Regardless of the worship space – old buildings, renovations, new ground up construction – one fact is true: Lights need Power

LED lighting fixtures, like Bargeheights LED 36 and BAR 252 are perfect examples of low-energy consumption luminaries. There’s even a new wave of very efficient moving head fixtures, like Bargeheights’ MH LED wash. Yes, all of these lights, and more produce crazy amounts of output for a small power draw. But, they still take power. All lights require POWER!

Budgeting for twenty moving lights is awesome and without question is an amazing set of tools to provide to a church lighting designer. However, without an infrastructure of power circuits, the church’s lighting designer will only be able to turn on just a few fixtures.

Power infrastructure is usually a fairly small expense in the big picture of a church worship space renovation or new construction design/build. Sadly, in our experience, it’s the most under valued and frankly the largest oversight in church audio/video/lighting (AVL) design. Power circuits can be integrated into a room and distributed through well documented and labeled receptacles or provided as a single large capacity power source, (called a “company switch”) which provides a great deal of power to energize portable distribution panel and rugged touring grade cable for more flexibility. Communicating these requirements to other trades, the electrical contractor, in particular is critical  Without details of AVL power requirements, an electrical contractors cost estimates within a design/build project will be grossly inaccurate. Further, it’s often the AVL designer that is “blamed” for this financial oversight, further compounding the perceived cost of AVL systems.

lighting design drawing example

Before you purchase a roadcase full of new lighting gear, or sign off on a five or six digit lighting system, make sure there are plenty of power circuits. While you’re at it, why stop at just the bare minimum number of circuits, add an extra 20% to cover new equipment or rented gear for special events down the road.

Warm Lighting Look at Crossroads 25th Event

Normally, at this point in the post I’d rattle off specs of the rig. Sure, my buddy Brad Bramer at River City Lighting pulled together a nice package for a great price. But, this is a diffrent kind of project. A different service. Crossroads is my “home church.” They have loved me, given me a place to serve, and loved my family through the good and not so good steps of life. I volunteered for years, worked for the church part-time, but ironically, never full time. The organization is filled with people I admire and respect deeply. People who live the values they promote. Authentic.

I started as a middle school kid, who wanted to get involved, to have something to do with services. Thankfully, an ETC Express and some altman lekos needed an operator, thus beginning my journey. I watched videos last weekend highlighting 25 years- big weekends and memorable services, some that I participated in. I watched brief clips of lighting cues I wrote 15 years ago. And then, I looked up. And saw this.

Here before me is a console I know like the back of my hand, and a rig I loaded in the day before, because I’ve now spent years doing lighting in the church as a profession-the domino effect of a local church, with a need and an opportunity. The middle school kid became a real lighting guy. And, for some reason, I had the honor of being the guy to light this service. Me? Really?

That tug, the pull into a movement larger than the influence of your own life, the feeling of making art in lock step with a team of people you KNOW and care about. THAT, my friends, IS THE CHURCH. That’s why I love the church.

During the event, Glen walked us through each milestone of the church: first service, first location, current location, expansion, satellite campus, end with folks who’s first experience was that morning. Each person in the room raised a green glow stick into the air symbolizing one life, one story in the journey of Crossroads–one of the most moving moments within a worship service I have ever experienced. An incredible moment. Before I began to strike for the day, I snapped a quick picture:

My Green Stick

;

Pretty much sums up my life.

Today, I opened up a notecard from one of the pastors at Crossroads (who has known me since I was a teenager). The note read, “it wouldn’t have been the same without you. We love you and your family and will always consider you Xroads family.” I cried.

When a church gets it, really gets it, that church is an unstoppable force. The local church is the hope of the world.

Foundations: House Light

I’m sure we talk about house light on this blog statistically more than any other sub-system of light. That’s because it’s the largest, and ironically the most often overlooked. The term “house light” refers to a group of lighting fixtures that provide general-purpose illumination for the “house” (main seating area) of a performance space. House Light is CRITICAL! People attending church services — from your grandmother to a sixteen year-old kid unfamiliar with church – all need adequate illumination to find their seat, read important information on paper, and determine that they are in a room filled with other people. In other words, their participation in the service will be a shared, community, corporate in nature experience. Moreover, every room, worship space or not, needs sufficient illumination for essential tasks: cleaning, working, reading.

House light needs to be dimmable. Modern church services are dynamic in method of presentation (spoken word, to music with full band) and lighting within the worship space should follow the same dynamics. Just as churches desire dimmable stage lighting fixtures, houselight fixtures should be dimmable to enable church lighting designers to follow the dynamics of a worship service.

Especially in the current day and age of energy-efficiency and tightening code restrictions on energy use, churches are presented with an array of choices for house light; LED, fluorescent, HID, and tungsten to name a few. Even more confusing, when project managers and other trades describe a lighting fixture as “dimmable,” one cannot assume this is fully dimmable. Many commercial fixtures, common in larger non-residential buildings dim within a range, say 25% to 100%. While better than no dimming, the modern church demands full dimming, without limitation.  So, always examine the fixture’s specification to verify that “dimmable” means 0-100% dimming.

Check back on the blog for another dose of the Foundations series. Next up- house light color temperature.

Should we? Many moving head lights (BH’s moving line included) have shutters. We can chase the shutters to create rapid flashes of light. But…should we? We can capture the room with a video camera, but should we put this image on the primary video surfaces? We can use a big projector and giant screen upstage of a teacher, but should we use plasma instead? These are not easy discussions, and there are rarely clear cut, black and white answers.

I’ve come to believe that there’s a lot we church production people can do. In fact, very little we can’t. The challenge to design great spaces, exercise sound stewardship of our resources and produce great worship experiences is about asking “Should I?”

Thanks for sharing Mike!!

If you have a pic of your Bargeheights gear in action, drop us a line and your pictures could be featured here!