
STEWARDING MEDIA FOR MINISTRY:
How Without Walls Church streamlined content creation with creative.space
By RaeAnn Slaybaugh
For 15 years, Jeff Watkins’ involvement at Without Walls Church in Mesa, Ariz., has grown exponentially.
In 2010, he started out as a volunteer. In 2013, he was enlisted as a contractor. Finally, in 2017, Watkins was brought on staff as the full-time production director.
Little did he know that his job would change drastically — almost overnight — when COVID struck just a few years later.
Pre-pandemic, content production was essentially non-existent at Without Walls.
“I’m not saying that it wasn’t important; it just wasn’t something that our church culture had grasped a hold of yet,” recalls Production Director Jeff Watkins. “It just wasn’t a focus for us.”
As providence would have it, Lead Pastor Ken Dutton felt a call two weeks prior to the pandemic’s onset to lean into expanding the church’s online presence.

“He told the board and church leadership: ‘I feel like there’s something there. I don’t know all the answers, but I think there needs to be some investment,” Watkins remembers. “So, we made that investment and — fast forward a few weeks — COVID.”
At the time, Watkins says he “knew nothing” about the content production. Fortunately, he could be honest about his misgivings, as Lead Pastor Dutton is his father-in-law. (Watkins’ wife, Tiffany, serves as Executive & Worship Pastor.)
“Given this dynamic, communication can be a lot freer sometimes,” Watkins says. “It can also be a lot more direct on the opportunity side. And this was definitely an opportunity.”
Like all opportunities, this one came with a cost: 86 days straight of studying, training and testing. Many of these workdays lasted between 12 and 20 hours.
“It was insane, but it was necessary,” Watkins recalls. “By that point, with COVID, embracing the learning curve was our only option.”
What grew out of necessity quickly identified itself as a blessing.
Although Watkins says the content produced early on left something to be desired in terms of professional quality, he adds: “People’s lives were still getting touched. We learned really quickly that there’s a lot of ministry that can happen there.”
As the months passed and the need for more and more content presented itself, Watkins and his team became increasingly adept at producing it. They dialed in on what comprises quality content — not just in general, but for Without Walls, uniquely.
“I say that because what it looks like for us, is probably different than what it looks like for the church down the street,” he says. “Is it just a live stream? Are there social aspects to this? That’s when it really blew up.”
True to form, in the past five years, weekly online attendance has grown from zero to 400. Last year, the church reached more than 4.5 million people with its online offerings. This translates to more than 75 months of consumed content in 2024 — a figure that exceeds the church’s goal 25 times over.
“I’m not talking about ‘likes’ on a photo; we don’t even count that,” Watkins explains. “It’s also not including the live stream; I’m talking about content that’s been consumed, whether that’s a Reel on Instagram, a YouTube video after the fact — basically, everything that’s not ‘live’ but that we can track.”
Back-end production needs take center stage
With the amount of technology being added to meet rapidly growing content production needs, storage was becoming a real issue at Without Walls. Up to that point, Watkins and his team would buy hard drive after hard drive — about 75 in all — at hundreds of dollars apiece. The complications associated with the abundance of equipment, spread out over multiple spaces, came to a head when Pastor Dutton was preparing to revive and revise a message from a few years prior. He asked the production team for that footage.
“I had to say, ‘Pastor-in-Law, we don’t have that content,’” Watkins admits.
That’s because the video which the pastor was looking for was hosted on Vimeo — an account the church canceled when it moved to other platforms. Effectively, the footage had disappeared.
It was a tough, but pivotal conversation.
“Pastor said, ‘You’re telling me that everything from ‘X’ date and prior is gone?’ And I admitted, ‘Yeah, that’s kind of where we are,’” Watkins recalls. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault; but again, we knew nothing other than that we needed to keep up with all this stuff. That’s why we had all these hard drives everywhere.”
It was decided: this couldn’t happen again.
The team invested in network-attached storage (NAS) devices.
“NAS is a storage space that’s on site — kind of like a really large hard drive that multiple people can access,” Watkins explains. “But there were hurdles.” Namely, it was clunky — not always reliable; plus, accessibility proved tricky. Still, the team was moving fast and made it work for several years.
Fast-forward to eight months ago, when …
A much better solution emerged.
On that day, the RED Digital Cinema team was onsite at Without Walls Church doing a ‘demo day.’ The church uses several of the provider’s cameras; however, the event also debuted and demonstrated new, related products.
Church production and worship teams from the community were invited to come by, put their hands on the products, see the latest and greatest functions in action, and have a representative from RED walk them through it all. The DigitalGlue team was one of the providers on hand that day, demonstrating their proprietary managed storage solution, creative.space.
“I’ll be honest, I’d never heard of them,” Watkins says. “But throughout the demo day, people kept telling me to check them out.”
After spending an hour talking with one of the creative.space experts, Watkins was intrigued by the product and impressed with the gentleman’s depth of knowledge about the storage solution.
A few weeks later, a larger conversation took place.
“We’re not a 5,000-member church; we’re around the 1,500-member mark — more of a mid-size church,” Watkins points out. “So, it wasn’t about what creative.space could do, because that was clear; the conversation came back around to what it could do for us. We wanted to know if it would be a good fit for our ministry.”
That talk convinced Watkins that Without Walls needed this solution in a big way. He took it to the board, and they acknowledged the necessity of creative.space for the production team.
Getting to work
Watkins expected a steep, intensive learning curve with creative.space.
“We came from the Box drive world, which, as far as storage solutions go, is the typical one that everyone uses,” he explains. “It was so disorganized; access management was all over the place.”
He prepared his team to climb that short, steep hill with him, with the promise that everything would be better — and easier — on the other side. Together, they set aside three intensive days to accommodate every step, from set-up to training. In the end, they only needed half that time.
“The creative.space team’s organization and all the pre-install work they did far exceeded my expectations,” Watkins explains. “There was plenty of time and plenty of communication spent to make sure our infrastructure and workflow were aligned before the hardware was even sent to the church.
“I would say that’s the brunt of the work,” he adds. “Sure, it takes time to learn something new, but — in this case — it wasn’t difficult.”
Even better, the DigitalGlue team was there every step of the way, providing guidance on network flow, hardware placement, power consumption, and more. “They were even able to tell us what temperature our rooms needed to be,” Watkins says. In Arizona, this is an essential consideration; Without Walls doesn’t even have air-conditioning in some of the upstairs rooms used only for racked equipment storage.
“It got that detailed,” Watkins recalls. “They had an answer for everything. And if they didn’t, they would find it.”
Ultimately, he says, he was “so far off the mark” when it came to the learning curve: “Basically, there wasn’t one. It was that easy. We have people on our staff who are really, really knowledgeable. They catch on quickly. We also have people who need more time and everybody in between. Still, there were zero issues.”
Case in point: it recently took Watkins only five minutes to train a social media manager on how to use creative.space. This speaks to another major benefit of switching to this storage solution …
Better collaboration across all work groups
Importantly, by implementing creative.space, Without Walls was able to shift from a linear to a parallel workflow. This bears some explanation.
If, for example, a youth event is coming up, the youth team might put together a rough graphic to promote it. They’d email it to the creative department for design. The design team would send it back to the youth team for input. So on and so forth.
“It’s a bouncing-back-and-forth of emails; we call them V1, V2, V3 — version one, version two, version three,” Watkins explains. “There might be 15 versions of a graphic or video before we land on a final product.”
In contrast, using creative.space, the appropriate departments are enlisted only when they need to be. Watkins likens it to a highway: “It may start here and end there, but everyone’s on the same road.”
This streamlined process is vital for the social media team, for example.
“They’re managing content, not creating it,” Watkins explains. “So, they don’t really care about the first three versions and don’t need to be involved until near the end. We’ve taken it from this ‘big box of bouncy balls,’ as I call it, to a parallel racetrack where everybody seamlessly works alongside each other.”
The centralized, on-premises design of creative.space makes this possible.
“It’s fifty feet away from me right now,” Watkins points out. “If there is ever an issue — if the drive goes out, for example — it’s easily accessible. It’s a five-minute swap.”
Moreover, the creative.space team monitors the solution around the clock, so they’re often aware of an issue even before the church team.
Even remote collaboration is simple using creative.space. If the social media director is at home, the video editor is onsite at the church, and Watkins is traveling, they can all tap into creative.space and work on the same project.
“And a lot of times, there’s zero latency,” Watkins says. (Zero latency refers to a general operational objective in which rapidly changing information is available across the entire organization, leading to more informed and coordinated decisions.) “We can view that same editable file within the server, without having to email duplicates back and forth,” he adds. “I’m not aware of another solution that offers that, and it’s been really, really big for us.”
Driving real, tangible ministry wins
Better collaboration across all departments is just one game-changing benefit Watkins and his team enjoy. As mentioned, Without Walls uses RED digital cinema cameras with “Camera 2 Cloud” functionality; so, files automatically upload to creative.space as soon as filming ends.
Before, on a typical Sunday, the production team would ferry the hard drives of up to six cameras to an office, where they were uploaded to one of dozens of drives. It would take up to three hours before the production team could work with those files — precious time spent away from family, on the Sabbath.
Often, it was late Monday or early Tuesday before the production team could pull memory cards out of the various hardware across the property and work on all of those recordings.
Today, it’s a much different picture on Sundays.
“Now, worship is over, and all of our equipment, relatively speaking, is linked to creative.space via IP,” Watkins explains. “Our editors are able to take a lunch, come back thirty minutes to an hour later, and everything’s already transferred, sitting in a designated space for them to access and start editing.”
In essence, creative.space has taken a 12– to 48-hour process and condensed it to a fraction of that time, every week.
“If you look at the time savings from a staff standpoint, I’d say we’ve saved each production team member — a video editor, for instance — three to five hours per week,” Watkins says. “From a ministry standpoint, work-life balance is important. If you’re sitting here at the church for three hours on Sunday just waiting to do your job, that’s three hours away from your family, your spouse, your kids.”
A solution they can grow with
Looking to the future, creative.space is designed to seamlessly scale as we grow and create more and more quality content. Watkins explains.
“We have 192 terabytes of storage on site currently. On Sunday, we use five cameras, each with isolated recordings. Ingesting that media — moving it into creative.space — takes up about 1.5-2 terabytes. So, each Sunday, we know that we can set aside about 2.5 terabytes [of storage] that’s never accessible for any other use, and we’re covered.”
Although Without Walls is nowhere near maxing out its 190+ terabytes of storage, Watkins says he could see it happening in three to five years. That’s plenty of time to plan ahead.
When the day comes to add storage space, it’s likely that just about every ministry at Without Walls will be using creative.space in some capacity. “We still have a couple of ministries that don’t need it yet; it doesn’t make sense right now,” Watkins says. “I want to introduce them to creative.space when the time is right — kind of in keeping with the parallel workflow we talked about earlier.”
If the past is prologue, their learning curve will be simple, too.
“Feedback-wise, everyone — starting with myself — has said, ‘Wow, this is so easy! We expected something different,’” Watkins says. “And when we do have feedback on what might work better for us, we share it with DigitalGlue. They’ve been really receptive, like, ‘Oh, that’s super easy to implement’ or ‘We can’t do it that way, but here’s another solution that achieves the same goal and it’s actually easier.’”
Regardless of how Without Walls’ media storage needs expand and change, Watkins, his team, and the entire church staff can count on one thing: more time for ministry.
“Using creative.space, there are more creative ideas flowing in meetings, for example,” Watkins says. “We did a merchandise shoot the other day. We’re doing a photo shoot today. There are so many other ministry projects to spend our time on as opposed to waiting on file transfers or tracking down files from years before.
“Basically,” he concludes, “time well spent on the front end — on organization — is saving us countless amounts on the back end.”
For more information, visit creative.space.