Mike Walker

Satellite Church

In my last 2 years at Fellowship Church one of the things added to my list was to help launch 4 satellite (distributed) campuses (3 of which opened within 3 months of each other).

I come across a lot of churches who want to expand their reach by opening satellite campuses. Whether or not it's for you really depends on your situation, but there are some definite perks to doing satellite church:
1 - If you are already a megachurch and looking to expand, you are talking about $15-20 million easy for a new building to seat 3500-4000 people. You can build a well outfitted (depending on your technology model) building for between $3-10 million. Beyond the costs of building there is also the cost of ownership after you build. Maintaining a building that seats 1500 is a lot easier than 4000 (and less expensive).
2 - It makes you more accessible to other communities that might not know about you, but also might not be inclined to make a drive to your main location. Think about this...a youth department that has a local set up near 8 high schools has more influence than if they just had direct impact on 3.
3 - It gives you opportunity to expand the leadership within your organization. The more you grow the more capable leaders you will need. Having a bunch of great leaders around is never a bad thing...as long as they are led well. A bunch of great leaders without good leadership above them ends up being groups of renegades.

I could keep going, but you get the point.

Over the next few weeks and months we will talking about what things you need to have on your checklist if you are thinking about launching satellite campuses.

Be back soon.

Set Design

July is coming to an end and it's been a busy summer. I had forgotten how much time it takes when starting your own company. During my time at Fellowship I never had time to work with outside clients so it's been a blast working with so many different organizations from across the country.

As the fall is inching closer churches are starting to think about their fall set designs so my time on American Airlines is picking back up again :-)

Since I am getting a lot of questions about what all would be involved in a set design for their organization I thought I would answer some of that here.

Typically speaking what I do is arrange a trip to your location so I can get a better feel for the space as well as catch the vision for what you are trying to pull off. It also allows me to take some pictures, some measurements of the room, and hopefully grab some blueprints of your space.

From there I head back home to meet with a scenic team based here in Dallas. We come up with the design and submit it for your approval. Then, there comes quite a few options. You can:

1 - You can take the rendering and figure out how you want to pull it off
2 - We can provide a list of materials and blueprints so you can have your team or volunteers build it
3 - We can build it in Dallas and have it shipped to you and you put it together on site...OR we can send someone from Dallas to install it with your team or stage hands.

In addition to having pieces built there are always possibilities of renting certain items as well.

If you have a project coming up that you would like some help with or if you have addtional questions about what putting together a design for you or costs or whatever, please drop me an email and I would love to talk with you about your situation.

Video Lock up technology

There are several ways to execute having a video venue. Some churches have elected to keep it as simple as running a DVD on a center screen, some do live video uplinks, we do what we call a "video lock up". We use time code to lock up an HD deck along with a DVcam deck.

Right now to use the lock up technology you would be required to purchase an HD playback deck that will do sympte and a DVcam deck as well. Prices on the HD deck range as cheap as $35k and go on up. I have seen some that people are using in the $95k range. There are a lot of factors in selecting your deck of choice, but a huge one is compression rate. In our application we are blowing the image up on a screen up to 32' wide so the less compression the better.

Television puts their HD signal out there with larger compression rates, but on a small home television it's barely noticeable....on a large format screen you start to notice it quite a bit.

All that being said, I came across a company that does Hard Disk recording/playback for a fraction of the cost of using decks. We just started researching it, but it could be a very cost effective solution for anyone wanting to use the lock up method in the video venue world. We are working on a demo in the next week or so....I'll keep ya posted.

Video Venues

One of the hot topics among growing churches right now is that of satellite campuses or the "distributed church model".

There are several schools of thought out there as to how you should approach them. We are very similar to the model set forth by Northpoint Churches Buckhead Campus.

We do a lock down shot of the pastor that is an iso of Ed with the full stage behind him in HD1080i that is captured at the main campus. We also do a capture of the IMAG cut on DVcam.

At the satellite campus we do a lock up of the HD feed and the DVcam feed via time code. The whole idea is to get you to forget you are watching a video. MOST people have reported that within 5-10 minutes they have forgotten they are watching a video. 

The things that are important to us are:

1 - The lock down video and projection - this is now our pastor - we have to get this right

2 - Audio - Each one of our 3 campuses have really good audio. In my mind this starts with speakers and amps. For two of the 3 campuses we chose Meyer M1d's , HP700 subs, and UPA 1P's for fill cabinets. Each campus also has 2 Mackie TT24's (1 for FOH and 1 for Monitors). Yes, I can admit it, Mackie came out with something I will not only use, but I really actually think they work pretty well.

3 - Lighting - Lighting has always been important at Fellowship Church. We use it, as well as audio and video, to transport people. I think lighting is such an effective tool that churches are still just now figuring out. We don't do much at the satellites, but we do have enough to effectively wash the stage and give the room some texture/color. At the main campus lighting is paramount to the success of the video looking as good as it does.

We have seen continued growth at each of the 3 campuses. As we head in to summer it will be interesting to see how they each do coming in to the fall. We are praying for big things.

Satellites are quite a bit of work and has forced us out of our comfort zone, but I really believe this current piece of technology will have a huge impact on the years to come for the local church