The Need and The Plan

My church (First Free Church), where I am on staff as the Young Adults and Creative Arts Director, has experienced some major growth in the past two years. Two years ago we where averaging around 900 people each week on a Sunday morning, now we are averaging closer to 1400 a week. With this growth we were presented with a challenge; do we add another service? We currently have two services on Sunday morning. We decided adding a third would not work for several reasons, time of services and drain on volunteers and leadership ranking high on the list of reasons not to. So we looked to see what we could do. We decided to turn one of our multipurpose rooms that was divided into 4 classrooms and make one large worship center. The space totals around 5000 square feet, where we could fit around 300-350 seats, in contrast to our main worship center that holds 600ish. (See the picture below)

The goal was to create a worship space, video venue, which would run simultaneously with the other worship service in our main worship center. The video venue would have its own worship and production team but we would send the teaching each week over live video to that space from the main worship center.

We knew that we needed to create a feel and atmosphere that would not feel like an overflow space where people where sent to watch something on a screen. To goal was to create a venue with its own unique style and feel so that it was truly another worship service with the same message, yet was timed and synced with our main worship center services.

Not only were the room esthetics important in the creation of the space but finding the right equipment and leaning how to create a live video room that made you feel like you are a part of the teaching experience happening in another space was the challenge to overcome that would make this room a success or failure.

Over the next few blogs I will discuss the work we put into the remodeling the space, post some pics, and give some descriptions of what we are doing now to make this worship center flow and work simultaneously with our main worship center on Sunday mornings. I’ll look at what equipment we use and how we use it and even what we could have done better. I hope you find this to be something that helps and inspires you in what you are doing in your ministries and churches.