In a world where it's harder than ever to be surprised, don't be shocked if Live Nation or AEG Live appears on the marquee of your neighborhood megachurch. The people who install their staging systems say it's increasingly difficult to distinguish what's inside them from any other theatrical venue anymore. "The typical high school performing arts center is about a sophisticated as our basic small-to-mid-level church is now," says Gary Zandstra, the house of worship (HOW) specialist at Parkway Electric in Holland MI, which installs sound, lighting and projection systems in dozens of HOWs every year. "The technology in the larger churches is on a much higher scale and often is more sophisticated than you might find in the other performance halls in the area."
The systems in HOW venues are more complicated because they need to cover a wider range of applications. "You'll go from a rock band to a 100-voice choir to a single talking head in the space of one day; in that same day, the church will hold a conventional worship service immediately followed by a contemporary service with bands and much more in the way of production values." says Zandstra. "The staging needs numerous rigging points, multi-service power. It has to handle a wider array of performances than the typical 2,000-seat or less venue will in the course of a month."
Not surprisingly, the same dynamic that has made live concert touring a critical revenue stream for the secular music industry is also driving staging needs at larger churches, which are regular stops for increasingly popular Christian rock, pop and hip-hop artists, who are also on the road more as CD sales continue to decline.
"In the end, there is very little difference between what many churches and commercial theatres are doing these day," says Hector La Torre, owner of HOW-TO Sound Workshops, which trains church volunteer staffs to operate entertainment systems. "Even medium-size churches are producing Christmas and Easter events packed with special lighting, multiple large-screen displays, MediaShout programs, synchronized projection scenes and loads of music and effects cues… that rival anything a secular theatre or concert venue is producing."
Staffing Issues
One major area of difference between secular and religious performance venues, however, is in the staffing. It's a consistent refrain from systems integrators that they have to program increasingly complex systems in a manner that lets them be operated by the volunteer staffers that most HOWs rely on.
"They… require different levels of operator acumen and very often quite different needs," states Kurt Bevers, director of technical engineering for Delta AV in Milwaukie, OR. "The simplest way to integrate all of this is to control the whole thing from touch panels. This enables us to keep [access to controls] away from the folks that shouldn't be trying to do things out of their depth, but hand the necessary technology to the guys who know how to use it."
Bevers says the strategy that's emerged from this is a set of ever-more-sophisticated control pages in the Creston/AMX-type automation systems they use. "In about 80 percent of the churches we do, at least one night a week require nothing more than (a simple system)," he explains. "Without a control system in the plan, they would have to have an engineer on site just to get the system up and down and to make the minor changes that are required. With a touch-panel controller, we build an entry screen that lets them choose what type of event it is; then they move on to the next screen that gives them the appropriate controls and nothing else. As you move up the technology and production ladder, more and more of the system functions and features become available as needed for the type of function that is being presented."
The reference earlier to AEG and Live Nation was facetious, but just barely. In fact, more and more HOWs with significant systems installed are renting out their performance facilities to third-party – and very secular – promoters and event producers. This is in part to help compensate for an ongoing decline in the donations that are used to fund all of the church's operations. According to a 2009 Christianity Today International survey, tithes and offerings comprise 87 percent of the church budget, and nearly 40 percent of congregations responding said that current economic conditions have resulted in a decrease in weekly giving by two percent or more last year. But, says Gary Zandstra, it's also a tactic to introduce more people in the community to the church itself. "Once they've got you through that door for a concert, you may be more likely to return on Sunday," he says. This also often makes HOW performance facilities less expensive to rent than competing conventional venues. However, HOWs do have to pay taxes on any for-profit uses of the space in order to maintain their tax-exempt status.
As live performances continue to play a bigger role in entertainment revenues streams, HOWs will become bigger factors in the overall venue and venue systems equation. What's holding many of them back, says La Torre, is a lack of understanding of what venues need in terms of acoustics and a failure to properly budget for all of the systems and their installation. "What they have to realize is that every church service is, in fact, an AV presentation, and that there really should not be a great difference between what a goes on every worship day and a special presentation. It's just the scope of the project that differs," he says.
