Kent defines Tech Novelty this way:

Tech Novelty is:
Being blinded by the novelty of an exciting new technology and consequently misusing the technology for novelty’s sake. Misuse of technology may be caused by lack of training and/or from the inability to focus on anything except the novelty.

I see this a lot in churches. I have more to say about the topic, but for now, go read Kent’s post. More to come…

We set 3 laptops up around our worship space. During the message, we encouraged people to go to a laptop and “blog” about a particular experiential that impacted their lives. Our web guru, also a Mike, designed a simple form on our web site that would take their entries and pass it to a database on the server via php. The form had a prompt question, and a text box sized to limit the length of the entries (we weren’t looking for a novella, just a few thoughts).

Once the person hit submit, they received a confirmation that their message was sent, and 5 seconds later, the page refreshed (Mike B.–you’re good!). Our Creative Director, Craig, sat in the service with his laptop checking the database via our website admin page (which was also custom designed in large part by Mike B.). As the posts came in, he chose the posts that fit the topic the most closely, and instant messaged them to me via Google Chat. I then took the copy and pasted it into a Keynote presentation. I had build at template that would display the words using the typewriter effect. I adjusted the timing based on a simple 3.5 seconds per line timing that we determined was about the right speed.

During the message, I was receiving the IMs and building the Keynote presentation (which actually resided on our iMac running ProPresenter), while our presentation tech followed our pastor with sermon slides in ProPresenter. Near the end of the message, I saved the Keynote and closed it. During the prayer, we took all lights to black, went to black in ProPresenter and flipped to Keynote. The first slide was black there, too, so the change was seamless if anyone was peaking. We then ran the “blog posts” from Keynote in order to take advantage of the typewriter effect.

At the end of this section, we went back to black, returned to ProPresenter and wrapped up the evening. It was pretty neat to see how people have been impacted by the experientials, and very cool to have their comments on the screen just minutes after they wrote them. Of course, we couldn’t have pulled it off were it not for our great Tech Team (props to Jeff, Ronica, Erik & Les). They truly rocked it tonight and brought their A-game. I’ve always said that one of my goals is to work myself out of a job in the tech booth. I love seeing volunteers so good at what they do that I can concentrate on other activities while they make the service happen with very little input from me. And I love being able to use technology to engage with our congregation in creative ways. That’s what we did this weekend…how about you?

Today, we’ll talk about the right way to outfit a church. That was a joke. You can laugh now. It would be quite presumptuous to think that A) there is a single “right” way to go about outfitting a church with A/V gear and B) that I know what it is and will now tell you. However, after being around churches and their A/V systems for some 20 years, and being the somewhat OCD thinker that I am, and having recently attended WFX where my thoughts were validated over and over, I would like to share some principles that I think are helpful when it comes to choosing A/V equipment for a church. Unfortunately, this process is hard; harder than just asking the GC for a quote, harder than hiring a consultant, and harder than leafing through the latest Sweetwater catalog. Which is why so few churches do it. But here we go.

Step 1: Figure out who you are as a church.
You were expecting, “Decide between digital and analog for FOH?” Sorry to disappoint. Here’s the deal: Your church is not NorthPoint. NorthPoint is not Saddleback. Saddleback is not Grainger. So often I find myself in conversations with pastors, tech guys or worship leaders who will say, “Dude, I just go back from [fill in the mega church here]. They have this awesome board at FOH, I think it’s a [fill in an awesome FOH desk here]. I think we need to look into that for our new building.” My first question is, “Why?” Very few churches really need a PM5D. In fact, for many churches, it would be gross overkill and a misallocation of ministry resources.

Back to the point. No two churches are the same. Your church needs to figure out who you are, who you are trying to reach and come up with the best way to do that. Depending on the answers to those questions (and a dozen more), you will start to get an idea of what the worship gathering should look like. You may find that going all Prestonwood (full rock band, orchestra, 8 vocalists and a 300+ choir) doesn’t really help fulfill your mission. On the other hand, it might.

You also need to evaluate your technical staff. Are they paid or volunteer? What is there skill and commitment level? What can they learn, and who will teach them? Same goes for the musicians. You need to determine the most effective to reach the type of people the church is missionally called to reach. For some churches, a huge band, choir and orchestra work great. For others, a piano and worship leader work far, far better. It all depends on who you are as a church.

Note also that these are not value judgements on a given style of worship. There is a place in the kingdom for mega churches, and there is a place for coffee house churches. Just don’t confuse the two.

Step 2: Determine what kind of facility you need to effectively reach your target market.
Sorry, we’re still not to picking out equipment yet. Why not? Because we don’t even know what kind of room we need to put it in yet. There are hundreds of questions that need to be considered here, and I won’t pretend to give you an exhaustive list. But think about a few of these and more will follow.

What should the worship space look like; traditional, modern, post-modern? Would a fan-shaped seating area work better, or does stadium seating help us better accomplish our mission? Do we need a room that enables us to pull off services that look like a Trans Siberian Orchestra show? Or do we need to bring together a more intimate “hanging out in the living room together” vibe? Does a big, elevated stage with some separation between the stage and seats work, or perhaps a more “theater in the round” concept?

Keep in mind, though I’m using two extremes to illustrate the point, there are hundreds, if not thousands of shades of grey in between. The point is that no one size fits all. I’ve heard of churches who currently have 100 people, more or less, showing up on Sunday that want to build a 5,000 seat auditorium. Even if they could afford it, which they can’t, do you have any idea how uncomfortable that would feel on opening Sunday?

The type of facility must match your mission. That may well be a huge auditorium. Or it may be a movie theater off the metro line. Or a coffee shop. Or another church you rent on Sunday nights. Just promise me you’ll think it through, OK?

Step 3: Determine the type of equipment that works best in your space, with your volunteers and within your budget.

Finally, we get to choose some gear. But notice that we’ve really done the hardest work up front. When equipment selection flows from missional direction and facility appropriateness, you will find yourself upgrading far less often.

Consider one model; an urban missional church dedicated to reproducing itself in a series of smaller, neighborhood-targeted churches. It’s really easy then to determine that spending $65K on a FOH desk is not an effective use of missional dollars. The church, especially if portable at the beginning may be far better served with a $10,000 RSS V-Mixing system. Or a $4,000 analog desk.

Or think about speakers for a second. Everyone wants line arrays right now (and every supplier wants to sell them). However, they really only work well (the operative word being well) in a fairly limited number of environments. And they’re really expensive. So don’t put them in your building just because Willow Creek has them. Go back to questions 1 and 2 and figure out what is the best use of ministry dollars. What helps further the mission of the church? A $200,000 line array that’s total overkill or a $50,000 distributed mono cluster?

While it may appear that I’m picking on churches for spending too much, other churches will spend too little. Both are mistakes. If you believe the mission of your church will be best served by building a large auditorium and going for a Willow/NorthPoint style of worship, then don’t cheap out on the gear. Because if you do, you will replace it not once, but twice. This frustrates the daylights out of me because churches do it over and over, and it’s so predictable. Seriously, do it once, and do it right. You will save tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of dollars.

Now, I’ve been using sound systems here for most of my examples, but the exact same principles apply to lighting, video and presentation. Do you need to have 18×32 HD IMAG screens in a worship center that seats 300? Probably not. But in a 5,000 seat auditorium, you had better think about it. And know that it’s going to be expensive.

If your worship team consists of 4-5 players and a vocalist or two on a small stage, you probably don’t need to budget for 15 moving lights. In fact, depending on the mood you’re trying to create, a few simple fixtures with gels might be just what you need. Think it through.

We’re working through this process right now at Upper Room. As we work to figure out who we are and who we’re missionally called to reach, I’m beginning to make decisions on the kind of gear I’m interested in. For example, as much as I love the M7-CL 48 we currently get to mix on, we simply don’t need that big of a desk in our new iteration. And while it would be cool to go all wireless in-ears for our band, I’m thinking Aviom because we’ll get through sound check faster. Faster will be important in a portable church environment. I’d love to have access to a bunch of moving fixtures (mainly because they’re cool), but since we’ll likely be loading in, setting up and tearing down every week, those are out. In fact, I’m strongly considering going all LED because of their low power draw. Sure, they’re not as bright, but our worship style works best in low lighting anyway. We like to set a darker, more “candlelit” vibe. So I don’t need to throw 50,000 lux on the stage.

As much as possible, I’m making selections based on our mission, and the facility we will use to implement that mission. And I’m not bothered that NorthPoint uses a DigiDesign Venue in their facilities. That would be total overkill for us. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure a 24 channel analog board wouldn’t cut it for them.
Clearly this is not the be-all-end-all discussion on the matter. In fact, I hope this does nothing more than start a bunch of discussions. We can’t choose our equipment in a vacuum. We can’t choose it because it’s what some other church uses. We can’t choose it because it’s what the GC put in the last church he built. It needs to work for each individual church and their mission. Figure that stuff out first, and the church and the Kingdom will be better of.

When it comes to making decisions about what kind of equipment we install into our church buildings, I’ve noticed a few disturbing trends. Some churches think about it roughly 3 weeks before the grand opening. They scramble around, make a few phone calls end eventually ask the electrician to hang the speakers a volunteer picked up on sale at Guitar Center. I wish I was making this up, but if you’ve been around the church for any length of time, you know this happens.

Another strategy is to call in a consultant early on with the direction of wanting the biggest, baddest and best sound, lighting and video systems in the city. $1.5 million later, the church does indeed have an amazing system. But get a look at that price tag. And sadly, many churches that take that route don’t end up with systems that their volunteers can run, so they never get the bang for the buck they hoped they would.

A third strategy is for the church to start off with the good intentions of wanting a quality A/V system. But as the project progresses, and the budget begins to escalate, money is borrowed from the A/V budget. Eventually, the system is “value engineered” and significant compromises made. The thinking goes, “Well, we know we’re cutting here, but people won’t really notice, and if they do, we can upgrade it later.” We all know how that turns out. People do notice–they can’t hear the pastor, the music is too loud or soft, they can’t see the screens because they’re too dim–and they end up upgrading sooner rather than later. Which means they pay for the system twice. As the saying goes, “Most churches are on their third sound system.”

What if there was a better way? What if we could find an appropriate balance between going crazy and ending up with a crappy system? What if, and this may sound just radical, we designed our A/V systems to fulfill the specific mission that particular church is called to? What if, instead of having to fight other departments for dollars, the A/V system was thought of as an integral part of the church’s calling and mission (just like the café or the kid’s wing)? Might that be a more effective way to put a system together? Check back tomorrow and we’ll talk more about that.

If you read this before 10 AM CST on Nov. 11, you can listen live. If not, iLevite is hoping to record the event so you can hear it later. Visit iLevite for more information.

Details are still coming out, but overall, it looks like generally good news for those of us who use wireless mics. I talked a bit with Chris Lyons of Shure and Kirk Longhoffer at WFX, and got a few more details. The short story is that the unlicensed white space devices will be limited to a few unused TV channels in each market, the will use spectrum sensing and geo-location to avoid other signals (which means churches can register their frequencies) and they are not allowed to use channels 14-20.

So overall, it’s good news. Kirk Longhoffer has a more detailed assessment that you can read at his site, TechnoPraxis. I just met Kirk and learned of his site at WFX, and I have to say, it’s a site to check out. Stay tuned for more details, particularly regarding the ruling on the 700 Mhz relocation plans. In the meantime, check out Kirk’s article.

Though I had to leave a day early, WFX was a wonderfully helpful conference. First, it was great to hang out with Colin Burch of FaithTools (and one of his volunteers, Erik). We had a lot of fun together; it’s always great to meet with other tech guys and hear their stories and passions. I also got to meet up with Brian Davis for a little while. Brian introduced me to a few other people I knew of but hadn’t met, and some new friends (Anthony, Kirk and Mark). I really enjoy networking and meeting new people, and putting faces to names/twitter photos. 

I will be recapping the conference in more detail later, but for now, I thought I’d run down some of the cool gear I saw at the Expo. This is in no particular order, just remembering it as I think of it.

Yamaha
There’s a lot of momentum toward digital audio transport right now, and Yamaha finally got on the bandwagon. With the introduction of the SB168-ES, the now have an Ethersound-based solution. The 168 is essentially a 4 space high rack mountable box with 16 inputs and 8 outputs. By connecting to an Ethersound MY card, you can now transport audio back and forth over a single ethernet cable. The channel count will depend on the board in question, but even the lowly LS-9 could do up to 32 channels bi-directionally. The stage box is expected to be shipping in January and retail for around $3,000, give or take.

RSS
Regular readers of this blog will know I’ve been really big on the V-Mixing system of late. I had some really good conversations with several reps and a fair amount of hands-on time. I came away even more impressed. The interface is really usable, the sound is great, and I’m completely enamored by the price point, considering the ability to transport 48 channels bi-directionally. The board has a great feature set, solid options for stage boxes, and some new things in the pipeline that I can’t talk about (I was sworn to secrecy). I will say this; some of the new stuff will be potential game-changers and I will be holding off placing orders for UR’s new system until it’s officially announced early next year. I just wish I could tell you about it!

Lighting
LEDs are the wave of the future. Every lighting booth was full of them. The technology is getting a lot better, and the feature sets are growing. I saw one moving head fixture that could zoom from 8-12 degrees, with full RGB color mixing. The color purity is getting much, much better, and there are more options than ever. Best of all, they draw substantially less power than conventional lights, with nearly the same output in many cases. While we won’t likely be replacing any of the really high-end fixtures like a Mac 700 with an LED unit just yet, for many applications, they are the bees knees. Depending on what we end up doing with the UR plant next spring, I will be looking hard at these. Here’s a sample from Elation.

Kramer
I stopped by the Kramer booth to look at their video over UTP (Unshielded Twisted Pair) products. I’m looking closely at these for sending video from our presentation computer to the projectors because CAT-5 cable is a lot cheaper and easier to use than a VGA or DVI cable once you get past about 25′. I wasn’t sure of the quality–until yesterday. They were sending full 1080i video over 300′ of CAT-5, and it looked amazing. No skew, now color shift, no blurring. It looked like high-def video. Best of all, the products are very affordable. These deserve your attention if you’re dealing with projector runs, digital signage, overflow rooms or any other long distance video application.

There’s more, of course, but that’s all I’ve got right now. Over the next week or so, I’ll write about some other cool stuff I came across.

FaithTools Live
One of the coolest things I got to do was sit in with Colin Burch on the FaithTools Live from WFX podcast. We were also joined by Eric, a volunteer from Colin’s church. Look for the episode in a week or so.

Eric, Colin and Mike record FaithTools using some vintage AKG D190E mics and Colin’s MacBook Pro and ProTools. The old meets the new in recording technology!

WFX Keynote Address
Dave Ferguson of Community Christian Church spoke at the keynote. He gave a great talk on innovation, and the set looked sweet as well. I believe many, if not most, of the lights were LED fixtures. The colors popped and the intensity was right there.

Oddly, in a conference devoted to worship facilities and worship technology, there were a host of technical problems. All the videos appeared to be running from Windows Media Player. I could tell because the play bar appeared at the beginning of every video. I would have gladly lent my MacBook Pro running ProPresenter if they had asked. Also, it was odd that one of the cameras for IMAG appeared to be shuttered at 1/15th of a second. The other one was fine, but every time they switched to the medium/wide shot, there was a shutter effect. Could have been 24p, but it looked shuttered. What’s up with that?

And there were several times when Dave asked for a graphic and it wasn’t there. Or it would pop up after he went on to another point. Made me feel really good about our presentation team. 

That’s not Dave. That’s some other guy. Just wanted to show the set.

I’ve got a lot more for WFX recaps, but that’s all for now. Stay tuned!

• It’s really important to pay attention to your boarding pass, and not talk on the phone while you walk to your gate. I could have sworn it said A3, not E3. Turns out, the two gates are about a 15 minute walk apart. So down and back, it was 30. Oops…
• I do not believe it’s possible to make seats any more uncomfortable than the airlines have managed to. Congratulations.
• George Bush airport is a big place. I am pretty sure I’ve been in towns (and perhaps counties) that are smaller.
• When Super Shuttle describes itself as “shared transportation from the airport to your hotel,” they are not kidding. Today, I shared a ride in a van with 10 of my new, close friends. It reminded me of youth group trips in a 12 passenger van…only much quieter.
• The architecture in downtown Houston is fascinating. Tonight I ate dinner at a place called Cabo (it was very good), which is across the street from a building built in 1882, which has a brand new parking deck built right next to it. You see this all over downtown. The very old, and very new. Somehow, it works.
• I always eat too much at dinner when I’m on the road. And too late. This always makes it hard to sleep. You’d think after spending 10 years on the road a lot, I would have learned by now. But no…
• I’m super-excited to hang out with some friends over the next two days, and to make new friends. And I am really excited about checking out some new gear for Upper Room. 

If I have wireless tomorrow, I’ll post when I can. Thanks for reading!

So far, the white space devices have not been able to successfully detect and avoid wireless mics (and at times even TV stations) more than about 50% of the time. So over the next few years, expect to start having issues with wireless mics, even if you are properly frequency coordinated and under the 698 Mhz range. It’s a jungle out there, and it’s going to get more crowded. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

As for the proposed 700 Mhz band relocation…well, I don’t know how that turned out yet. The final rules are not yet available. But as soon as I hear something, I’ll let you know. As we’ve been saying all along, start making a plan to move out of the 700 Mhz band, whether sooner or later. 

More to come…stay tuned!