When it comes to church facilities, Kingdom City – Houston has a unique tail to tell. Most churches are traditionally home to one ministry or one church body and as time moves on all churches go through seasons of expansion and sometimes contraction because of the demographics of the area in which the facility is located. In 2015, during the end of a contraction season in Ashford Community Church’s history, the church found itself with a wealth of unused space, areas which for 25 years was never complete since it’s original construction and a growing overhead of facility expenses. However, what man sees as a struggle, God sees opportunity and directs his people on a course of action. Under the leadership of John Parks, the newly appointed Senior Pastor of Ashford Community Church, a new vision was birthed of the concept of sharing/renting the facilities to other newly formed church plants and smaller congregations who were looking for a meeting place thus creating Kingdom City – Houston, a shared home representing a multitude of nations, languages, and faith experiences.
Enters Elite Pro Audio
Elite Pro Audio was contacted by Pastor John Parks to turn the unused spaces of the church facility into additional sanctuaries so that at any given time the multiple congregations can meet simultaneously. With the vision cast of having the ability to having the potential of three sanctuaries filled with three different congregations meeting at the same time or one congregation using all three sanctuaries at the same time and streaming to the world, Elite Pro Audio assembled their team and colleagues and began the build out phase of acoustically tuning each room, installing the proper infrastructure for audio, lighting and video for in house presentation as well as live stream presentation.
Once the design was completed, the conduit and junction boxes were installed in the main santuary to provide the infrastruction for electrical, A/V and lighting, then the gypsum walls with designed in difussion were installed followed by additional acoustic treatment using Whisperwall track, rockwool acoustical insulation enclosed with Guilford of Maine fabric to perfectly tune the 1000 seat room. The room was also fitted with LED theatrical lighting, and ambient lighting all controlled via DMX as well as 5 camera positions to provide SD video to Black Magic Design group switcher into an Apple Mac streaming software. Optoma projectors were installed as well as confidence monitors for stage personnel which received their feed via Propresentor.
An additional stationary camera was positioned set in a wide position for a close circuit feed to the 48″ LED monitor in the Audio Streaming room in the adjacent building to provide a quiet zone to create a dedicated mix for Live stream. With the networking capabilities of the Allen & Heath SQ7, Fede Rosales, Director of Audio is able to mix remotely from his home studio in Argentina when he is visiting his home.
The other two sanctuaries are able to connect directly to the SQ7 via the Dante network and each sanctuaries’ camera feeds are added to the video switcher to for a multi-room live stream production.
Along with the Allen & Heath Avantis console, custom made speakers by Sonorous were installed providing and exceptional stellar sound for those in attendance in person.