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The Meeting House Church has three venues on their Carlisle, PA campus: a traditional sanctuary, a gym-natorium and a more modern theatrical-style auditorium (shown). Photography ©Spire AVL
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The Meeting House Church, based in Carlisle, PA, recently acquired property from a church in nearby Dillsburg, PA. The new venue was completely renovated and built into a video venue using Digital Projection projectors. Photography ©Spire AVL
The Meeting House Church is all about options. Based out of Carlisle, Pa., the church not only features different types of sermons to satisfy a diverse group of congregants, but services multiple locations as well.
However, this isn't a mega-church, but instead a way to serve more congregants in a smaller, more intimate setting. It's also extremely high-tech.
It all started when the church moved into its current flagship Carlisle location in 1985. Ever since, the church has been growing—and outgrowing its venue. To accommodate everyone, the church started streaming live sermons from the sanctuary to a multi-purpose auditorium on the lower level in the early 2000s. This allowed the church to include more attendees every Sunday.
“Initially people weren't too open to the idea. They thought, ‘There's no way that I'm going to be able to go to church and sit and watch a video and get anything out of it,'” says Scott Hallman, executive pastor at The Meeting House. “It didn't take too long for some people to actually get to the point where they were saying, ‘You know what? I like the video better. I can see better, and I actually prefer it.'”
In fact, people loved it so much, the church continued to grow even more. In 2007, both rooms were bursting at the seams, so they added a 650-seat auditorium. Then in 2015, a second campus was opened in Dillsburg, about 10 miles away.
Projecting the Brand
To keep costs down, the church wanted to record the Thursday night sermon in Carlisle and deliver it on Sunday to the congregants in Dillsburg. While that was going on, Carlisle would offer a live Sunday sermon in the sanctuary, while streaming it to additional congregants in the auditorium. The Carlisle-based design and integration firm Spire AVL was hired help make it all possible.
Spire AVL set up cameras to capture the service in the Carlisle location, as well as a brand-new projector. Digital Projection’s HighLite Laser Projector was purchased to be paired with the biggest of three screens in the Carlisle auditorium, after an older model had stopped working. The main screen delivers the live sermon from the sanctuary, while two side screens are showing secondary content.
“We’ve really grown to trust Spire and their decision-making, and they were real up-front and gave us a good summary of the different options that we had moving forward,” says Hallman. “What sold the deal on this was the maintenance over time. It seemed to be a good move forward financially for us.”
Spire reps told the church’s leadership that besides cleaning the dust filter on occasion, the HighLite is reported to be incredibly low maintenance because it uses laser technology and that it doesn’t need lamp replacements and boasts a 20,000-hour projected lifespan. This was good news to church leaders, who had been previously spending $1,300 on a new lamp every year. Spire’s management says another bonus is that the HighLite Laser Projector also produces a gorgeous image.
“The previous projector was a 14,000-lumen projector and we replaced it with an 11,000-lumen projector,” says Tyler Hoffman, owner and design principal at Spire AVL. “Because there is no light projected to represent black, the contrast is very high, therefore allowing the human eye to focus on whatever is being projected and not on kind of that black light that surrounds people in a video frame. So it allowed us to go down to 11,000-lumens, yet perceivably gain intensity. So it looks far brighter than the 14k ever did.”
Despite different projectors and different locations, the two campuses are both part of The Meeting House Church. They are connected in name—as well as via technology.
To make that connection, Spire AVL installed cameras that can capture the Thursday night sermon, which is then broadcast to congregants in Dillsburg on Sunday mornings. The church calls that Thursday program a “Dialogue,” since it doesn’t have any music and includes a Q&A. Dillsburg congregants enjoy the recorded presentation on Sunday, which is broadcast to a large screen via DPI’s E-Vision 7500 projector. Two side screens show additional content using a pair of E-Vision 6500s.
The Dillsburg setup is very similar to the auditorium in the Carlisle location, which has only two projectors in the sanctuary venue. Every Sunday, those two projectors flank the sides of the church, showing secondary content to complement the live sermon. Then, everything is streamed to the auditorium as it happens live.
“This is not a franchise way of doing church,” Hallman says. “Yes, they’re going to have the name The Meeting House, they’re going to have our color palate, our brand, our logos, and all those types of things. But we don’t want people to go there and say, ‘Oh, this is just like the auditorium service in Carlisle.’ We’re not replicating it that way.”’
Diversity
To appeal to the diverse congregation, the church offers a variety of services. On Sunday, the first hour is a classic sermon. “Classic is a more traditional approach to worship; it’s not completely void of any contemporary songs, but those contemporary songs, if done, would be done with a traditional flavor,” Hallman says. The second hour is an acoustic service, which Hallman says is, “more like a coffeehouse approach to worship.” It features acoustic guitar, piano, percussion, and bass. “It has a much more of an intimate feel to it.” The auditorium also offers two more modern services, which include bass, drums, electric guitar, and more.
Currently, the main sanctuary in Carlisle seats about 400, with the auditorium able to accommodate 650 more. The Dillsburg location houses another 300. Each location features multiple screens, designed to pack a big punch without overpowering the room.
“It allowed us to maximize our platform space without making it need to be really, really big,” says Hallman. “It still made the room very intimate and small, but uses the video very effectively. For us to have a full-size screen—that would have made our platform need to be pretty big, and then that would have made it feel so much more presentational.”
Despite the personal touches, every Sunday at The Meeting House Church is a big AVL production. In the Carlisle location, there’s typically one person mixing audio, one running the sermon content and recording, and another person running with projection and lighting. However, Spire AVL tried to make the process as simple and smooth for The Meeting House technical team.
“Spire was super, super helpful with us, because we had specific things that we were looking for in a system,” says Hallman. “We wanted a quality image, so that means it needed to be true HD. We wanted it to be clean, clear, and good. We wanted redundancy, so if we lost the video feed we could switch to another channel and just keep the sermon going. It had to be user-friendly. We didn’t want it to be super complex where we’re having multiple channels of media content mixed together every Sunday, because that would have just been labor-intensive.”
It also needed to integrate with the church’s current video system. “Our video systems are pretty complex, and because we have a lot of money in it, we can’t upgrade everything in one shot,” says Hallman. “We needed something that could integrate well with what we currently have across all our video platforms, and they were able to do that really, really well for us.”
With the church constantly growing, some would assume that The Meeting House would want to go the mega-church route. At one point back in 2006, they did have a plan to create a 1,250-seat auditorium. However, the multi-site experiment has paid off. “We’ve discovered that it’s much more effective for us to stay small and introduce more and more venues,” says Hallman.
Hoffman certainly agrees. “We’ve seen a lot of mega-churches not doing well, mainly because of leadership changes, which is pretty common, and carrying all of the debt with them,” he says. “I think The Meeting House vision is definitely a forward-thinking vision and a great plan for the future.”
