Why the Moment Matters More Than the Art Itself
Most performers think their job is to entertain. Get on stage, deliver the set, give people a good time, and call it a night. But in this segment of the Create Your Art Podcast, worship leader and Two Eight founder Eric Maitlen makes the case that entertainment was never really the goal. The goal is the moment, the small window where a room full of strangers shares something real together, and someone inside that room makes a decision that changes the rest of their life.
Eric has spent the last five years building festival-style events across Indiana that use live music to open the door to addiction recovery conversations. He has also spent two decades leading worship, playing in bar bands, and studying how the most persecuted, most effective church movements in the world actually operate. This post pulls together what he shared about engineering moments, why “holistic gospel” beats Bible-thumping, and what any coach, consultant, or business owner can borrow from it. This post is inspired by our latest segment of the Create Your Art Podcast. Watch here.
Why a Great Set List Isn’t the Point
Eric said something early in the conversation that reframes the whole idea of performance: “It was less about building the right set list and it was more about constructing these moments that would allow us to have a shared experience together as people.”
That is a subtle but important shift. A set list is a sequence of songs. A moment is a shared experience that creates connection, and (as Eric put it) connection is what people actually want, more than they want to be entertained. He learned this first as a worship leader, then playing secular bar gigs, and later while sharing his faith through music in a country where that is not legally allowed. In every one of those settings, the songs were never really the product. The moment was.
Once Eric started designing for the moment instead of the setlist, he found he could use the exact same tool, live music, for a much heavier purpose: helping someone walk into treatment for the first time, helping a grieving family member decide to get help, or helping a college student find the courage to start a life of faith. Different audiences, different stakes, same underlying craft.
Three Insights Worth Stealing From a Worship Leader Turned Recovery Advocate
A moment is engineered, not accidental. Eric didn’t stumble into this. He noticed that some of his favorite artists, the ones who inspired his own songwriting, were already doing it to him at their shows. He decided to build the same atmosphere on purpose, for a different outcome.
Connection has to come before the ask. Whether the “ask” is stepping into treatment, starting a new faith, or buying a product, Eric’s model puts the shared experience first. People are not moved by information. They are moved by a moment they were part of.
Holistic beats one-dimensional every time. Eric described watching an underground church movement in one of the most restricted places in the world for Christianity, and what struck him was that this movement never stopped sharing its message, but it also never separated the message from serving people’s actual needs. “They come in solving problems,” he said. “They don’t come in blasting people and dividing people into sheep and goats.” That single distinction, message plus service instead of message or service, is why the approach works in rooms that would otherwise shut the door immediately.
How to Apply This to Your Own Work This Week
You do not need a stage, a band, or a podcast to use this. Here is how to start engineering moments instead of just delivering content or pitches:
- Name the moment you actually want, before you plan anything else. Not “post more content” or “run a better event,” but the specific decision you want someone to feel free to make.
- Build the shared experience first, the pitch second. Whatever you are creating, ask what will make people feel like they went through something together, not just watched or read something.
- Serve before you ask for belief or buy-in. Solve a real problem for the person in front of you before you ever get to the ask.
- Watch for your own “sheep and goats” instinct. It is easy to quietly divide an audience into people who agree with you and people who don’t. Eric’s model, and the movement he learned it from, refuses to do that.
- Design for the person who isn’t in the room yet. Eric mentioned people “whose voices aren’t heard very often.” The best moments account for who is missing, not just who showed up.
The Mistake Most People Make Here
The most common mistake is treating message and service as competitors, like you have to choose between being bold about what you believe and actually helping people. Eric pushed back hard on that idea. “You can’t have one without the other,” he said, “because how are you really sharing the gospel without the other side?” The same logic applies outside of ministry. A coach who only teaches without ever serving comes across as preachy. A coach who only serves without ever saying what they actually believe never builds trust or authority. The moment lives in the both/and, not the either/or.
The second mistake is assuming a “moment” has to be big. Eric’s examples ranged from a full festival stage down to a single conversation. Scale isn’t the requirement. Intention is.
Final Thoughts
Eric Maitlen didn’t set out to become an authority on addiction recovery or holistic ministry. He set out to write songs. But somewhere along the way he noticed that the moment mattered more than the music, and he started building for it on purpose. That shift, from performing content to engineering moments, is available to anyone creating anything, whether the medium is a podcast, a business, or a Tuesday night event in a small Indiana town.
Watch the full segment to hear Eric talk through how Two Eight got its name, why he studied underground church movements to learn how to do this well, and what a truly holistic approach looks like in practice.
Full Transcript
Darren: Most performers, people that are in arts and music and film and all of that, think that their job is to entertain, right? To put this thing on to be entertainment. But actually, it’s to engineer moments. And I’ve heard you talk about this a little bit. Could you explain why a moment in your art and the things you’re creating is more important than even maybe the art itself?
Eric: Yeah, that’s something I’m very passionate about. I realized a while ago, as a worship leader, whether I was playing in the bar band or trying to share my faith with music in a country where you’re not supposed to be doing that, that it was less about building the right set list and more about constructing these moments that would allow us to have a shared experience together as people. Because at the end of the day, we want connection more than anything. And then if you do it right, I believe you can create moments that lead to movement for someone.
And so what we’ve done the last five years especially was creating those moments for addiction recovery, where if you use a festival, for example, and create the right, well-crafted moment, it might help someone make that hard decision to step into treatment for the first time. Or for a family member who’s experienced the loss of a loved one to an overdose, they might realize this is my moment to actually start getting the help that I need.
It might mean you’re a college student at a conference, and if we do our job right as artists, we might help create a moment that gives them the courage to step into a life following Jesus for the first time.
Darren: Dang. It’s important, right?
Eric: Yeah.
Darren: Well, and I love that, and I don’t think I’ve ever put language to some of the things that we’ve done. You and I have worked together on some things before, but even from the sense of music or film or putting on events in some way, to go, hey, there’s a moment that we’re trying to get people to. I think we naturally do that. I grew up in the church world, and I think you were in college when you kind of got into that whole thing. But we’ve both been in it for a long time, right? And so we kind of know we’re trying to get people to these moments. But ultimately, you’ve kind of taken this to the next level, to go, hey, there’s some real things we can tackle, right? Like the opioid, I cannot say that, opioid epidemic.
Eric: Demand it, it’s hard to say. Yeah, the opioid epidemic. I’m glad you can say it. That’s a tongue twister, I’ve just said it a lot.
Darren: Well, now I don’t want to get it in your head, because now you’ll be struggling too. But, man, was there a time that really kind of hit for you, where you went, man, these gifts, these abilities, these talents, I can actually move people in this way? Was there a moment that stands out where you thought, let’s do that?
Eric: Yeah, I mean, I think, as an artist, it’s probably the same for you too. I remember hearing one guy say, when asked how do you write a song, if you need to write music, how do you start that process? He said, easy, I go to a show. We get inspiration from others. So I noticed it was being done for me sometimes by some of the greats, and I thought, wow, how about if we took that same atmosphere? Because you can’t go to like a Garth Brooks concert or Coldplay, or, I got to see Muse recently (location unclear on the recording, possibly “Ireland,” needs audio verification), and it blew my mind.
They created some moments, but they didn’t have any agenda to help you make a hard decision in your life. It was just great moments for the sake of art, letting us know how amazing Muse is. But if you think of the power of music, and especially if you use some of the audio-visual elements it’s so often accompanied with, it can be used for good. It can be used in a way where it’s like, hey, let’s stop for a minute and think about the significance of what we’re singing about or talking about here tonight. And what would it look like, as a group of people in this shared experience right now, if we all just took one step toward a better future, for everybody here and everybody who’s not here, because their voices aren’t heard very often.
Darren: Yeah. What I love about that, Eric, is I have this held belief that we’re all artists in our own way. The Create Your Art thing is kind of that mantra, if you will, of going, hey, it doesn’t matter, you don’t have to be a musician or a filmmaker or an artist in the pure sense of the word to make these moments. And I think why I wanted to have this conversation with you today is because I want to help others see that they can create moments inside of whatever the art is that they do, whether it’s from an entrepreneurial standpoint, they’re building a business and they can take people on a journey. And it can be not just for the money-making aspect of it, but for the good of the people they’re working with and serving. There’s something beautiful there. And I love how you’ve positioned this as, these moments are for good, right? These moments to move people to action. That’s really cool, man.
We’ll talk a little bit more about that throughout this conversation today, but I want to go back a little bit. So you started Two Eight, what, back in 2005, was it?
Eric: Yeah. And it’s like the worst name ever. We needed a name for Battle of the Bands. It was 2005, and I had just come back from spending a year in India. That whole nation is pretty tough to be a Christian in, there’s actually anti-conversion laws and stuff in India. So I’d spent a year there and had seen unreached people groups in the mission field firsthand. I really wanted to be a part of helping inspire my generation to take missions seriously. What does it look like to follow Jesus and actually be a part of the Great Commission? So we wanted to start a band that would help mobilize people to missions, really. We wanted a missions-band name or something.
My mentor at the time, Jim Peters (name as heard, unverified, minimal web presence), said, well, just call yourselves Two Eight, from Psalm 2:8, a missions verse, and, sounds good, we just stuck with it. There have been so many seasons over the last 20 years where I’ve thought, I wish I had a cool name that explains what we do. When you’re working with state-funded tours funded by the governor’s office or the Division of Mental Health and Addiction, and they’re all secular agencies that look sideways at us faith-based groups, because you guys are just trying to shove Jesus down people’s throats, you don’t treat…
Treatment around something as difficult as mental health and addiction recovery, these are hard issues. You guys just want to Bible-thump at people. So coming into that space, I kind of wish I had a better name, but…
Darren: Sure. Well, speaking of that, how do you balance that? Because there’s a reality of, okay, we’re a faith-based organization that wants to get people to Jesus, because we believe that changes their lives ultimately. But there’s also this reality that we’ve got to work with government agencies, non-faith-based organizations that might, like you said, look at you a little sideways. But you also have to step into actually making the difference and helping those on an addiction recovery path get the help they need. How do you balance that? What does that even look like?
Eric: I know this about you, because I know you, you’re somebody who’s a constant learner, and you know this part of my story, that I take it pretty seriously to look for those who are making the biggest Kingdom impacts in the world. To the extent that I would go over with (name unclear on the recording, possibly “Masterson,” needs audio verification) and actually try to follow an underground movement that is heavily persecuted and is leading millions to Christ in one of the hardest places in the world. I want to learn from those people.
One of the things I learned from them, and it was a timely lesson, is that the gospel that Jesus brought is a holistic gospel. And if all you do is Bible-thump, or try to say, well, let me just tell you the truth, you’re not sharing the whole gospel. I noticed this group of people didn’t pull back on sharing the gospel at all, but they shared a holistic gospel. It was often through serving and loving and meeting the needs of communities.
That’s how they’re coming into communities. They come in solving problems. They don’t come in blasting people and dividing people into sheep and goats. They come in as a blessing, the blessing to the nations we’re called to be, and they’re sharing the gospel right away by doing that. And then, as people are ready to decide if they want to follow Jesus and be a Christ follower, they start walking them into that. I had to get my head around that, because I was taught a different model. Maybe you were too, (name heard as “Ray,” likely “Darren,” needs audio verification), in the evangelical church model, that this is, well, at least since college, that you’ve got to really just make sure you’re preaching the gospel, and that’s a high value. And then if you’re just trying to do the service-based stuff, then you’re not bold at all, or something.
But you can’t have one without the other, because how are you really sharing the gospel without the other side? Holistic. Because I think there are even faith organizations that would look at people doing awesome work, like a Charity Water, or somebody helping with real issues, and they go, well, you’re missing the faith element of it.
Darren: I like how you’re saying it’s a holistic gospel approach, where it’s both and. And that’s how you can actually make impact. How well are we really showing that we love humanity if we’re only going to help people who are willing to believe what we believe, sign the little connect card or something? We have to just love them because we love them. It doesn’t matter if they’re doing it right, or if they’re…
Eric: Lost or found. The last, the least, the lost, we’re just going to love them.