HOUSE OF WORSHIP: TECHNOLOGY
Turning ‘No’ Into ‘Yes’ Church of the Highlands overcomes technological limitations with digital audio. By Anthony Vargas One of the biggest challenges for a successful multi-campus church is ensuring that its audio and video technology is truly equal to the needs of a growing ministr y. Many rapidly growing churches eventually find that their existing AV technology is limiting what they are capable of, and as their ideas for worship programming become more ambitious, the answer to the question “Can we do this?” is too often a resounding “No.” Alabama-based Church of the Highlands is one such growing ministr y that
A view from the FOH mixing position. The two mixing consoles allow for one console to be used as a fader-expansion rig and provide redundancy in case one of the consoles experiences a system failure.
wanted to overcome the technical limitations of its existing systems in order to create a worship experience that matched its growing ambitions. To that end, the church recently invested in a large-scale audio upgrade at its Grants Mill AL broadcast campus, and it is currently in the planning stages for an accompanying video upgrade. The Grants Mill broadcast campus seats 2,600 in a fan-shaped layout with stadium-style seating in the rear of the room. In addition to the broadcast campus, Church of the Highlands is composed of 19 satellite campuses located throughout Central Alabama. Each week, the satellite campuses host their own local worship ser vices, and the satellite campuses also stream a spoken-word teaching segment delivered at the broadcast campus. As Church of the Highlands’ Audio Director, Marc Johnson, described it, “Highlands follows the onechurch-many-locations multisite model. Local worship [is] done at each campus, and the main broadcast location [originates] the message content for all campuses. There are local campus pastors and local worship teams at each of the [19 satellites]. Local content is used at each location until the message portion, at which time all campuses get a near-real-time stream of the message portion from Pastor Chris Hodges or other guest pastors.” He continued, “The audio broadcast studio is responsible for the audio content that is sent outside the main broadcast auditorium to other campuses for livestreaming, archive recording, on-demand playback and prison-ministr y distribution.” Johnson leads a team of 18 technicians and 24 Sound & Communications June 2019