America’s mega-churches are biblical in their proportions.
The largest church in the U.S. is Lakewood, a quasi-denominational congregation—more like a small city— that sprawls over five acres outside of Houston. At 150,000-plus square feet, the former Compaq Center, once home to the Houston Rockets basketball team, holds 16,600 churchgoers at a time for several services each weekend. It’s also a broadcast ministry, with two massive video monitors flanking the huge stage that the telegenic Rev. Joel Osteen shares with a band. The church market has emerged as one of the fastest growth areas for lighting and video in the U.S.
Video
One could be forgiven for confusing Lakewoodwith a large television production stage, given the eight Sony 900 and 950 HDC cameras that cover each service. Two are fixed, one on the centerline 65 feet in front of the podium, the other slightly off center; the other six cameras are either handheld, dollied or on jibs. Director Jon Swearingen guides the service from a production control room on the fifth floor, part of a 200,000- square-foot adjunct structure added to the original structure, bringing the entire facility to a total of 605,000 square feet.
The cameras feed three huge LCD screens—the 34- by 19-foot, 12mm-pixel main screen above the stage and two 20- by 11-foot, 8mm-pixel screens that flank the stage on either side. The video monitors are widescreen with a 16:9 aspect ratio. The picture is later letterboxed to a 4:3 ratio for broadcast.
There are abstract formulas for figuring out the appropriate sizes for the screens for such a large space, but as they did with the sound system, the staff at Lakewood preferred to use an empirical method. Chief engineer André Guidry supervised the raising of huge sheets of fabric upon which projectors beamed images. It was ultimately determined that three screens could cover 85% of the 16,000-plus seats in the sanctuary, and spec for the main monitors were given for custom fabrication to digital signage company Daktronics in Billings, S.D. The remaining seats are covered by 10 Sony SX VPL51 front-projection monitors arrayed in a semicircle around the catwalk.
Lakewood’s lighting system is proactive and dynamic; the system designed by Bill Klages, who lights the Republican National Conventions, has presets on the grandMA console that follows the moves of the sermon at each service, with concertlike lighting transitions between live and prerecorded action. In fact, the lighting would not be unfamiliar to patrons of heavy metal concerts: smoke generators provide an interference medium for moving lights, while Arri 5K Fresnels and Color Kinetics LED fixtures create a brilliant cloud effect in the atrium above the stage.
The Weekend Warrior Church
There are some new trends in the mega-church sector, and they’re worth noting by LDs and manufacturers. Second Baptist Church, also in Houston (Texas is the epicenter of the mega-church trend), has had to spread its 40,000-member congregation over three campuses that hold a collective 12,000 seats. Even with some of the locations holding multiple services each weekend, they still needed more space. Rather than consolidating, Second Baptist instead diffused its congregation. Every Sunday, they take over several local cinemas, and between 6:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m., church teams bring in prepackaged lighting systems and plug various sources into the theatre’s projection and sound systems. The Saturday night service has been videotaped using high-definition cameras and is played back in full. The entire system is then broken down, loaded out, and the theater readied for the noon movie showings.
The prepackaged lighting systems are compact but comprehensive: four Robe color spot XT fixtures, two Robe color wash XT units and eight PAR cans all hung from a pair of 16-foot trusses, all controlled by a Hog2PC console. A High End Catalyst DMXcontrolled media server feeds a 10,000-ANSI lumens Sony HD projector that projects lyrics, abstract images and the pastor’s message on the massive screen.
The trend is the reverse of one that helps many mega-churches get started: Fledgling congregations will contract to use cinemas on Sunday mornings as they save up to build their own facilities. There are an estimated 125 of these temporary theatre churches ongoing now and their number is expected to rise, with a combination of live and videotaped services. There is even an entire Web site dedicated to the phenomenon—www.theaterchurch.com.
This is the perfect confluence of forces here: Churches are trying to expand their reach and accommodate growing congregations —Second Baptist has a $5 million initiative that will extend the theatre-church to four more Texas locations this year, and is considering doing the same in other cities as far away as San Francisco and Raleigh, N.C.; theatre chains, reeling under a slump caused by intense competition from other entertainment venues and, arguably, rotten movies, see churches as a revenue source to fill seats that would have been unused anyway and, according to an Associated Press report, are actively courting churches.
Churches have figured out that the new breed of American evangelism needs to be entertainment-based, and are willing to invest in the lighting and projection accouterments of their secular counterpart. Given the massive constituency of these churches—a mega-church is defined as one that seats at least 2,000 per service, and the Hartford Institute for Religion Research estimates that there are now 12,000 such churches in the U.S. with a total attendance of about 24 million—they might be as much as force for promoting HDTV as Best Buy and Toshiba. The best part for lighting and video professionals? These churches for the most part rely on volunteers to man their entertainment infrastructure. Their needs will quickly and inevitably become more sophisticated than their training. If that’s not opportunity knocking, I don’t know what is.
