Hype Worship is DEAD! || Carey Nieuwhof

Do Churches Still Need High-End AV? Carey Nieuwhof on Production vs. Presence

If you’ve been in church production for more than a few years, you’ve probably felt the shift happening. Walk into any production meeting lately, and there’s a tension in the air that wasn’t there five years ago. Your pastor’s talking about “authentic encounters with God” while you’re sitting there thinking about the $40,000 lighting rig you just spec’d out.

So here’s the question everyone’s asking but nobody wants to say out loud: Does that mean we need to ditch all of our high-end AV equipment?

We sat down with Carey Nieuwhof—bestselling author, podcaster, and one of the most influential voices in church leadership today—to get his take on where church production is heading. What follows is an excerpt from that longer conversation, focusing specifically on this production question. And honestly? His answer might surprise you.

The Copycat Phase Made Everyone Look the Same

Nieuwhof starts by taking us back about 15 years, when churches were racing to add cool lights, smoke machines, and modern worship bands. If you were doing production work back then, you remember it well. You were the hero bringing your church into the modern era.

“Social media changed the game,” Nieuwhof explains. “Suddenly we could see what everybody was doing. Oh, what kind of microphone is this? SM7B. Look at this arm. We need that arm. We need this microphone. We need those lights.”

There was a copycat phase—and it wasn’t necessarily bad. It got churches into the modern era pretty quickly. We all caught up.

But then something shifted.

“When everybody has it, it’s like, well, everybody has it,” Nieuwhof says. “All your churches that were new and novel now look the same, sound the same. And guess what? We’re singing all the same songs.”

In the non-denominational evangelical world especially, we all became copies of each other. What was unique isn’t unique anymore. Every church started looking like a smaller version of the megachurch down the road.

Why Gen Z Doesn’t Care About Your Production Value

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for those of us who’ve spent our careers mastering production techniques.

“Gen Z is saturated. Millennials are saturated. Doom scrolling,” Nieuwhof observes. “They’re numb to it all. And when they show up in church, they want something real. They want something tangible. They want to know: is God real? They want something transformational.”

This generation is the most marketed-to in human history. They’ve been raised on high production value—professional cinematography, perfect lighting, studio-quality audio. It’s not impressive to them anymore. It’s just… expected. Or worse, it’s invisible.

The internet is really good at information. With AI, you can find out anything. But here’s what the internet can’t do: facilitate a genuine encounter with God.

“There’s something that happens in the room that doesn’t happen online,” Nieuwhof says. “People aren’t looking for more information. They’re looking for presence, not just presentation. For an experience of God, not just more information about God.”

So… Do We Ditch the Gear?

This is where Nieuwhof’s answer gets nuanced—and honestly, more helpful than a simple yes or no.

He’s not saying throw out your SM7Bs or turn off the haze machine. He’s talking about something he calls a “tonal shift.”

“It means your worship leaders are not just rehearsing the transition. They’re more sensitive in the moment,” he explains. “What is actually happening in the room? What might the Holy Spirit be saying? There’s a little more spontaneity.”

For preachers, it means not just watching the clock and hitting your time marks. It means leaving a little more space. Paying attention not just to whether the audience is engaged, but to what God might be doing in the room.

What This Actually Looks Like in Production

As production people, we’re used to eliminating dead air. We fill silence. We plan transitions down to the second. We pride ourselves on tight rundowns and seamless service flow.

But Nieuwhof challenges that instinct: “When I started in ministry, my goal was to get rid of as much silence in church as I could. Now, I’m a big fan of space. When you’re praying, why do you have to fill it all with words? People’s lives are so noisy and so crowded. Where else are you going to get silence? You don’t get it unless you’re in church.”

This doesn’t mean abandoning production excellence. It means being excellent at creating space instead of just being excellent at filling it.

Think about it practically:

Your worship leader pauses between songs. Do you automatically trigger the next lighting look, or do you wait to see if something’s happening in the moment?
Your pastor goes off script. Do you panic about the timing, or do you adjust and create room for it?
The band starts playing spontaneously. Is your board ready to support that, or are you locked into your preprogrammed mix?

Evoking vs. Manipulating: The Line We Can’t Cross

Nieuwhof draws a critical distinction that every production person needs to understand.

“You can evoke, and the best way I can describe it is if you’re watching a really well-done movie and you end up crying, it’s because somehow the director, the actors access a memory in you or an emotion in you—and it was genuine tears,” he says. “But then there are other times where you feel manipulated… that was cheap.”

As production people, we know how to manipulate emotion. Bring the lights down. Add some haze. Crank up the low end. Play in a minor key. Hold that last note longer. We’ve all done it.

But that’s not our job.

“It’s not our job as Christians to manipulate,” Nieuwhof says. “It’s our job possibly to evoke. I’m going to set the table. I can’t control the Holy Spirit. I’m not the Holy Spirit. But I’m going to make some space.”

He uses the example of an altar call: “You don’t want to seed that altar call with people who are going to go up and get saved just so that somebody comes to the front. If you’re doing a real altar call, maybe nobody puts up their hand. Maybe everybody puts up their hand. You don’t know.”

What This Means for Your Next Install

So here’s the practical takeaway for church tech teams and production professionals:

High-end AV equipment isn’t the problem. The problem is when we use that equipment to create an experience that substitutes for genuine encounter. When our production becomes performance rather than facilitation.

Your church probably doesn’t need to rip out the LED wall or downgrade to cheaper microphones. But you might need to:

Train your team to be sensitive to moments rather than just executing cues
Build flexibility into your systems that allows for spontaneity
Create lighting and audio environments that can support silence and space, not just energy and excitement
Stop trying to make every Sunday feel like a megachurch production

The goal isn’t less production. It’s different production.

Production that serves presence instead of replacing it. Production that facilitates encounter instead of manufacturing experience. Production that knows when to step back and let something real happen.

Because at the end of the day, people can get high production value anywhere. Netflix has better cameras than you do. Their favorite band has a better light show. Their local theater has better acoustics.

But they can’t get a genuine encounter with God on Netflix.

That only happens in the room. And our job is to create the technical environment where that can happen—not to create an experience so polished that it leaves no room for God to show up unexpectedly.

The Bottom Line

Carey Nieuwhof isn’t calling for churches to abandon production excellence. He’s calling for something harder: production that serves transformation instead of just creating a vibe.

Keep your high-end equipment. Master your craft. But hold it loosely enough that when the Holy Spirit wants to do something you didn’t plan, your systems and your team are ready to support it instead of fighting it.

Because the churches that will thrive in the next decade won’t be the ones with the best gear or the tightest production. They’ll be the ones who figured out how to use excellent production to create space for something real to happen.

Want to hear the full conversation with Carey Nieuwhof? Check out the complete interview on the Churchfront YouTube channel. And if you’re wrestling with these questions in your own church, drop a comment—we’d love to hear how you’re thinking about this shift.