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Jeremy Poland
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Church Facilities Expo (CFC) – slated for September 14-16, 2026 at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Center in Birmingham, Alabama – isn't actually one conference. It's two, running in the same building at the same time: the Church Production Conference and the Worship Facility Conference.
For a lot of attendees, that structure raises a fair question. If you're on the media and production side, do you actually need to care about the facilities side? The short answer is yes, more than you'd think.
Production and facilities used to feel like separate worlds inside a church. One team worried about cameras and mixers. The other worried about HVAC and parking lots. That separation made sense when the two departments rarely overlapped in practice. It makes a lot less sense now.
Think about how many production decisions actually depend on facility infrastructure. Network cabling and bandwidth for streaming. Power distribution for lighting rigs. Room acoustics that either help or completely undercut everything your audio team is trying to do. A media team that never talks to facilities is often solving problems that facilities could have prevented in the first place, and vice versa.
That's the real value of putting both conferences in the same building during the same week. A production director can sit in on a facility session about acoustics or infrastructure planning and walk away with context that changes how the next equipment purchase actually gets made. A facilities director can sit in on a video session and understand why the streaming team keeps asking for more conduit runs than seems reasonable.
The shared week also means shared meals, shared hallway conversations, and shared exhibit floor time between two groups of church staff who often don't get enough face time with each other back home. Some of the most useful conversations at any conference happen away from the sessions entirely.
If you've historically treated CFX as "the video conference" and skipped anything facility-related, it's worth reconsidering this year. The two sides of the building are more connected to your actual job than the schedule might suggest.
Jeremy Poland
What's New In Worship Audio
Worship audio is certainly not standing still. Heading into this year's CFX, a few shifts are worth having on your radar, whether or not you're able to attend in person.
Digital consoles keep getting smarter about scene management, which matters enormously for volunteer-run teams. Being able to save and recall a consistent starting point for a service, rather than rebuilding a mix from scratch every week, is closing the gap between churches with one dedicated engineer and churches running a full volunteer rotation. That trend keeps accelerating.
In-ear monitoring is showing up in more mid-size churches than it used to, not just the largest productions. As the gear gets more affordable and easier to manage, the case for ditching wedge monitors gets stronger, especially for churches dealing with stage volume bleeding into the house mix.
There's also a growing conversation around training over gear, which is exactly the philosophy behind this year's Audio Mixing for Worship Masterclass, presented by Allen & Heath University (more on this a bit later). Rather than positioning the newest console as the answer to every mix problem, more churches are recognizing that a team with strong fundamentals gets dramatically more out of the equipment they already own.
Acoustic treatment is getting more attention too, partly because more churches are renovating multipurpose spaces that were never designed with sound in mind. That's an area where the Worship Facility Conference track, running alongside the Church Production Conference this year, has real value for audio teams willing to sit in on a session outside their usual lane.
None of these are flashy, headline-grabbing shifts. They're the kind of steady, practical changes that add up over a few years and quietly separate churches with a strong sound program from churches still fighting the same problems they had five years ago.
Audio Mixing For Worship Masterclass
Allen & Heath University has built a reputation for training that goes past the spec sheet, and this year's Audio Mixing for Worship Masterclass at CFX keeps that reputation intact.
This isn't a booth demo dressed up as a session. It's a full afternoon built around one question: how do you actually get a better mix, week after week, regardless of what console you're standing behind?
The content leans hard into fundamentals. Gain staging, EQ decisions that actually serve the room instead of just looking right on a meter, and the kind of gain structure discipline that prevents half the problems engineers spend their Sunday morning chasing. None of this is console-specific. The principles apply whether your church runs a compact digital board or a full-size system with more channels than you'll ever use.
There's also a real focus on consistency, which is the thing most volunteer-run sound teams struggle with most. Getting one great mix is achievable for almost anyone with a little coaching. Getting the same quality mix every single week, regardless of who's behind the board that day, is a different and harder problem. That's where a lot of this session's time goes, building a repeatable process rather than chasing a one-off good day.
The format is built to be hands-on and conversational rather than a straight lecture, which matters given how much of good mixing comes down to judgment calls that don't have one universal right answer.
If your church runs on a rotating cast of volunteer engineers, or even if you've got one experienced hand who's never had formal training, this session is built to meet both situations at once. It runs Monday afternoon at CFX in Birmingham, ahead of the main conference.
This year's Audio Mixing for Worship Masterclass at CFX, presented by Allen & Heath University. It's deliberately not a product showcase. The session is built around technique that transfers to whatever board you're already running, on the theory that a team with strong fundamentals gets more out of modest gear than a team without fundamentals gets out of expensive gear.
Sometimes the upgrade your church actually needs isn't a purchase order. It's a training session.
Five Video Production Trends
Jeremy Poland
Church video production has changed more in the last three years than in the decade before it. Cameras got cheaper. Software got smarter. And congregations got a lot more comfortable watching a screen instead of a stage. If your team is still running the same workflow you built in 2021, you're probably feeling the gap.
Here's what's actually moving the needle this year, and where you can dig into each one at Church Facilities Expo this September.
– AI-assisted editing is no longer optional. Tools that used to feel like a novelty, auto-captioning, rough-cut assembly, color matching, are now standard parts of a lean media team's toolkit. The churches getting ahead aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones who figured out which of these tools actually save time versus which ones just create new problems to fix.
– Short-form is eating long-form's lunch. A full sermon still matters. But the 15-second clip that gets pulled from it might reach 10 times as many people. Teams are starting to plan content backward, shooting and editing with the short-form cutdown in mind from the very first frame instead of treating it as an afterthought.
– Volunteer-run production is getting more sophisticated, not less. The gap between a church running a full-time media staff and one running entirely on volunteers used to be obvious the second you walked into the booth. That gap is closing, mostly because training has gotten more accessible and more specific to church contexts rather than generic film school theory.
– Livestream quality expectations have quietly gone up. People compare your stream to Netflix whether that's fair or not. Audio sync, lighting consistency, and camera switching that doesn't feel jarring are no longer nice extras. They're baseline.
– Storytelling is pulling ahead of spectacle. After a few years of churches chasing bigger screens and flashier graphics packages, there's a real swing back toward simple, well-told stories: a baptism, a testimony, a single well-shot interview. The tech matters less than whether the story lands.
All five of these show up directly in this year's Video Production Masterclass at CFX, presented with support from JB&A. It's built as a hands-on afternoon session, not a lecture, and it's designed for teams anywhere on the spectrum from one volunteer with a phone to a full production department.
Inside The Church Filmcraft Festival
Every year, a stack of church-made videos gets submitted to the Church Filmcraft Festival, and every year, a handful of them stand out enough to win. The question worth asking isn't just who wins. It's why.
The honest answer is that it's rarely about budget. Some of the strongest entries come from churches with a single camera and a laptop full of free editing software. What separates them isn't gear. It's clarity of purpose.
The videos that place well almost always know exactly what they're trying to make someone feel before a single shot gets planned. A testimony video that wins isn't the one with the most dramatic music sting. It's the one where you forget you're watching a produced piece at all, because the story is doing the work.
The same goes for worship promos, event recaps, and social content. Judges notice when a video was built around an emotional throughline versus one that was assembled out of whatever footage happened to exist.
Technical execution still matters, obviously. Clean audio. Steady footage or intentional handheld movement, not accidental shake. Pacing that doesn't drag and doesn't rush. But technical polish without a point of view rarely wins over a rougher piece that clearly knows what it's saying.
If you're thinking about submitting this year, here's the practical advice: pick one specific story, not a general theme. "Our youth ministry" is too broad. "The night three students got baptized after camp" is specific enough to build a real video around. Keep it tight. Most winning entries respect the viewer's time rather than trying to cram in everything the ministry did that year.
The Filmcraft Awards are presented as part of CFX in Birmingham this September, alongside the full Church Production Conference. Whether you submit or not, it's worth attending the awards session just to watch what other churches are making right now. It's one of the fastest ways to re-calibrate your own sense of what's possible with the resources you actually have.
The Value Of A Leadership Collective
There's a specific kind of burnout that hits production and tech directors, and it doesn't show up in the gear or the workflow. It shows up in the people side of the job. Managing volunteers. Navigating a staff culture that doesn't always understand what the tech team does all week. Trying to build a pipeline of new talent when everyone's already stretched thin.
That's the actual problem the Worship & Tech Director Leadership Collective at CFX is built to address, and it's worth being honest about why that matters more than another session on the newest console or camera rig.
Most production directors didn't get into ministry to become people managers. But that's what the job turns into once a team grows past two or three volunteers. Conflict resolution, scheduling headaches, and the slow work of developing someone from "shows up when needed" to "runs the board with confidence" aren't skills anyone teaches at a gear demo.
The collective format is built around peer conversation rather than a single speaker talking at a room. Directors sit with other directors facing the same version of the same problems. Someone in the room has already solved the exact scheduling nightmare you're currently living in. Someone else has a volunteer pipeline system worth stealing outright.
It's easy to treat leadership development as the thing you get to once the technical stuff is handled. In practice, the technical stuff never actually gets fully handled. There's always a new camera, a new mixer, a new streaming platform to learn. The leadership skills are the ones that actually compound over time and make every future technical decision easier to execute, because you've got a team that trusts you and each other.
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