It was the fall of 2010 when John Stickl assumed his role as lead pastor at Valley Creek Church in Flower Mound, Texas, and the church has enjoyed considerable growth ever since. So much so that Valley Creek’s main campus required an expansion to accommodate increased attendance and, at the same time, the church secured property in nearby Denton, about 15 miles north of Flower Mound, to launch the first in a planned series of campus locations.
"Color-changing LEDs [in the house], allow them to extend the color palette that they’re using on stage into the audience, so it’s seamless. There’s not this divide of the congregation and platform."
—STEVE REED, LEEP AP, Vice President & Senior Consultant, Idibri, Addison, TX.
“There were times when Pastor John was preaching between four and five times every weekend, which was not sustainable for him,” explains Pastor Becca Reynolds, who is responsible for ministries and operations at Valley Creek. To address this, Valley Creek initially created a video venue in its Flower Mound campus, with the goal of launching an off-site campus—and thus, embarking on the church’s multisite strategy—in the near future.
Design Opportunities & Challenges
The new worship center doubled in size, now seating 1,500. One of the main design challenges was to create a space that was large enough to support Valley Creek’s continued growth while enabling Stickl to remain engaged with the church family—and for them to be able to connect with each other.
“They wanted a very interactive room, one where people could engage with each other, vs. a presentation-style room,” recounts Tom Greenwood, principal at Beck. The resulting design features tiered seating on a wide wrap to create a sense of closeness. The platform design also contributes to this sense of intimacy: the thrust of the stage is 30 feet deep from the proscenium to the edge.Valley Creek’s Flower Mound campus serves as the main capture and broadcast facility for its multisite service, presenting a set of what are sometimes opposing objectives: “live” attendees must be able to see everything properly, but the service also has to look good on camera. “In these cases, you don’t [usually] want a lot of movement on the platform,” Greenwood explains, “but Pastor Stickl’s style is to really move around a lot on the platform.” This required the design team to consider how the backdrop, video screens, as well as the platform, could work together to provide a consistent shot no matter how mobile Stickl may be.
Peter A Calvin
“One of the ideas that we floated out early on was to install a large central screen [as a backdrop] that could be used not only for reinforcing the message, but also for visual effect,” says Hoyt Hammer, lead principal at Beck. Instead, the resulting backdrop incorporates three separate screens. “What persuaded us to go in that direction was really that issue of being able to capture the pastor’s message for rebroadcast.” Idibri, a technology, theatrical, and acoustical design firm based in Addison, Texas, provided theatre consulting and acoustical design for Flower Mound. The firm also designed the audio, video, and theatrical and architectural lighting systems. Steve Reed, LEEP AP, vice president and senior consultant at the firm, notes that the shape of the room is one of the things that dictates what video technology will work best in the room. “In this particular space we used three screens so that from every angle, everyone can see the pastor, and see the image magnification. Those sightlines give people a sense of intimacy through video,” he says. “They can see a close-up of the pastor’s face and his facial expression, which helps them to feel closer to the pastor—you don’t feel like you’re really far away from him and what he’s communicating.”
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The lighting technology also plays a role in creating intimacy. Flower Mound’s architectural lighting system features color-changing LEDs, which enable the worship leaders to enhance services by developing different moods through light. Reed also points out that the architectural lighting system connects worshippers with what’s taking place on the platform. “[In many churches] the house lighting will be dark and all of the color and tech is up on stage. With the color-changing LEDs [in the house], it allows them to extend the color palette that they’re using on stage into the audience, and so it’s seamless. There’s not this divide of the congregation and platform.” Matt Montgomery, project manager at Beck, notes that one of the firm’s design goals was to minimize any perceived distractions in the worship center, including the chairs, done in a combination of solid browns, purples, and grays. “One of the things we worked on with the church was the arrangement of the chairs according to the fabric,” he relays. “They had selected these three colors for the chair fabric, and they were designed to be placed randomly. We worked with the church to make sure that there weren’t two contrasting colors next to each other because that might be too much of a distraction.” Seating placement then became “intentionally random,” Greenwood jokes.
Slipping in to the Future
One of the primary concerns for multisite churches is acquiring a solid connection between the main broadcast facility and satellite locations. To link Flower Mound with Denton, Idibri specified a HaiVision cloud-based streaming platform for playing back time-slipped HD files. A KulaByte server (also by HaiVision) resides at Flower Mound, where it is used to encode and upload services to the cloud for the Denton campus to play back just minutes after the Flower Mound service has begun (or, several hours or even days afterwards, hence the term “time-slip”). A Ki Pro hard drive is available for backup.
“The capability of time-slipping a live feed—just starting it a little bit later—usually would involve the Internet or dark fiber and dedicated hardware on one side or both sides of the link,” Jason McKelvey, consultant at Idibri, explains. “It made more economical sense to use a cloud-based service.”For Valley Creek’s Denton campus, the church secured a space in a strip mall—a building that at one time served as a Walmart. Bill Ward, principal at TGS Architects in Dallas, explains that in this case, converting a space originally conceived for retail was actually an advantage rather than a challenge. “The benefit was that this building was vacant, and that gave us a clean shell to work with,” he says, adding that aside from having to take out a column and some ceilings, there wasn’t much that needed to be removed. “It was fairly easy to design the programmed spaces in this big shell.”
The challenge was that the building’s owner had no drawings to provide TGS, leaving the architectural firm to assess the situation on its own before remodeling began. “When you have existing drawings, you have the benefit of knowing the original designer’s intent [when the building was originally constructed],” Ward says. “All we had was a site plan, and then after that we had to go in and do as-built drawings, and measure things, and just do the best we could with what we understood, because there were things behind the walls that we couldn’t see, whether it was plumbing, or electrical, or where the services came in.” While original drawings would have made things easier, Ward notes that situations like this are part of the fun of being an architect.
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“When you get those projects, it’s about how you deal with them. You get to practice your imagination, so it’s all good.” Incorporating the exposed structure, as well as adopting the color and materials palette that exists at Flower Mound, the Denton campus comprises a worship center, a relational space for gathering, a café, a meeting space for adult ministries, and several youth and children’s areas.
Acoustics & Integration
Summit Integrated Systems, an AVL design and integration company based in Lafayette, Colo., installed the technical systems at Flower Mound. At Denton, the firm designed and integrated the audio, video, and lighting systems. Summit also provided an acoustical design, which was carried out by Valley Creek. Devon Yevoli, project manager and system designer at Summit, notes that the building’s low ceiling and box-like shape produced some acoustical challenges in the worship space, since the parallel walls created reflections. To solve this, several of the walls were re-angled, and the church applied acoustically rated insulation and acoustical panels on the side walls to absorb reflections.
Another concern was “soundproofing” the worship center so that Valley Creek’s next door neighbor in Denton, the retailer Hobby Lobby, wouldn’t be disturbed during services and events. The church shares a cinderblock wall with the store; in front of the cinderblock Valley Creek built a false drywall wall, leaving an air gap between the two. “When you start putting surfaces in between [the wall and the sound source], it will knock the sound down by a certain decibel percentage, and then adding an air gap helps the sound to dampen,” Yevoli explains.
Leveraging Video Technology
Where at one time multisite strategies may have been risky for some churches, because people are now accustomed to communicating via video, multisite churches are leveraging video technology to deliver a consistent message to multiple campuses. Reed notes that fewer churches are requiring “virtual pastors,” where remote sites will project life-size images of the pastor on video displays in hopes of making congregants feel like the pastor is actually there.
Instead, churches are opting for image magnification that displays tight close-ups of the pastor. “It eliminates the need for two streams of video to go [from the main campus] to the [satellite campus], because you only need the stream for the IMAG and not for the virtual pastor, and you can dedicate all of your bandwidth to making a high quality image,” he explains, adding that designs encompassing a virtual pastor also present restrictions on seating layout (everyone must be able to see the middle screen where the pastor’s image is displayed). “Now, remote site churches are ubiquitous, so there’s not this need to ‘trick’ people into thinking that the pastor is there. They know that they’re at a remote site and they’re there for the community, for the people at that satellite campus, and yet they’re all receiving the same message for the main campus.”
