Since its inaugural year in 2001, “Christmas at Highlands” has been one of the most anticipated events on the calendar of Church of the Highlands.
Since its founding, Highlands, based in Birmingham, Alabama has grown to over 20 campuses in Alabama and Georgia. And from its beginnings, the church began to make its mark on the local community with a holiday service experience anticipated by attendees and community observers alike.
“The opportunity to provide a more locally driven, live Christmas experience for campuses was a game changer. We noticed our congregation engaged in anew way when they saw people from their community leading on stage.” - Kyle Cantrell, Gadsden Campus Pastor, Church of the Highlands, Birmingham, AL.
Highlands has always aspired for the Christmas service, while unique, to have the same basic feel of a regular weekend service, including a clear path for attendees to engage with the life-changing power of Jesus. Until the past few years, a majority of the programming originated at the Grants Mill (broadcast) location in Birmingham and was streamed out to campuses. While there was a benefit to this approach, such as being able to exercise greater depths of creativity and quality at just a single, larger location with greater resources, the greatest drawback was in the gap it created with the campuses’ attendees. Instead of feeling immersed in an experience as an active participant, congregants spent a majority of their time watching a screen as a distant observer. Chris Griffin, who serves as Highlands’ worship creative director overseeing all creative musical elements and content creation, agrees. “[The] general feedback has been, even if the quality of performance is slightly less, campuses would rather have the music or other elements performed live at each location.”
Due to the need to scale, and to have all campuses share comparable experiences, the personal and powerful impact of the service had been diluted. So, a paradigm shift had to occur.
That is where the 2019 edition of “Christmas at Highlands” made its mark.
A Christmas 2019 review
For the first time, all service elements other than the sermon itself and any pre-produced video bumpers would be live at each of the 21 campuses holding services. While every campus would essentially have the same service flow, there was now a new level of local ownership in creating the experience with their local teams.
For a journey that had slowly begun just a couple of years before, it was a fulfilling transformation of what the campus experience had become.
Local budgets were expanded to allow each location the flexibility to introduce various “extras” that they could use to improve their local experience. This could include string players or extra musicians for musical elements; dancers; lighting fixture and/or LED wall rentals; or cookie and hot chocolate stations and photobooths in the lobby.
After navigating the transition to a more campus-involved experience, Gadsden Campus Pastor Kyle Cantrell agreed with Griffin’s assessment of the shift to local programming. “The opportunity to provide a more locally driven, live Christmas experience for campuses was a game changer,” he says. “We noticed our congregation engaged in a new way when they saw people from their community leading on stage. As a campus pastor I am grateful for the new resources we were able to utilize that allowed our worship and production teams the opportunity to flex their creative muscles and minister in this way.”
However, with the campuses relying heavily on volunteers to fill roles in both worship and production, and with the teams’ relative inexperience in executing services with so many moving parts compared to a typical Sunday flow, there was extra emphasis on the role of Central teams in helping set up those campuses for success.
Church of the Highlands has always aspired for the Christmas service, while unique, to have the same basic feel of a regular weekend service.
Planning and coordination meetings, which included members of multiple Central and Campus teams, began weeks in advance. As services approached, multiple phone conferences were hosted to talk through service and transitional details with campus pastors, worship directors, and production directors.
As rehearsals were held at the broadcast campus, videos were recorded and uploaded to Dropbox and Planning Center so campus teams could see how to execute service details, ranging from managing transitions to coordinating the blocking of personnel on stage. Nearly 100 audio files were created to resource campus worship teams, including tracks for separate vocal and band parts for every song, along with backing tracks and even percussion tutorials for a special drum element.
Additionally, Central lighting staff began to put in hours of work to program the lighting elements that would be so crucial to the show’s success. Using MA3D (for campuses on the MA console platform) and Vision (for campuses on the Hog platform), and existing show files and plots for all campuses, those Central staff created a template for how lighting effects and transitions could work at each location. “How To” videos were shot so campuses handling their own programming could get an idea of the overall vision for how to implement certain effects; since all campuses tend to have a similar combination of Chauvet and Martin fixtures, it was easy to paint a picture of the goal and the potential process to get there.
While every campus—20+ in Alabama and Georgia—would essentially have the same service flow, there was now a new level of local ownership in creating the experience with their local teams.
Given the complexity of the opening musical number, it was ultimately decided that Central teams would handle all lighting programming in advance via pre-vis software for portable campuses. This was due to the amount of programming time needed for the show and the fact that most portable locations had limited access to their facility until the day prior to their opening service, when they would load in. That combination would have rendered it nearly impossible for those campuses to do all of the programming necessary, especially if they had a rental lighting package being loaded in that same day.
In addition, the church’s creative team partnered with the worship and production teams to create custom motion graphics, or jumpbacks, for much of the music in the service. The band’s Ableton software would trigger the videos, via SMPTE timecode, playing out of Resolume, which had been loaded on iMacs or Mac Pros at each location. Despite the moving parts and extra programming requirements, the result was a smooth run of 130 services over five days that had attendees raving about how great it felt for their local campus to have had such a high-quality experience.
Enter 2020
As successful as this endeavor was last year, moving into the Christmas season for 2020 may bring challenges that make it difficult to replicate the experience as it existed last year.
Programming discussions for this year’s services began in September, and at the time of this writing, the direction had already changed multiple times. While Highlands did resume in-person services in early August, in compliance with local regulations, there are still many uncertainties revolving around what will happen in the coming weeks leading up to Christmas, as the temperatures drop.
Unfortunately, due to so many layers of uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been challenging to nail down a comprehensive and consistent game plan. In fact, there are several factors being considered this year that hadn’t been on the radar in the past:
For portable campuses that meet in schools or public facilities, like a community center, how does the church need to consider alternate plans in case the venue becomes unavailable?
If there’s the prospect of losing a venue, or having restricted access, is it worth it to commit to equipment rentals, knowing that the team may be on the hook for gear that doesn’t get used?
If the team waits too long to make a decision on rentals, is there the possibility of not being able to find the type of gear needed, simply because inventory has already been committed elsewhere?
A large majority of the congregation now attends services online instead of in-person, so how does that need to impact the direction of the programming, regarding what the church does at a venue vs. what it makes available to be viewed online?
Since the volunteer teams at many campuses are smaller than they were in the spring, to what extent can the team count on those remaining members to execute services with complex details? More moving parts, with more programming, but with a smaller team might be a challenging equation at some locations. Is a “backup team” available (like an understudy in theatre) in the event that a key worship or production volunteer gets sick leading up to services?
And, if local teams do have their depth impacted, does that mean that Central teams may need to carry a greater role in the planning and execution of services than in years past?
Or does this all mean that, instead of trying to do something big again, the team just needs to do a stripped-down, trimmed-back experience that’s simpler and more intimate?
Griffin acknowledges those challenges, but also stresses the importance in the process “not sacrificing the heightened Christmas experience Highlands is known for.”
Prayer and perspective
Churches all across the country are likely asking themselves similar questions. At Highlands, Christmas services are regularly one of the most popular opportunities for visitors to become familiar with who the church is and what it does—and ultimately to become part of the church.
And while Highlands staff is confident that they’ll give this year’s visitors an excellent experience, exactly what that experience looks like … remains to be seen.
