DALLAS, TX — Under the leadership of pastor Ed Young, Jr, Texas' Fellowship Church has experienced exponential growth over the past five years, with typical weekly attendance surpassing the 20,000 mark, and to accommodate growth, Fellowship expanded from its primary campus in Grapevine, Texas (adjacent to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport) to satellite campuses around the metro area: two in nearby suburban communities and one in the Arts District in downtown Dallas. Then, late in 2006, Young established a fourth satellite campus in South Miami, Fla.
Fellowship is using a combination of digital projectors and a system of Meyer Sound self-powered loudspeakers to plug the new Florida campus into the same look, the same sound and the same "virtual teaching" that fills the Texas satellite campuses.
The church's technical staff collaborated with performance engineering firm Clark ProMedia (Atlanta and Chicago) on implementing Fellowship Church's technology at the Miami campus on a fast-track schedule. The system went online less than a week after it was ordered. "Basically, we got a call on Monday, and they wanted to have a service in Miami that following Sunday," recalls Houston Clark, president of Clark ProMedia (CPM).
To fill in for the first weeks, CPM arranged for AV rentals to cover the church's immediate needs, while the company's chief engineer, George Clark, flew to Miami and met with church media director Mike Walker and senior audio engineer Matt Wheeler. To maintain consistency with their other campuses, Walker and Wheeler relied on the same technology suppliers they've been using: Christie Digital for image projection and, for audio, Meyer Sound loudspeakers.
"We first looked at the Meyer line arrays, but the shape of the room did not lend itself to that solution," comments Matt Wheeler, "so we decided on a combination of CQ-1s and UPJ-1Ps for our coverage. We knew that CQs would give us lots of flexibility in the future as we adapted to a fast-changing situation in Miami."
Miami is an admitted "temporary-permanent" system. With main loudspeakers sitting on Genie lifts (partly concealed by pipe-and-drape), the Miami system is composed of, per side, a CQ-1 full-range wide coverage loudspeaker, a UPJ-1P compact VariO loudspeaker and a 700-HP ultrahigh-power subwoofer. Also, "as an experiment," according to Wheeler, they hoisted one M1D-Sub subwoofer over each CQ-1 to augment the mid-bass punch of the system.
M1D arrays also serve as the primary system elements for a temporary system that shuttles in and out of a high school auditorium every week at Fellowship's Alliance site in Justin. In this case, the arrays contain five M1D cabinets and a pair of M1D-Subs per side, supported by matched pairs of 700-HP subs, UPJ-1P units, and UPM-1P wide coverage loudspeakers.
More information is available at http://www.meyersound.com.
