Church of the Highlands in Birmingham, Alabama, transformed an auxiliary auditorium into a full sound stage, dubbed Motion Studios, during the pandemic.
If there’s any one lesson that has been learned in the church market during the past few years, it’s the importance of flexibility. Of being committed to a certain vision, but being willing to remain open-minded and adjust the means necessary to achieve that vision. To consider it from a different perspective.
In an industry that has historically struggled at times to embrace change, however, there have been widespread signs that the pandemic season has not only enabled many churches to change for the sake of survival, but has also allowed some to thrive by shifting their direction on how best to reach their audience.
Times change, design accommodates
It’s been widely confirmed how important it is for churches to maintain an online presence for their attendees who aren’t comfortable with an in-person experience. But what’s intriguing is how some churches are serving that audience by repurposing their current facilities.
“Once COVID hit, we saw most of the churches we work with realize how important it is to continue to reach their audiences when in-person gatherings were either more difficult or impossible,” says Luke Roetman, a business development specialist at Atlanta-based AVL integration firm Clark. “They also wanted to keep their services engaging for those that felt more comfortable tuning in online.”
Roetman and Clark have worked extensively with 12Stone Church, a multisite megachurch based on the northeastern edge of metropolitan Atlanta, to turn its main auditorium into a room that can simultaneously serve multiple audiences.
12Stone Church Production Director Taylor Davis describes the staging setup at its Sugarloaf Circle campus as a family room on one side of the live performance stage, and a coffee shop on the other.
When organizations were first asked to shut down in early 2020 as a means of combating the pandemic, the 12Stone ministry team sprang into action to encourage its congregation to still stay engaged with the church by viewing services at home and organizing “watch parties” with friends and family.
From this effort, “12Stone Home” was born as a way of offering stronger connection between the church and its attendees, encouraging the continual development of relationships and maintaining a feeling of community with the broader church.
Through a collaboration between multiple staff teams, and many hours spent on Google and Pinterest, a very unique stage experience was born.
Once in-person restrictions were lifted, there still existed a strong desire to keep the connection with the online audience and further develop that smaller-group, relational feel for a service experience, while simultaneously meeting the needs of those choosing to attend in person.
Through a collaboration between multiple staff teams, and many hours spent on Google and Pinterest, a very unique stage experience was born.
By thinking differently about its existing stage space and production capabilities, the 12Stone team was able to rework its space and essentially serve two markets at the same time, in the same venue.
“We really felt like we were in mostly uncharted waters as far as church world goes, so we really dug deep on what we thought would make people watching at home or at a coffee shop feel the most comfortable,” says Taylor Davis, the 12Stone production director. “We landed a little literal in that we built a living room on one side of the stage and a coffee shop vibe on the other.”
By thinking differently about its existing stage space and production capabilities, the 12Stone team was able to rework its space and essentially serve two markets at the same time, in the same venue.
With simple but modern décor on both the left and right side wings of the stage, the team created two casual seating areas that could be used for various on-camera sermon elements that needed to be packaged in a more laid-back wrapper.
But by also keeping its existing LED wall and higher-production look in the center-third of the stage, the 12Stone team redefined the stereotypical concept of “stage design” and created a multi-faceted experience to serve two audiences: casual set for the online audience, and higher-production set for the worship experience, all while being able to utilize the same Production spaces and technology for both.
By also keeping its existing LED wall and higher-production look in the center-third of the stage, the 12Stone team redefined the stereotypical concept of “stage design” and created a multi-faceted experience to serve two audiences ...
12Stone’s approach of a multi-purpose main stage is unique in one regard, in that they may be on the bleeding edge of that concept. However, the idea of redefining the purpose of existing church facilities is one that has been broadly embraced.
The midweek studio space takes shape
Many ministries have taken offices, kids’ rooms, or lobby spaces and turned them into midweek studio space to shoot online content ahead of the weekend. And depending on how greatly those spaces were needed to support in-person ministry, it’s been common for churches to keep those “temporary” studio spaces set up longer-term.
Birmingham, Alabama-based megachurch Church of the Highlands found itself in this situation in the summer of 2020. With three major conferences on the event schedule in a six-week period, the church had to pivot to marketing those events exclusively as online-only experiences. But the production demands for them wouldn’t allow the church to use its existing auditorium stage due to how it was needed to support recordings for weekend services.
With the state having imposed in-person restrictions at that time, [Church of the Highlands' auxiliary auditorium] venue wasn’t needed for its designated purpose. So it was transformed into a large sound stage.
Motion Studio rehearsal, Church of the Highlands, Birmingham, AL
The church had built an auxiliary auditorium a decade prior to support various ministries and to serve as an additional seating venue on Sunday mornings. But with the state having imposed in-person restrictions at that time, the venue wasn’t needed for its designated purpose. So it was transformed into a large sound stage.
With the extensive set-related needs for two of the conferences in question, the decision was made to remove all of the seats from the auditorium and use the main floor as the set and the build-in stage as the Production booth, since the former has roughly four times the square footage as the latter. By thinking “backwards” in its space utilization, the Highlands team was able to design a larger, more immersive experience that created a dynamic online experience for conference attendees watching around the globe.
The success of that experience led the church’s leadership team to draw up conceptual plans for what a permanent redesign of the room would potentially look like: sections of the main seating area that could be used for live or post-production shoots but curtained off if not in use, while allowing a swath in the middle of the room to still function as a seating area for in-person events.
While Highlands shifted back to its main auditorium as a production hub once attendance restrictions were lifted, 12Stone’s investment in a dual-audience model is one made with a longer term view in mind.
Ahead of the curve
However, its intentionality in cross-pollinating between the online and in-person experience is one that Victory Church has been doing for several years. Even before COVID, the Norcross, Georgia-based megachurch was using a portion of its lobby, outside the café, as a live set during and between services. There, hosts would address the online audience, chat with passers-by, and interview staff pastors about that day’s message and its practical application.
Even before the pandemic, Victory Church in Norcross, Georgia, was using a portion of its lobby, outside its café, as a live set during and between services. Image: Marcellus Walls
It was a strategic way of helping everyone in its ministry realize that the online and in-person audiences didn’t have to be seen as two separate entities; they were, in a way, two sides of the same coin.
And when it comes to the overlap between the online and in-person experience, 12Stone’s Davis agrees. “We believe that what it communicates is oneness. This is why we’ll keep driving the experience the direction we’re currently growing, and we’ll continue to change in order to do it better.”
[Editor's note: This article was originally published Dec. 2022]
