“Keeping everything familiar will ease requirements for multiple workflows, reduce overall operational costs, simplify compatibility, and unify team training.”
—MICK HALL, Regional Sales Manager, Southeast, All Pro Sound, Pensacola, FL
The multisite church trend is by now a well-entrenched phenomenon. Data released as far back as 2014 by the Leadership Network, a Dallas-based nonprofit that acts as a church-growth research group and consulting firm citing a National Congregations Study sponsored by Duke University, determined that five million worshippers use one of an estimated 8,000 multisite church locations in the United States; 9% of all Protestant churchgoers attend a multisite church located in more than 40 states. The juggernaut led Christianity Today to proclaim, “Multisite is the new normal.”
However, the rapid rise of the satellite campus, as these churches are also known, also created some issues for the AVL systems designers and integrators who were expected to outfit them. Whether streaming content to them from the central or host church (usually to local servers for later replay, although a few larger churches are braving the vicissitudes of real-time streaming), or distributing sermons to them on hand-delivered hard drives, the diversity of the environments of these satellite locations is creating challenges for integrators and the architects and church designers they work with.
Great expectations
“The [satellite] location can be anything from a retail store to a bowling alley to another church, but one that’s nothing like the host church, in terms of architecture and AV,” says Kurt Bevers, technical engineer at Delta AV Systems in the Portland, Ore., area. “They’ll come to us with a wide range of expectations about what they want these multisite locations to look and sound like, but we try to make them understand that function is going to follow form to a large degree—AV and lighting can be used to help make these locations mimic the main church, but the kinds of AV and lighting that can be used will also depend on the nature of the location and its architecture.”
Bevers says he asks multisite church clients to step back and try to define where they want to go with additional locations, and adjust their expectations and budgets accordingly. Host churches that have extensive AV, including broadcast-quality video, may make a less well-outfitted satellite location seem diminished by comparison. “Video at 15 frames per second across a 20-foot screen is going to look poor compared to an HD projector,” he says.
Bevers brings up another interesting point and it’s one that others also commented on: the way a satellite church looks—its aesthetic and how AV is used to achieve that (or not)—is a primary concern of HOW clients, and by extension, of their AV vendors, or it should be. He recalls a recent project in which the satellite location managers pressed for a high-end sound system but encountered pushback from the main church, which expressed more concern about how the system looked than how it sounded.
Bevers says the conflict was resolved when he recommended a solution that used the low-profile JBL CBT 70 columnar array loudspeakers, which were easier to hide than the larger line arrays originally considered, but it underscored to him the need for all AV professionals to keep the optics near the top of the list.
“You can’t always specify the tech aspects based solely on their [technical] performance if the cosmetic committee always wins no matter what,” he says.
How the aesthetic issues play out is often dependent upon the nature of the how the multisite situation came about. “Sometimes it’s because it’s a successful church expanding by taking over a less successful one,” explains Glenn Peacock, executive director for western North America at the CSD Group, a Christian-oriented AVL integrator in Ft. Wayne, Ind., that works closely with church architects. “Sometimes, it’s a completely different kind of environment, a former retail space or school cafeteria.
Sometimes it’s a design/build, sometimes it’s a complete remodel of an existing space. In any case, the usual priority is to make that space as closely as possible resemble the host church’s environment.”
The simplest way to do that is to revert to basics—subdued lighting around a relatively sparse stage, keeping the focus on the podium. Architectural lighting is an efficient way to accomplish this, and done well can avoid a lot of architectural and interior décor changes and costs.
John Storyk, an architect and acoustician is a founding partner with Walters-Storyk Design Group in New York, points out how lighting comes into play at both the satellite and host churches. “You can use lighting to create continuity between the host church and the satellite locations,” he says.
“But what many churches don’t realize initially is that when they transition to a multisite model, they may be significantly increasing their use of streaming and broadcast as part of that, and that means they’ll have to change their lighting model from a theatrical one to a broadcast television model. That’s a huge step.” Storyk says that those host churches may also need to make their media control rooms bigger to accommodate the additional technology, and that becomes an architectural process. “Every change produces additional things to think about,” he says. “The more you can anticipate those knock-on effects, the better you’ll handle them.”
Recreating the experience
At All Pro Sound, a Pensacola, Fla.-based AV integrator, Mick Hall, the company’s southeastern regional sales manager and himself the tech director at his local church, believes that the multisite model has pushed the sector towards a phenomenon that event producers and museum designers would be familiar with: the experience.“We don’t want people just watching television in the remote-site church,” he says. “We want them to feel the same experience as being in the main church.”
To achieve that, Hall says integrators and church architects need to understand the nature of each church at its “DNA level”—its personality, its fundamental identity. “Some churches like having the AV technology in full view; some want it hidden,” he says, delineating a broad difference between church types. Integrators and architects need to determine as many details of a church’s worship style in order to effectively replicate it for multiple sites.
On a practical level, Hall says that technology has to be chosen not only on its performance characteristics and cost but also on its ability to scale. “Every site is going to have different staff capabilities and budgets,” he says; so find platforms that can offer some level of consistency across a variety of operational levels. For instance, Hall says he tends to choose Ross video switchers because the company’s various models address a range of costs, from about $7,000 for a basic model to over $60,000 for the one he’ll use in the largest churches, but they offer a similar GUI for all models, allowing staff and volunteer operators to have a familiar interface at all sites.
“The best practice is to select then stay with brands and platforms [that] offer products that share the same design and operational feel, but which have different models or options suited for various applications and demands,” Hall closes. “Keeping everything familiar will ease requirements for multiple workflows, reduce overall operational costs, simplify compatibility, and unify team training.”