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Your tech team puts sweat and tears (sometimes) into creating a worship environment each weekend for the congregation. You think through what to do in terms of the visual impact that the sanctuary or auditorium can have on the time of worship and teaching. This may include a set design for the stage; augmenting the space with flowers and plants; how greeters and ushers are positioned in the space and how they actually interact with those attending the service; and how the space is lit.
Using lighting to set a mood isn’t limited to just the stage ...
I’ve discussed in prior articles the role lighting plays in worship services: to provide illumination, to draw attention, and to set a mood. Using lighting to set a mood isn’t limited to just the stage. However, if your house lighting (the lighting over the seating area of your sanctuary or auditorium) has the ability to dim, you probably already use this feature to help set a mood. Less bright lighting feels more intimate, so churches often dim the house lighting during worship. Brighter lighting feels more energizing, not to mention enables us to read the printed word, and so lights are brighter during the sermon.
LED expands
With modern LED lighting, we now have a real opportunity to use color to help reinforce a mood for the house. Many churches who are building a new facility, or significantly renovating an existing one, are using LED color-changing fixtures for their house lighting. While at first glance these fixtures seem expensive, they do eliminate some of the infrastructure needed for traditional house lighting (such as fewer line-voltage cable runs, no need for a dimming system, and potentially lower air conditioning costs) which helps level the price. And the ability to change color brings a whole new element into your services.
While at first glance [LED] fixtures seem expensive, they do eliminate some of the infrastructure needed for traditional house lighting (such as fewer line-voltage cable runs, no need for a dimming system, and potentially lower air conditioning costs) which helps level the price.
Churches use the color mixing capabilities of these fixtures to match the color over the house with the colors used on stage. More introspective music may benefit from a deep blue color wash on stage, and extending that look out to the seating area can make the house area feel more like an extension of the stage. This can make the audience feel more like participants and less like observers, or to use one of the more recent buzz words, create a more “immersive” environment.
More introspective music may benefit from a deep blue color wash on stage, and extending that look out to the seating area can make the house area feel more like an extension of the stage.
Subtlety is key
While house lighting can be an effective way to draw in the congregation, it can also be an effective way to create a distraction. So take caution: sudden, radical changes in the house lighting draw people’s attention, and when doing so, draws people's attention away from worship. (When something draws your attention to it, by definition it is also drawing your attention away from something—you can’t have one without the other.) When using color over your house seating area, I suggest very slow, gradual changes in your house lighting. Something to experiment with may be doing your house lighting in a separate cue list and having the color and intensity change slowly and gently over the entire time of worship.
When using color over your house seating area, I suggest very slow, gradual changes in your house lighting. Something to experiment with may be doing your house lighting in a separate cue list and having the color and intensity change slowly and gently over the entire time of worship.
For example, let’s say that your service starts out high energy, and then gradually goes slower and more introspective as you get closer to the sermon. Perhaps your stage wash is starting out magenta, and as you transition between songs you change the stage wash to be more blue and somewhat darker. And let’s say your worship time lasts 20 minutes. At the start of the service you could fade the house lighting to magenta over 10-15 seconds as the band starts up, and then immediately start a cue running that fades the house lights to blue and lower intensity. Have this cue take 15 minutes to run. This way, the house lights are slowly changing to keep pace with the feel of the stage lighting but without any sudden, distracting changes that would draw the congregation’s attention away from worship.
As with any production tool, color-changing house lighting can both add and detract from a service. How you use it within the context of your service style will determine which it ends up being.
