give you a practical framework for creating honest, compelling documentaries that resonate deeply and inspire change.
The 4D Creative Process
Dustin Pead
An in-depth exploration of the four-dimensional creative process: DEFINE, DREAM, DESIGN, DEVELOP. Participants will learn how to move projects through each phase with intention and excellence, while maintaining team engagement and creative quality. The session includes real-world applications and troubleshooting strategies.
Cut the Noise
Mark MacDonald
Churches today are flooded with messages, graphics, and posts—and your congregation is feeling it. This session shows you how to simplify your communication so every email, social post, and announcement lands with clarity. Walk away with practical tools to cut the clutter, focus on what matters, and make sure your people actually hear what you’re trying to say.
Session
C
Thursday at 4:00 PM
The 7 Building Blocks: A Better System for Church Communication
Brady Shearer
For church communicators buried in last-minute promotion requests, overloaded Sunday announcements, and ministries competing for attention. For teams tired of rebuilding communications every week and deciding what gets promoted based on who asks loudest. The 7 Building Blocks gives your church a repeatable system for eliminating the chaos, the politics, and the guesswork. In this workshop, you’ll learn the complete framework and how to put it into practice at your church.
Fix It In Post (And When You Can’t)
Josiah Lightle
For anyone with a hand in production, whether camera, directing, producing, or editing, this session covers what post can genuinely rescue from a locked edit, and what it can’t. Working live in DaVinci Resolve, it walks through real rescue scenarios: planned fixes decided on set, mistakes that happen mid-shoot, and mistakes nobody controls, like a live award show with one take and no reset.
It covers the cheapest fix first, from reframing to patching to masking to full paint. It also looks at where AI genuinely helps versus where it can’t be trusted, and closes with color correction as a tool for directing the eye rather than prettifying the frame. Almost everything is fixable, but the real question is always what it costs.
How to Launch and Grow a Podcast
Isaac Harris
If you’ve ever wanted to launch and grow a podcast, this workshop is for you. Maybe you have the idea and direction, but don’t know where to start. Maybe you’ve launched a podcast already, but have been discouraged by the lack of growth. Podcasting can be exciting, fulfilling, and rewarding. It can also be overwhelming, discouraging, and stagnant. Let’s talk through that together.
Lighting for Two Audiences
Bryan Bailey
Do you struggle with creating lighting designs that look great in the room AND on video? Many times, we create a lighting look that translates well on camera, but looks really odd in the room. Or, our in-room experience feels great, but the camera doesn’t see it the same way. In this session, we will talk about how to design for both audiences without needlessly compromising the creative integrity of either environment.
More Than A Role: Building Production Teams Where People Belong
Willow Hodge
Every church wants excellent production, but excellence doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when people are given a place to belong, a safe environment to grow, and the tools they need to succeed. Whether you’re welcoming brand-new volunteers or developing seasoned team members, this workshop will explore how to create intentional training processes while cultivating a culture where people of all ages and skill levels feel seen, valued, and empowered. Learn how to build more than just technically capable teams and build a ministry where people can grow spiritually, socially, and in excellence as they pursue a shared mission together.
The 5 Love Languages of Worship
Johnny Burkhalter
Worship isn’t just music. It’s a language. Someone once said, “Worship is a language, and we are teaching people how to speak.” Just like learning Spanish, you don’t become fluent overnight. You learn words. You practice. You immerse yourself. In the same way, worship is how we express our love to God. Jesus gives us the foundation in Matthew 22:37 (NKJV): “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” The greatest commandment isn’t simply obedience, it’s love. And love always expresses itself.
Using the framework of the Five Love Languages, this workshop explores how worship becomes an expression of loving God in multiple ways:
Words of Affirmation Praise, thanksgiving, declaring who He is (Hebrews 13:15)
Quality Time – Drawing near in prayer and presence (James 4:8)
Acts of Service – Living obedient, surrendered lives (Romans 12:1)
Receiving Gifts – Offering generosity, sacrifice, and honor
Physical Expression – Kneeling, lifting hands, bowing in reverence
All of it flows from loving God with everything.
From Tune-Out to Lean-In: Building Announcements People Don’t Ignore
Makenzie Merrifield
If announcements feel like background noise, it’s time to rethink the strategy behind them. This workshop will help you create a simple, intentional system for communication that keeps people engaged and paying attention. You’ll learn how to decide what gets stage time, what goes digital, and how to make every message count.
Session
D
Friday at 11:00 AM
Building a Songwriting Culture In Your Church
Stephen Brewster
Original songwriting doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when a church builds the environment, processes, and rhythms that make it possible. This session covers what it actually takes to make songwriting a normal, ongoing part of your church rather than a one-off event.
Rebranding with Purpose: Aligning Identity, Message, and Mission
Mallory Nall
A rebrand is more than a new logo. It’s an opportunity to clarify vision, strengthen communication, and create alignment across an entire organization. In this session, we’ll walk through Brentwood Baptist Church’s visual rebranding journey. From defining the meaning behind colors, messaging, and tone to navigating feedback and revisions with key stakeholders, you’ll gain an inside look at the process from start to finish. We’ll also discuss how the final brand was implemented and adapted into ongoing ministry strategies, systems, and processes to ensure consistency moving forward.
The Creative Team Your Church ACTUALLY Needs
Phil Bowdle
Many creatives in the church are working hard, carrying pressure, and quietly wondering if it’s making a difference. Behind the graphics, videos, services, campaigns, and constant stream of requests is a deeper question: does what I do really matter? Phil’s work with churches and creative teams of all sizes have surfaced the same traps that keep teams stuck, and the same purpose that helps them move forward.
This session helps your team step back, realign, and rediscover what’s truly worth fighting for… not just as a talk, but as a practical reset your whole team can put into action.
The Work Before The Weekend
Willow Hodge
Great services don’t happen by accident. They are built through intentional systems, clear communication, and the hard work that happens long before the countdown clock starts. In this workshop, we’ll explore practical processes that help teams create seamless experiences across rooms, campuses, and online platforms. From rehearsals and checklists to simplifying workflows and empowering volunteers, you’ll learn how to do the heavy lifting during the week so your team can serve with confidence on Sunday.
Whether your church is single-site, multisite, online, or somewhere in between, this session will provide principles that can be adapted to any context.
From Busy to Better: Fixing Your Creative Workflow
Marcus Myers
There is no shortage of things competing for our attention—from to-do lists and trends to gatherings, responsibilities, and even our own desires. As a result, burnout has become an all-too-familiar reality for many creatives and leaders. But what if there was a different way? Not just finding moments of relief, but actually becoming better in our creative process, serving, and daily life.
Being busy doesn’t necessarily mean we are accomplishing what needs to be done. In many cases, busyness can pull us away from purposeful work and the things that matter most. In this workshop, we’ll explore how to recognize patterns of busyness, realign our focus, take intentional steps toward growth, and look to the life of Jesus and key biblical events as a model for moving from busy to better.
Beyond SDI: How to Deploy NDI Successfully and Prepare for ST2110
Will Chapman
This workshop will help church AVL leaders understand how the video-over-IP protocol NDI works, why it has a reputation for being “unreliable,” and how to deploy it successfully in real-world ministry environments. Through practical examples and lessons learned at Cottonwood Creek Church, attendees will discover how video over IP can reduce costs, increase flexibility, and prepare their teams for the future of broadcast technology. The session will also introduce SMPTE ST 2110 and explain why understanding NDI today is an important step toward the next generation of professional IP video workflows.
Claude for Churches: Using AI to Get Real Work Done
Brad Zimmerman
You’ve used AI to write an email or generate an image, but you know there has to be more. What if AI could clean up your entire church database, build the reports your ChMS doesn’t give you, or take a repeating task off your plate for good? This class is for the church leader, communicator, or staff member who’s ready to move past one-off prompts and start using AI as a teammate. This class will help you spend less time on a computer and more time developing and discipling people.
Session
E
Friday at 1:15 PM
Creative Church Lighting: Visually Setting the Table for Christ Encounters
Bryan Bailey
We often approach lighting design with ideas of fixture placement, color palettes, and well-crafted effects. However, in this session, we are going to look more broadly and deeply at how our design affects not only how the room feels but also how well people can connect with the Holy Spirit. We will spend time learning how to walk the fine line between visual enhancements and emotional manipulation.
Why Preproduction Is the Most Important Part of Production
Adam Erickson
Our success as filmmakers lives and dies by how much we invest in preproduction. It’s often the first phase to get cut when time is tight, but it’s the phase that makes everything after it possible. Preproduction lets us answer hard questions before we’re on set, set clear expectations with crew and leadership, and solve problems before they arise. That work frees us to focus on the creative once we’re rolling, and keeps us from having to problem-solve when we’re already stretched thin, mentally and physically. This session walks through preproduction using our Christmas and Easter productions at Seacoast Church as the case study, including moments when strong preproduction saved us from catastrophic problems on set. We’ll break down the process step by step: the tools we use, the questions we ask, and the specific benefit each step delivers.
Building a Worship Team On-Boarding Process That Develops People, Not Just Musicians
Claudia Oliver
A healthy worship ministry is built on more than musical talent—it requires intentional development of people. This workshop will provide worship leaders with practical tools for creating an audition and onboarding process that identifies, equips, and develops volunteers for long-term ministry effectiveness. Participants will learn how to evaluate both musical readiness and spiritual maturity, establish clear expectations, and create pathways for growth from the first audition through active team involvement. The goal is not simply to grow a worship team, but to develop spiritually healthy volunteers who steward their gifts well and serve with excellence.
How to Avoid Burnout: Setting Boundaries to Stay Healthy
Dennis Choy
Burnout isn’t what happens when you hate ministry. It’s what can happen when you love it so much that you slowly give away pieces of yourself you were never supposed to sacrifice. Come learn from Dennis Choy a veteran of over 30years in ministry the warning signs, practical guardrails, and biblical habits that can help you stay healthy, stay called, and stay in ministry for the long haul.
Say It Well: Communicating So Volunteers Actually Listen
Makenzie Merrifield
When you’re leading a handful or hundreds of volunteers, more communication doesn’t always mean better communication. In fact, it can quickly become noise. But what if your volunteers actually read, responded to, and even appreciated your messages? In this workshop, you’ll learn how to communicate clearly, consistently, and effectively so your team feels informed, valued, and confident without being overwhelmed. We’ll focus on how to make your communication feel relevant, purposeful, and worth paying attention to.
The 12-Month Outlook
Dustin Pead
A strategic planning workshop that helps creative leaders develop a comprehensive vision for their team’s next twelve months. Participants will learn how to balance long-term creative ambitions with short-term deliverables, while building in flexibility for emerging opportunities. The session includes practical tools for resource allocation and milestone planning.
Be Known for Something that Matters
Mark MacDonald
Programs, events, and trends come and go, but your core message is what people remember. This session teaches you how to identify the biblical truths that define your church and communicate them in a way that sticks. Walk away with a practical filter to evaluate every sermon, email, and social post so your audience remembers what really matters.
