Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Luke McElroy. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Luke, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.

At SALT Community, we have an annual conference every year, where many in our community gather and hear from inspiring creative speakers, learn from masterclass teachers in workshops and pre-conference environments, and get to be immersed in a creative atmosphere of innovative ideas, products and inspiration. We strongly believe that Inspiration breeds Inspiration and creatives must be immersed in ideas that evoke Awe + Wonder so we may have the ability to see a new way or unlock a new idea. That’s what makes us a bit different. In the world of Creative Conferences for church leaders or church creative/technical teams, it’s almost always so “low cost” that they cut out all the necessary elements that create environments where creativity is a natural byproduct. I’m proud of our team’s most recent event in October. We had 10 unique experiences to inspire new ideas. Some were interactive, some were immersive. Some were technically, and some were not. It’s a cost, no doubt.. and prevents us from being competitive (price-wise) with almost any similar conference in our space, but we believe in practicing what we preach.

Luke, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I grew up in the church, and when I was in elementary school, the choir director invited me to run lights for our church “youth musical” (are those still around?). This unlocked something for me. The idea that technology (specifically lighting for this event) could affect the atmosphere of worship. What followed in the years to come was a passion and pursuit of the role that creativity and technology can play in the local church.

As I embarked on that journey, I discovered there is a lot of research around the role of color and emotions, the use of fonts/textures/white space to communicate and provide freedom (in relation to lyrics or slide design). There was a lot to learn about design styles, history of design, etc. And even more, I was astounded by what the Bible said about creativity in the worship space. (Read Exodus 34-40 and notice the intentional use of color, texture, specific material, etc). Creativity is the first characteristic we see of God in scripture, and the idea of making, made, creating or created appears in 60 of the 66 books of the Bible. It’s important to God, and therefore important for us as local church creatives and technicians to craft environments with excellence.

So today, our small and nimble team, has monthly webinars, an online learning community (SaltUniversity.com), a podcast (that’s just now launching) and an annual conference. Our hope and intent is to Inspire, equip and connect the creative society of the local church.

It’s true that there’s a multitude of training for technical and creative communities, but the ability to come to an event and actually connect with other attendees may be what I’m most proud of. We have heard story upon story that people who come to our annual conference feel like it’s a “gathering of their tribe” or as one attendee said: “I finally found my people at SALT Conference!”.

Every year we try to help foster environments where you can connect with like-minded individuals and build deep and lasting relationships across the nation/globe with people who do what you do at other churches. This has proven monumental because of one attendee’s story – Katie.

She met a group of attendees in 2019 through an environment we call “forums”. In this forum, they traded phone numbers and started a group text thread. Only months later did covid prevent in-person gatherings, and she claims it was that specific group of people who helped walk her step-by-step in getting a live stream up and running the next week. Thanks to those connections, her church as able to continue to meet during Covid.

Have you ever had to pivot?

For anyone in the live gatherings space, 2020 was not our favorite year. Lucky for us our annual event is in the fall. This means we had ample time to plan a virtual gathering. However we couldn’t plan too early as the initial reports coming out were saying we’d be “back to normal in a few weeks or months”. However we ended up pulling off an amazing virtual event that our team is really proud of presenting to our community.

In a matter of 3-4 moths, we connected with every single current registrant and encouraged them to stick with us for a virtual conference. We took some serious risk with some high-profile speakers for our main sessions (since it was virtual and we wouldn’t have to fly everyone in). We chose to do a live Q&A with every single one of our 45+ workshops (in real-time). A feat that was not technologically as easy as we thought.

And finally, we were able to role out a high-tech Unreal Engine virtual set design for our main stage (this is the same technology that drives the LED walls for Disney’s “The Mandalorian” with real time manipulation, camera tracking, etc). And in a year where we couldn’t be in-person, we were still able to create that “immersive environment” that hopefully breed inspiration again.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

From day one, we’ve always been committed to making our core conversation be: “Creativity and technology in the local church.” When you serve a creative audience, there is often pressure to venture into social issues (politics), and we’ve resisted this at every level. Once it meant we had to turn down an offer for a very high profile speaker to participate because they wanted to communicate a recent idea that felt like it stepped over the line of avoiding political discussions.

When you serve a faith-based audience, there’s often pressure to venture into theological issues (aka the subtle differences between protestant faith’s). We’ve (mostly) avoided this as well, by making sure that the Name of Jesus Christ is our primary goal, not the advancement of the differences of our faith or denominational uniquenesses.

This hasn’t been easy, but our hope is to have a conversation that centers around the role of creativity and technology in the local church, and we never want to isolate or alienate any side-belief that may associate itself with our community.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://saltcommunity.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/salt_community/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theSALTCommunity/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SALTNashville