How a Fresh New Look Can Help Your Church Save Money, and Enhance the Worship Experience

Here's a system that saves electricity, provides better key lighting, house lighting, and adds an immersive element to the overall worship experience.

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For a fresh new look, many churches are upgrading their house lighting systems. Like many churches, with aging and failing equipment, the team at the St. Charles/South Elgin, Illinois campus of Christ Community Church decided now was the time to explore that option. What they found was a system that saved electricity, provided better key lighting, and house lighting, and added an immersive element to the overall worship experience.

“The ability to change the colors of the house lights really allows us to eliminate that division between the stage and the house. It makes it feel less of a performance and more of a worship environment.” - Noah Kimmel, Production Director

Noah Kimmel, the production director at the Christ Community Church in St. Charles/South Elgin, said, “So our main goal was to replace a 20-year-old outdated lighting infrastructure and fixtures that were starting to give us problems…but also help enhance the worship environment.”

The church called on Jason Reberski CEO of JRLX Incorporated based in Tinley Park, Ill. for a solution. Reberski says, Christ Community “had a really nice key lighting system in place. It was just power-hungry, limited, couldn’t change color, was tungsten, used a bunch of dimming, et cetera.” Reberski's new design includes Fuze Profile moving heads and Fuze Pendant house lights from Elation Professional. “The Fuze Profile, I remember specifying in the very beginning because… it uses an RGB amber mint additive color mixing engine.” He adds, “It has an incredibly high CRI in excess of 90 because it is an additive color mixing fixture. And so it really maintains its luminous efficacy across the range of color temperatures.”

The Elation Fuze Pendant house light wound up being an excellent fit for Christ Community. It gave them new LED fixtures with improved efficiency in the power department and color-changing capability they didn’t previously have. “The ability to change the colors of the house lights really allows us to eliminate that division between the stage and the house,” Kimmel says. “It makes it feel less of a performance and more of a worship environment.”

The speed at which technology advances results in new, better solutions with frightening regularity. It’s become imperative for churches to regularly evaluate some of the things they take for granted technologically. Color-mixing LED house lights might not have been an option when your building was built. Still, depending on your house lighting situation, it’s possible you could make an improvement that would not only improve everything about your service but provide cost savings too.

Noah also highlights the importance of working with a good integrator. “Our experience working with (JRLX) is always fantastic. Whenever we have a problem, they can come up with creative solutions for it. We actually just put Fuze Pendants in another one of our campuses a couple of months ago, and that was another very successful project with them.”

This is a great lesson for churches; when considering upgrading equipment, consider how technological advances can help in terms of cost-savings, space-savings, and how the new technology can further your current goals.

Get the details on Elation Lighting's Fuze Profile and Fuze Pendant.

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