ABOUT BRINER WORKSHOPS

The intersection of faith and culture, and where the two should meet, has long been wrestled within the Christian music community. While spreading the Good News with the world has always been the goal, many Christian artists naturally found their audience inside the walls of the church. In 1993, the release of Bob Briner’s Roaring Lambs sparked a radical shift for many in the industry. Briner’s book challenged Christians to be “roaring lambs,” the movers and shakers of social change who impact the world through their faith. This thought-provoking position compelled many artists and industry professionals to re-think how they used their talents, looking outside the walls of the church to impact culture in a personal way.

Barry Landis was one of those affected. Briner and Roaring Lambs brought him back to a calling he felt as a young child to work in full-time Christian service. Working as a music executive at Warner Bros. Records in Nashville, he didn’t see how that calling was being fulfilled. He wondered if working a good job, doing something he loved to do and being in ministry could all exist in one place. According to Briner’s book, the answer was yes. Ministry wasn’t about the location or vocation, but about the person and their faith influence.

Remaining dedicated to the Roaring Lambs philosophy, Landis got together with several friends and supporters to see how they might keep the message at the forefront of the industry after Briner passed in 1999. Landis identified the need to create a home, a landing spot, for Briner’s brand of thinking. “Briner’s book was like a rock that gets thrown into a pond and creates these ripples. I wanted to keep the ripples going,” Landis says. “I wanted a place to convene and talk and create and fan the flame.” Landis secured the intellectual property of the book, as well as Briner’s other books, with the intent to keep the vision going. “I’ve tried to create bridges and pathways for Christian artists to be known by mainstream people who aren’t touched by Christian media.”

Two decades later, Landis’s vision for Christians impacting culture continues in the form of The Briner Institute, a Tennessee 501c3 non-profit dedicated to motivate, network and educate people to bring about cultural change. “Entertainment and media influence our world in powerful ways”, says Landis. “I think Christians should be taking a larger role in shaping the direction we are going”. Through a series of Briner Institute Workshops for Christian organizations, he’s attempting just that. “We are partly a ‘think tank’ and partly a ‘do tank’ to help teams find solutions to strategic, operational or systemic problems.” 

Other attendees of Briner Workshops have explained the process in their own words.  Jonathan Liao, Chief Operating Officer of Crowdsmart in San Francisco attended one in Nashville. “The Briner Workshop was an incredible experience. It came at a pivotal time when I was wrestling with the application of my faith in an industry that seemed hostile. Through the event, I was able to connect with others who shared the same struggles, using our collective experience and insight to come up with new ideas on integrating our faith with our approach to culture.” Another participant, Neal Joseph, Managing Partner of Mission: Leadership in Orlando, added, “It’s a roomful of some of the most creative minds in the country working together toward a common purpose.”

A key part of every Briner Workshop is the scribe work, done most times by Peter Durand of AlphaChimp. Over the course of each meeting, the scribe will organize the group’s discussion into a visual flow chart (ex. below) that helps define the ideas into a powerful presentation. “I found one guy at a workshop just standing in front of the board, mesmerized,” Landis jokes. “He wanted to take home Peter’s scribing work, but he couldn’t figure out how to get all those white boards on the plane.”

The Briner Institute recently hosted a workshop focused on one of the major challenges facing the Christian music industry - shrinking revenue. From 1993 until 2015, Christian and Gospel music accounted for roughly 3% of overall music sales in the United States. From 2016 to 2023, the format has been growing at 5-8% per year, but sales in other genres have grown faster. Largely due to the proliferation of streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music as well as Gen Z’s adoption of new technology, Christian and Gospel music has slipped in overall percentages in the US to roughly 1.9%. Through the Briner Workshop, a team of industry professionals found five major reasons why Christian music is struggling to keep up isn’t keeping up with mainstream counterparts.

These five categories will continue to be mined for practical solutions at the next planned workshop.

Regardless of where they are held or the subject matter, Briner Workshops are helping Christians apply “salt and light” (in the words of Jesus in Matthew 5:13) to the culture around them.  “I think salt is like strategy,” says Landis. “Strategic thinking is needed so badly by Christian organizations. We are really good at the tactical side of problem solving (like knocking on doors and handing out pamphlets), but rarely do we measure the cost of taking on a new initiative. It probably comes from the teaching that Jesus is coming back soon, so we are in more of a hurry to make things happen.” That line of thinking is essentially the most important function of the workshop process at The Briner Institute: Helping Christians think long-term. “Abe Lincoln once said ‘give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe’,” says Landis. “Strategic thinking matters - especially if we are trying to have a preserving effect on our world.”

For more information about The Briner Institute or how to schedule your own workshop, check www.brinerinstitute.org