Top 5 Essentials for Modern Church Lighting

How well does your church’s lighting rig work to enhance the worship experience? Weigh your rig against these key components and find out how to up your lighting game.

Are you making the most of the latest lighting technology?

Lighting is an integral part of the technology mix in the church. A versatile lighting rig not only ensures the whole congregation can see clearly what’s happening on stage, but it can also creatively enhance the worship experience. Lighting technology has advanced significantly over recent years and one of the biggest innovations has been the development of LED technology. This brings with it the benefits of low power consumption (allowing more fixtures without the risk of overloading your power supply), reduced excess heat (keeping the temperature down on stage) and extremely long life (essentially removing the need for lamp replacements). 

1. Keylight

The most important role of any church lighting system is ensuring that everyone on stage—the pastor, the preacher, the worship team—can be clearly seen by everyone in the congregation. In addition, for many churches, it’s also important that those on stage are brightly and flatteringly illuminated for live video capture, be it for in-house IMAG in large auditoriums or external streaming. Up until recently this required conventional ellipsoidal fixtures that drew a lot of power and produced a great deal of excess heat, however, modern efficient LED fixtures can now generate the same warm white light that is ideal for creating natural-looking skin tones.

2. Wash Lighting

Having got the basics of lighting the people on stage down, the addition of colored wash lighting can be used to create a vibrant background to worship and preaching. Most LED-powered fixtures feature three or more primary LED colors that can be mixed in varying intensities to create an almost limitless palette of shades and hues, which can be matched to the mood of each song or sermon.

3. Beams and GOBOs

The aesthetics of a stage set and the atmosphere in a sanctuary can be further enhanced through the use of moving head lighting fixtures. These can be used to project GOBO patterns onto the floor of a stage, the walls and ceiling of an auditorium, or even through the air (when used in conjunction with haze machines). Dedicated wash, spot (for GOBO projections) and beam (for mid-air effects) moving heads with LED light sources are now widely available

, while the latest “hybrid” models combine all three into a single fixture. 

4. House Lighting

In addition to illuminating stages and sets, many churches are using the latest DMX-controlled LED lighting technology to cover house lighting duties. Wide-angled wash fixtures with Chip On Board (COB) LEDs offer even coverage and uniform color mixing without shadows—ideal for lighting up an auditorium prior to and following a service. Such a setup provides easy control of the house by stage lighting operators, while also offering the flexibility and creative potential to illuminate all or parts of the main body of a sanctuary with any color of light at any point during a service. This allows the lighting design on the stage to extend out into the seating areas, connecting the congregation to the musicians on stage and fostering an immersive worship experience.

5. Video          

 Video is a part of almost every church’s worship services. Whether simply utilized to display song words and Bible verses, or integrated into a stage set to display visual elements that enhance the lighting design, or as IMAG to ensure everyone can see clearly what’s happening on stage, crisp and bright video is essential for modern expressions of church. Once outside the budget of all but the biggest and wealthiest churches, LED video panels are now a viable alternative to projectors for even small-to-mid-sized churches. This new technology offers increased brightness and exceptional contrast, ensuring that screens are clearly visible even in the brightest of ambient lighting conditions.