Creativity Quote by Michael W. Smith

The phrase sounds politely anodyne, but it carries a whole blueprint for how contemporary worship culture wants to run: like a tightly curated stage. Michael W. Smith isn’t arguing theology so much as production values - an insistence that worship is shaped by the people at the mic, and that those people should be carefully chosen.

“In terms of worship” sets a managerial frame, as if we’re talking about staffing, not mystery. Then comes the loaded euphemism: “the right people.” It’s a phrase that pretends consensus while smuggling in a set of criteria that rarely get named out loud. Are the “right” leaders the most spiritually mature, the most musically skilled, the most charismatic, the most doctrinally reliable, the most palatable to a broad audience? In modern evangelical music ecosystems, those categories blur. The subtext is that worship leadership is influence, and influence is risk - so you mitigate it by selecting the safest, most effective, most “platform-ready” voices.

Context matters here because Smith helped define the sound of mainstream contemporary Christian music, where worship often travels through mass-media channels: arenas, radio, megachurch livestreams. In that world, leadership isn’t just pastoral; it’s representational. The leader becomes the congregation’s emotional proxy, guiding when to lift hands, when to soften, when to crescendo. Saying “we ought to have the right people leading” is a defense of gatekeeping, but also an admission: worship doesn’t simply happen. It’s engineered, for better and for worse, by whoever holds the room.