Remember to breathe! That's good advise, and as we're reminded today by our guest columnist Mike Sessler, it's also good advice to remember to pray. Last week, we wrapped up the back to school and back to church "tech crunch" season. In all of its busyness, summer 2012 brought us a fantastic variety of projects, and all, in one way or another, stretched us to become better at what we do. Some days, we were lots more tired, too.
A trend that we're noticing is that churches are growing larger by becoming smaller. That seems counterintuitive, of course. I'm hardly a church growth expert, but many churches today have made a shift to take church (if you will) to the people, as opposed to trying to get people to "come to church." I think that it's working.
Just this Summer, we have worked closely with churches in Columbus, Pittsburgh, Sioux Falls and other places that are planting what some might call satellite or multi-site churches.
Three of the churches have opened new services in local high schools. All have some challenges with the facilities and logistics, but having the opportunity to open a 1000 seat auditorium for worship in a matter of weeks is an exciting option. The church in Pittsburgh received a full audio system, based around the Presonus StudioLive and Electro-Voice speakers. For the other, we installed a three Da-Lite screens and Panasonic projectors, along with providing a bunch of video gear to make the portable video venue a reality.
Another Columbus church began its 4th local campus in a commercial strip mall/center with a new Soundcraft console, and existing JBL speakers. The first service went so well that they're already looking for another space, just a month after the first service. 700 seats wasn't enough. Nice!
High schools aren't always for church. In September, we commissioned a new football field sound system (subwoofers and all) for North Union High School in Richwood, OH. Thank you to the good people at Atlas Sound who came through like champs and helped us with a complete redesign -- just 10 days from start to finish. How's that for cramming 4-5 weeks of planning into about a week? The athletic boosters and fans were thrilled 100% with the end result, just in time for Friday night football.
We've never done a church in a restaurant, but the crew pulled two weeks of 3rd shift work at a local Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant. Those are always an adventure. Imagine installing a combination of 70 new projectors, screens and TV's while keeping the restaurant open all but one day in a two-week period.
Add a conference room system, upgrading two large-format screens and projectors for a church in Cleveland, installing a complete audio system with Roland digital mixer and Electro-Voice speakers for rural church in Ohio, and the rest of the normal business we do on a national scale, and it's no wonder that I didn't have time for a vacation.
Thank you to all of you who had a part. I'm glad that we could be helpful, and I'm glad to be sleeping more in the second half this month, as we prepare to upgrade a permanent audio system for the church with four campuses, and as we begin the design phase for a new church under construction here in Ohio.