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Scottsdale Bible Church's team updated an aging 2,000-seat worship center at the heart of its Arizona campus. It practiced strong economic stewardship by finding ways to reuse its existing AVL equipment base. Images by Greg Vatt, Artistec Media LLC.
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The production booth was moved to the center of the room to provide both a better place to mix and better camera locations. Stadium seating along with a new rear-seating plan improved sightlines throughout the room.
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The redesigned room offers improved sight lines for the live audience and better camera angles for broadcasts sent to the church's remote campuses. New cameras include two Panasonic AG-HPX370 cameras and an AG-AF100 camera on a motorized slider for center-wide coverage.
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The church's 35-year-old main sanctuary acts is a hub for worship, performance and broadcast. Styles of worship in the sanctuary are both blended and modern with a Saturday night 5 p.m. service that's band-driven.
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"Renovation marks the church's shift from educational/institutional to relational." - Troy Peterson, Pastor of Worship and Creative Arts, Scottsdale Bible Church, Scottsdale, AZ.
Renovation is a fact of life for growing houses of worship. Like the productions they host, evolving worship centers must maintain a balance of technology and creativity to stay current, as well as meet the expectations of the congregation for more modern or more traditional worship—and, frequently, both. Add to that some budget constraints and you have the recent challenge faced by Scottsdale Bible Church Pastor of Worship and Creative Arts, Troy Peterson.
“We had both a strong vision for the room and a major challenge of working with what our budget allowed,” recalls Peterson. As a result, the team embarked on a two-year mission to update an aging 2,000-seat worship center at the heart of its Scottsdale, Ariz., campus and, for AVL technology, that meant finding ways to revisit and reuse the existing equipment base.
As anyone who has lived through a major venue upgrade can attest, putting a “new face” on a room can be a risky business, but the time was right. “The health and vitality of the church remains at an all-time high,” Peterson states. “With so much change over the past few years in various parts of the church, our new worship center has been a major step in the church’s revitalization. We’re coming into a new season.”
Peterson knows something of renewing worship centers, having led a building project for a 2,500-seat worship center in Pennsylvania in 2004. “There, I was able to help a church that was about half the size of Scottsdale Bible navigate toward a more modern approach to worship,” he recalls. With his help, the church flourished with more modern technology. His experience with physical improvements and creative engineering made Peterson the perfect choice to direct creative arts and the renovations at Scottsdale. “I was excited about the opportunity to work with the multiple campuses at Scottsdale and I felt I had enough drive and experience to take another crack at re-launching a program,” he says.
Shortly after Peterson’s arrival six years ago, he was joined by Technical Director Nick Palomo. Palomo had worked closely with Peterson at his previous assignment in Pennsylvania as a musician, and ultimately fell into a technical role—something he is well suited for. Since his teenage years, Palomo has volunteered in local churches and played saxophone in praise bands. At a pastor’s request, he started tinkering with audio equipment to help the band sound better. His developing skills were soon being challenged by local professionals. “I started helping a local sound company and with technical direction at a popular theater in Davenport, Iowa,” he recalls. He reports learning from his experience with touring sound companies as he helped with big load-ins and various shows. His move to Pennsylvania was the result of a commitment to a church plant where he would set up and tear down for services and produce website podcasts. He connected with Peterson playing on a live worship album and they kept in touch as Palomo’s technical roles grew to supporting district events at arenas. “That prepared me for the production director role and our work here in Scottsdale,” he says.
Worship Space Re-envisioned
The total redesign of Scottsdale’s main worship center was a bold move and part of a larger initiative to make the entire campus more contemporary, shifting the church’s focus from educational/institutional to relational. With a 53-year history and local campus with six performance venues, including multi-purpose, a children's worship space, three youth venues, and a cafe, the church’s 35-year-old main sanctuary acts as a hub for worship, performance and broadcast. Styles of worship in the sanctuary are both blended and modern with a Saturday night 5 p.m. service being band-driven and Sunday 9 and 11 a.m. services featuring as many as 125 voices in the choir and a 50-piece orchestra. The room also hosts regular concerts, conferences and outreach events. Though reconstruction activities started in 2013, the project was in the making for two years prior after a “blue sky” session with creative designer Visioneering Studios of Irvine, Calif. The design meeting impacted the campus overhaul and sparked ideas for Peterson and Palomo for a renewed worship center.
"Our goal was to help point to the future by building upon the past—not tear down the past."
Troy Peterson
Pastor of Worship and Creative Arts, Scottsdale Bible Church, Scottsdale, AZ.
The redesign of the main sanctuary focused on structural changes that would both create a more modern worship setting and facilitate production. The ceiling above the stage was removed to provide more room for lighting and rigging, and the production booth was moved to the center of the room to provide both a better place to mix and better camera locations. Stadium seating along with a new rear-seating plan improved sightlines throughout the room. With structural changes taking more than six months, services were moved to other areas on campus. While Peterson was concerned about the room being unavailable for worship, he had a plan. “We scheduled the work in our ‘down’ season,” he says, “and encouraged them to take the time to check out our other worship venues and campuses.”
Budget & Gear Choices
One of the most significant challenges Peterson and Palomo would face with the redesign of the main sanctuary was budget restriction for new equipment. They enlisted the help of Armando Fullwood, executive director of Wave in the Charlotte, N.C., area who had worked other projects with the team and understood the church’s need to work on a tight budget. “Our objective,” Fullwood recalls, “was a room with [a] more modern feel; one with more flexibility that would connect with a multi-generational congregation.” Fullwood attributes the company’s success with worship spaces to making it about the story and the experience, designing for emotion in the room and not a ‘storybook’ picture in a magazine.
Fullwood’s goal for audio at Scottsdale was to use whatever equipment was available to create a true stereo system where every seat would have the same quality. “I don’t value seat count over experience in the seat,” he says. “I need to make sure every seat experience is matched.” A redesign of the sanctuary's acoustical space was key to his plan.
Design Principal Paul Henderson of Wave implemented a plan to reshape the room acoustically to best match the church’s evolving worship programs. Removing the ceiling in key sections of the space both improved access for theatrical rigging and helped to balance the reverberant response of the room to a more contemporary voicing. In addition, ceiling clouds were carefully positioned over the new stadium seating. “With the new room design, absorption and reflection patterns were matched to the behavior of the renovated loudspeaker system,” Henderson says, “avoiding problematic late reflections while maintaining strong early reflections to assist with congregational singing.”
With the tech booth in a better position at the middle of the room, Fullwood was able to revamp the system using many of the existing components, including 16 EAW KF761 three-way line array modules in a left-right configuration in four hangs to preserve sightlines and equal coverage for the room, along with a delay ring system employing three EAW MK2396 two-way full-range loudspeakers. “I knew the value of the design of the box and how it would perform when tuned,” Fullwood recalls. “Knowing the musical content and the room, I saw no point in throwing them out.” The Wave team also modernized the redesigned audio setup by building new filters using a Meyer speaker processor.
To cover the audio low end, four Bag End D18 subs were reinstalled under the stage. Six Lab.gruppen FP1000Q power amps were reinstalled to provide amplification. For mixing, the team traded the existing Yamaha PM5D console with an Avid Venue D-Show console from one of the other venues. “It’s a well thought out console,” says Fullwood, “and the plug-in architecture of the Avid mixer lends itself better to the needs of the main sanctuary.” Fullwood, who has worked on other spaces on the Scottsdale campus claims that moving equipment around to the benefit of different rooms both saves money and helps to get the best experience in each room.
As much as 85% of the gear was reclaimed and pressed back in to action.
Troy Peterson
Pastor of Worship and Creative Arts, Scottsdale Bible Church, Scottsdale, AZ.
The Wave team, and Fullwood in particular, welcome the opportunity to do what he calls “redemptive engineering,” that is to say, finding creative ways to reuse and redeploy equipment. Fullwood, who grew up rebuilding vintage stereo gear, describes it as “a deep commitment.” As an example of creative reuse, he offers the repurposing of older 4x3 format projectors as lighting fixtures to improve the look of a room with easy color-matching abilities and projected images. The team has even been known to do repairs and rehabilitate aging lighting fixtures, but Fullwood is quick to add that his efforts must fall well within the client’s comfort zone and meet the objective to improve overall quality.
In fact, after about two years of redesign work on the Scottsdale campus, Fullwood claims that all of the rooms are improved and as much as 85% of the gear—much of which was reclaimed from equipment closets—has been pressed back in action. “It’s easy to put new gear in a building,” he says, “but much harder to bring older gear up to a standard to meet modern day expectation. You need to intimately know what the products will do and you don’t get to guess at anything.”
Lighting With A Vision
According to Wave’s design associate, Trey Smith, who was responsible for a new lighting plot and programming lighting control, the plan to renew Scottsdale’s lighting was to reuse mostly owner-furnished gear and to redeploy in a new network infrastructure with new house lighting. According to Smith, “Scottsdale brought over 100 ETC Source Four fixtures to the table that allowed us to provide a light plot that met their needs.” Due to existing building limitations with the catwalk, the front stage thrust where much of the action on stage would take place was out of range of lighting. Wave provided two satellite battens to extend out over the house to handle the issue. ETC Source Four LEDs were used on the battens since access would be more limited and lamp changing more difficult. An old ETC dimmer rack was swapped out with an extra rack that the church had in storage.
A new house lighting system was designed by Wave Engineering Director Justin Hames, who installed using TLS fixtures from The Light Source. 41x RL120 fixtures and 20x SM120 fixtures were deployed in the ceiling painted to invoke a modern faux cloud effect. “The TLS fixtures have a great beam and field coverage compared to many other fixtures on the market,” Smith says, “and they provide the flat and even fields essential for lighting with the least amount of dead spots.”
Tech Booth Reboot
The relocation of the tech booth to the center of the room provided significantly more space for the production teams, along with better vantage points for video and projection equipment, including a central location for two Panasonic AG-HPX370 cameras and an AG-AF100 camera on a motorized slider for center-wide coverage. Two 10x18-foot Da-Lite Cinema Contour screens were reestablished on either side of the stage. In addition, a mobile teaching television is now available on stage. Three Christie projectors, including a 10k lumens unit for center environmental projection and two 7k lumens projectors for the side front walls were reinstalled and a confidence projection provided on the back wall. A major challenge, recalls Hames, was reestablishing connectivity of switchers, recording decks, encoders, and video gear needed by the main sanctuary for the church’s broadcasts to remote campuses. “With the time constraints and many moving parts,” Hames notes, “getting everything connected up and working well was a challenge we had to meet.”
Renewing the sanctuary created what Peterson calls a “healthy disequilibrium.” “Change,” he says, “knocks us off center in a good way.” He summed up the objectives for his team and its willingness to work on a tight budget by saying, “Our goal was to help point to the future by building upon the past—
not tear down the past. Even on a tight budget, working together, we were able to change a lot of little things that make the room feel more current and alive. Now, it’s just a better context for public events and worship. It feels right; not ostentatious, but comfortable.”
