
Messiah Lutheran Church, Weldon Spring, MO
One of the greatest challenges church technical teams face each week is the difficulty of creating powerful worship services in spaces designed for something else. The degree of difficulty grows even higher for teams that are required to support two or more radically different types of worship styles such as traditional, contemporary or post-modern.
Background
Sunday morning services at Messiah Lutheran Church in Weldon Spring, Mo., include two contemporary services in the church’s multipurpose gymnasium. While the multi-purpose nature of the space allows the church and its in-house early childhood, elementary and middle school to share the space throughout the the week, the victim of the compromise arrangement used to be the quality of the sound and lighting.
... the victim of the compromise arrangement used to be the quality of the sound and lighting.
From the beginning the church’s production team knew that creating great sonic experiences for the contemporary service in a gym would be an issue. “... a church-nasium is a challenge,” confirms Director of Worship Greg Worzel.
“When I first came here it was really hard. We knew we needed to remodel the actual platform, which helped some,” he notes. “The sound, however, was not evenly distributed at all. They did acoustic treatment to deal with delay and slap back, but there were just a lot of frequencies that naturally bumped much higher than they should have. The floor was tile as well, which was very resonant and reflective.”
Another difficulty posed by the original design was the actual layout of the room. “The stage itself goes the full length of the gym, but it wasn’t as deep as we’d like. This meant the band has to be on stage left while the vocalists [are] separated over on stage right. That means we have to really depend on the stage monitors,” Worzel says.
As the final obstacle to creating great weekend worship services, the days in between these services were filled with elementary and middle school gym classes in the same physical space. “We put a ceiling-to-floor screen in front of the platform to keep basketballs and volleyballs from hurting anything during the week,” Worzel explains.
AVL design progress
The church-gym's sound and lighting systems upgrades began with the process of casting a vision for a better future that the church leaders and members could understand. “Our system had been in place for 16-17 years, and comparing the technology to cell phone technology helped people understand how much progress could be made with an upgrade,” Worzel says. “It helped also to let them know how much more responsible the investments we were asking for were compared to more traditional technologies like a pipe organ.”
Worzel continues, ”Another important aspect of casting the vision was to purposefully recruit and include other leaders to do some of the heavy lifting. It wasn’t just me convincing everybody—there were other people in our corner [including systems designers]. Visiting other churches with strategic members of the board really helped cast that vision as well.”
Once the decision was made to move forward on the AVL upgrade, the tech team wasted no time moving into the installation phase, complete in summer of 2017. The results were both immediate and impressive, the church reports.
“The single most amazing part of the new installation has been the new [Yamaha] Nexo Geo M6 line array system,” reports Worzel. “I would encourage anyone in a room like that to really invest in line array speakers. They’re expensive, but they’re far cheaper than building a whole new sanctuary.”
“The Yamaha LS9-32 gives us a lot of versatility, especially with its ability to save individual scenes. It’s easy to turn the board on, pull up a scene and get good results right away. And if our main sound guy has to be gone, it’s easy for someone else to come in and get up and running very quickly.” Greg Worzel, Director of Worship, Messiah Lutheran Church, Weldon Spring, MO
For the FOH audio position the church’s team chose the Yamaha LS9-32 digital mixing console. “The Yamaha LS9-32 gives us a lot of versatility, especially with its ability to save individual scenes,” Worzel says. “We also liked the ease of use. It’s easy to turn the board on, pull up a scene and get good results right away. And if our main sound guy has to be gone it’s easy for someone else to come in and get up and running very quickly.”
Moving forward with a digital console also presented a unique advantage in a context that required cooperation with an existing school. “In a church-nasium, people from the school side can just go to their scene on the console and get what they need without having to worry about EQ or routing, which is amazing,” explains Worzel.
For onstage monitoring Messiah Lutheran’s teams are still in the process of transitioning. “We bought the Aviom system with Shure SE215 in-ear monitors, which has taken some getting used to,” admits Worzel. “Most of our people prefer to use the Avioms with Behringer small powered monitors, which are nice and focused and don’t muddy up the sound onstage too much, but our goal is to get everyone onstage using those in-ear monitors within the next 3-4 months.”
Lighting
Along with the audio upgrades, lighting needed an overhaul in the space. "We [went] with the ETC Colorsource 40 lighting console, which isn’t a huge console but it does everything we need it to do,” shares Worzel. “It gives us a lot of control we didn’t have before.”
Rather than completely replacing lighting instruments that were still useful and dependable, the church opted to reinforce and expand its abilities. “We installed 14 new Colorsource LED spot lights and 11 Colorsource LED pars, which we use in concert with our existing incandescent lights,” Worzel notes.