You started documenting your walk with God, and somewhere along the way, the walk got quieter. The quiet time gets filmed. The prayer gets posted. The hidden season gets announced, because if no one saw it, it barely feels real. And underneath all of it is a question you would rather not ask out loud: are you performing an intimacy with the Lord that you no longer actually have? LJ Mitchell has spent a decade as the music director of Elevation Worship, and he joins me for a conversation that begins with performed faith and refuses to stay on the surface.
For many of us, the reason we broadcast the walk is the same reason we cannot put down the role: we have confused what we do with who we are, and we are frightened of who we would be without the applause. We talk about releasing what you’re known for, the hidden work of formation that no one claps for, and the wilderness that excavates the false scaffolding out of you. LJ Mitchell is not saying this from a safe distance; he is telling you what it cost him to loosen his grip while he was still holding the thing.
You do not need a better feed. You need to be honest about what you are afraid will surface if the audience goes away. The applause is not filling you; it is starving the very thing you keep praying for. This conversation will not help you build a more spiritual platform. It will ask you to close the app, open your hands, and find out whether you are loved when no one is watching.
About LJ Mitchell
LJ Mitchell is the music director of Elevation Worship, the Charlotte-based worship collective he has helped lead for a decade, and his journey there ran through Toronto, a season of obscurity, and a wilderness he now credits for everything that came after. He is known publicly for what happens on the platform, but the conversation he brought to Win Today is about what happens off it: releasing what you are known for, ministering from identity rather than for it, and the hidden formation that quietly outlasts the moment. He speaks about all of it not as a finished man, but as a big brother who is still learning to keep his hands open.
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