LED lighting has been around for at least a decade now. While interest in LED fixtures has always been high, the performance has often been lacking, causing potential adopters to hold back on making the transition, or ending up with a lighting rig with issues. In recent years, however, LED lighting has given house of worship lighting designers the brightness, control, and color options they had been seeking to bring their worship services to life.
Today’s LED fixtures provide intensity that rivals traditional tungsten theatrical fixtures, white lighting with a high color-rendering index (CRI), compatibility with a variety of color temperature sources, and excellent performance for video capture — all important requirements for today’s houses of worship.
Whites for Every Occasion
Saddleback Community Church in Lake Forest, CA, was founded in 1980, and weekly attendance averages more than 20,000 people, with 50,000 during “peak” seasons such as Easter. They are a multi-site church — along with the Lake Forest main Worship Center, there are other campuses across California and four international affiliated sites. The majority of services at Lake Forest are also streamed live via Saddleback’s website to their other campuses and to audiences around the world.
As part of a lighting upgrade in their main Worship Center, Saddleback wanted to bring their stage lighting up to date with fixtures that could cut through their intense ambient lighting and improve their look for video capture. “We wanted to invest in a brand that we knew would offer a reliable, powerful solution, and prove to be a great return on investment,” says Alex Fuller, lighting and scenic designer at Saddleback. To meet that requirement, they chose Chroma-Q LED lighting fixtures.
To achieve suitable and effective uplighting on the main stage, Fuller opted for 15 Chroma-Q Studio Force V 12 Phosphor white LED softlights. Saddleback built these fixtures into the staging below custom Plexiglas covers.
“The V 12s have transformed the look of the stage,” says Fuller. “Their output is awesome, meaning they cut through the sunlight, house lights, and LED screens to make the stage a beautifully bright focus in the room. Spaced three feet apart, the V 12s provide very even coverage. The light they’re capable of is so powerful yet soft that they actually make the screens look better, and the stage look impressive with incredible depth for our live streaming.”
The V 12 Phosphor’s color temperature can be controlled via the lighting console over DMX, allowing a lighting designer to choose between a bright daylight look for events taking place during daytime where significant light is coming in through the windows, to a tungsten setting for night time when traditional tungsten house-lighting may be in use.
As with all Chroma-Q lighting, the Studio Force V 12 Phosphors are designed for use with video, and provide flicker-free performance for any video capture situation.
The Emotion of Color
While the quality of white lighting is important for key lights and video capture, using only white light can create a sterile environment that lacks the ability to fully support a worship setting. Color triggers and supports an emotional response, and emotions play a significant role in the worship experience. Who doesn’t look at the colors of a rainbow and feel joy?
As part of their lighting renovation, Fuller also installed Chroma-Q Color Force 48 and Color Force 12 fixtures in Saddleback’s auditorium, to bring intensely saturated color options into their worship experience.
“I mainly use the 48s to light set pieces,” states Saddleback’s Fuller, “but I also rig them around the main room to accent architectural elements. The units are workhorse fixtures — a true staple in my designs. The color saturation, the richness of the colors and the way I can program the cells to create really great effects is just awesome.” The Color Force 12 fixtures are used as color washes for the stage.
In addition, the IP65-rated exterior version of the Chroma-Q Color Force Compact fixtures are used in their open-air prayer and worship spaces. “The Compacts provide an incredible palette of colors,” Fuller continues, “which is very useful for enhancing worship and creating the right mood. They also dim beautifully and offer a very smooth beam, which works great in our outdoor areas for an immersive worship experience.”
Blurring the Line between Stage and House
Increasingly, churches want to move their congregations from being spectators to being participants in their services. The traditional theatrical-style approach to house lighting, where lights are brought low or completely out, implicitly sends the message that it’s time to be quiet and observe, which is exactly the opposite of what a worship experience can and should be. LED color-changing house lighting can help break that mold, providing visual cues that those attending are to be a part of the worship event, not observers.
Both Pleasant Valley Baptist Church in Kansas City, MO and Raleigh First Assembly Church in Raleigh, NC have embraced this concept of “Immersive Worship” by installing Chroma-Q Inspire RGBW house lighting fixture in their facilities.
Pleasant Valley Baptist Church (PVBC) is located on the north side of the Kansas City metropolitan area. Close to 4,000 worshippers attend every week. The church has existed since the 1940s at various locations, but was purpose-built at its current location in 1997. PVBC has three unique styles of worship service happening every weekend in the same room — the main Worship Center — meaning that flexibility and reliability of the lighting system is very important.
Raleigh First Assembly Church (RFA) is an Assemblies of God organization that stresses the importance of godly living, Christian service and personal salvation. They recently relocated to an extensively renovated, 58,000-square-foot building that had previously served as an industrial facility.
“When demoing and comparing house lights with DMX control from multiple manufacturers, the Chroma-Q Inspire fixtures totally hit the mark for price and functionality,” says Marcus Hammond, church resource director at Stark Raving Solutions, which handled the installation project that included the Inspire fixtures at Pleasant Valley.
“The option for color has been beneficial at Pleasant Valley for special events, such as the ‘Fourth of July Patriotic Service’, and special music-only nights that are an intentionally immersive worship experience for the congregation,” adds Hammond. “While some of the more traditional services use only white house lighting, the more progressive or contemporary services use single colors — or an entire spectrum of colors — across the whole room, to provide the congregation with an immersive worship experience.” By setting the color of the house lighting to match or complement the color wash on the stage, the entire room feels like one unified space, visually breaking down the “them and us” barrier between the worship team and the congregation.
“Versatility was a recurring theme in our design meetings with Raleigh First Assembly, with the hope of creating an environment where we could blur the lines between stage and seating using lighting,” says Douglas Hood, president of Indiana-based CSD Group, installer of RFA’s lighting system. “As part of the design process we were able to share with the church how using color-mixing house lights could let us treat the entire space as a canvas — not just the stage — which was very appealing to them. Therefore, we required color-capable, fully-dimmable lighting which could be controlled from FOH as well as from wall panels located throughout the venue.”
“We looked at a few different cost options from several manufacturers,” Hood continues. “Given the caliber of this project and the end result we were looking for, the Inspire was our fixture of choice due to its richness and depth of color, plus its smooth transitions and fades. The client trusted us to make that decision, and they are thrilled with the results. It’s a great fixture.”
LED lighting has come a long way in the past decade, and as these three churches have found, can significantly expand a house of worship’s options for supporting their worship services.
For more info on Chroma-Q products, go to www.chroma-q.com and www.aclighting.com.
