Five14 Church
Columbus. OH
Five14 Church Finds Its Home
From portable to permanent, Clark Productions guided this Ohio church’s media technology into its first brick-and-mortar location
Named for Matthew 5:14, the verse that gave us the widely used “city set on a hill” metaphor, Five14 Church, the community formed as a portable pop-up church in 2010, recently opened its first physical plant, in the New Albany suburb of Columbus, Ohio. It was a lengthy process, beginning in 2016 and lasting through (and extended by) the COVID-19 shutdown, but resulting in a 50,000-square-foot ground-up facility that includes an auditorium seating over 700 worshippers, a generous lobby space, a comfortable gathering room, a nursery, separate pre-school and kids areas, and administrative offices. Throughout that entire process, Clark Productions was right by the side of founding Pastor Joel Kovaks and his worship team, helping them choose the audio, video and lighting technologies that would truly make this new house of worship a shining city set on a hill.
“Clark had the benefit of being brought in on the project at the very beginning, during the planning and design phase,” recalls Clark Project Manager Tysen Bowling, referencing how the Clark team helped steer the original construction concept away from a planned metal building to a concrete-walled design, to better contain the sonic energy of the dynamic, vibrant live music that Five14 Church is noted for. “We saw that there was a residential neighborhood just beyond a few rows of parking on one side, and we suggested they check the local noise ordinances, which could have really impacted them,” says Bowling. Such a fundamental change required additional fundraising, but it also enabled Five14 Church to maintain the level of performance excellence that has made it a leader in its style of worship while being conscious of the surrounding community and local ordinances.
The Right Sound
And that kind of application of Clark’s significant expertise and experience characterized the rest of the project. For instance, the new auditorium seats about 700 in a wide fan-shaped configuration with a relatively low ceiling, which is always a challenge for accurate and consistent sound-system coverage. Jonathan Robertson, Clark’s Project Engineer on the project, and Ed Crippen, the integrator’s audio specialist, collaborated on a unique system design in which four hangs of two d&b audiotechnik 24S speakers were rotated horizontally and rigged via a customized bracket. “Some system designers tend to default to line arrays for almost any space, but we could see that that wasn’t going to work here,” Robertson explains. “The d&b 24S is a great box and it’s flexible, so we were able to use it this way to achieve optimum coverage of this wide space.” The sound system is rounded out with four d&b 12S speakers flown from a yoke and installed as delays in the room, eight 8S speakers across the lip of the stage used as front fills, and nine floor-mounted d&b 21S subs, which add a visceral kick to Five14’s music. An Allen & Heath dLive S5000 console is used to mix front of house.
The Big Picture
Five14 Church’s worship space sounds great, but what first catches the eye upon entering is its 16-foot-tall by nearly 50-foot-wide LED video wall, comprised of three 16 X 9 3.91-mm pitch units joined and flown just above head height, and spanning nearly the entire length of the stage, displaying I-Mag images, song lyrics, and color graphics.
Five14 Church’s leadership has always been exceptionally curious and forward-thinking when it comes to technology — Pastor Joel had carefully researched the AV systems in other churches, including the well-known Northpoint Church in the Atlanta area — itself also a Clark AV project. The first major challenge of the budgeting process was to develop a high-functioning, but strategically scalable AVL system that would elevate their current experience and allow for future growth, while not exceeding the original target budget. “Five14 prioritized clean and simple stage design that is easily reconfigurable, translates to streaming video well, and utilizes a large 9-foot-by-48-foot LED screen flown above the stage, just overhead height of the speaker onstage,” says Bowling. The processing for the screen includes three Barco ImagePro II Jr. all-in-one video scalers, three NovaStar MCTRL660 controllers, and a ProVideoPlayer multi-screen media server with screen-mapping capabilities for live events, as well as a Blackmagic Design switcher and camera system. And those LED screens are complemented by an equally impressive lighting system using ETC Source Four LED ellipsoidal fixtures and Chauvet moving heads.
Streaming Ahead
Like many churches, Five14 Church resorted to streaming its services during most of the Covid-19 shutdowns, and they had already been using the Fusebox solution for that. But in another example of how Clark works with clients to achieve the best technical outcomes at the most affordable cost, Clark engineers enhanced the streaming capability by providing two new BMD URSA broadcast cameras along with the cabling infrastructure for them. “They already had their encoder, so we provided the output to it from the video systems we installed,” says Robertson. “So they had a streaming solution they were already familiar with but that had been significantly updated.”
That, says Pastor Joel, helped Five14 Church throughout the COVID shutdown. “We could now broadcast anytime we want,” he says. “It looked good, it sounded good. We could come in this room anytime we wanted and connect with all of our people all around the state or anywhere else. It was amazing that even though we were closed and couldn't bring people in, we had a system that was ready to do whatever we needed it to. It truly was amazing and it was completely turnkey.”
The church’s new AVL systems could have been a bit intimidating for its staff, which is 90 percent volunteer-driven, but Clark considered that from the beginning, designing a system that is easy to operate and providing comprehensive training on it for the church’s staff. “Coming from a portable location, what we're doing in this building couldn't be any more different than the way we did it,” says Five14 Church Technical Director Ryan Donovan. “None of my volunteers had any experience with this type of audio or camera equipment. And the learning curve was the same for me overseeing everything — I felt like I was drinking from a fire hydrant for six months! But Clark helped us build a system that was easy to use and then they did the training that helped us learn the systems and set us out on the right foot. It’s been a game-changer for us.”
Pastor Joel understands the need to do AV technology right. “The past seven years there's been a major evolution of what it means to be a church that uses media to communicate what that feels like, how that lands in society,” he states, while emphasizing the need to balance the intensity of the technology with the authenticity of the message. When it came to Five14 Church, he wanted to hand his vision of that technology over to people who would understand it and be able to realize it. “We’re theologians, you know, we study the scriptures and how to lead people in worship and teach and communicate,” he says. “I wanted to bring in a specialist. And we just knew, from the beginning, we were going to use Clark.”