- Hey it's Jake with churchfront.com.
In this video I'm gonna give you a tour
of a church plant that has done a really great job
of building a high quality audio visual and lighting system
on a really low budget.
Yesterday, I went and visited my friend Josh Shaw,
he's the lead pastor at Lighthouse Church
in Lakewood Colorado and Lighthouse is a new church plant,
they're only like two years old.
They started in this little warehouse space
and then they were meeting in a high school.
They were set up and tear down church every week
and just a few weeks ago they were
able to have the opportunity to be able to move in
to a more permanent church building,
to be able to have worship on Sundays
and then also have their offices there
throughout the week and they don't have to do
any set up and tear down on the weekends anymore.
So I went to go visit Josh and we recorded a podcast
which hopefully you can listen to pretty soon here
when I launch the Churchfront podcast.
And I thought it would be a good idea
to bring my camera along, kind of show you
what they're doing at their church,
to take an old, very old church building,
well I guess not very old compared to some,
but older building built in like the 50s or 60s,
or 70s, somewhere in there, hasn't been really
updated since then.
They've taken this old building and they're trying to
transform it to be like, you know, relevant to modern day
culture in a welcoming space for new people
who are visiting their church.
(slow music)
Alright, so I'm in Lakewood, Colorado,
visiting my friend Josh, we're gonna record a podcast
and he's gonna give me a tour of the new church building
his church moved into.
There he is, the man of the hour.
How's it going, man?
- Hey.
- [Jake] Hey, new roof up here.
- [Josh] It's still not fixed, still not fixed.
- [Jake] What happened there?
- Freakin' hail, bro.
- [Jake] Oh, hail storm.
- [Josh] Literally massive.
- [Jake] Oh my gosh.
- [Josh] Just massive balls of ice.
- We get some pretty nasty hail storms here in Colorado
and tornadoes.
- The church was planted in like 1940-something
and Presbyterians built buildings and then
they would start churches.
And so, what they did is, they literally built
this half of the building, and I'll show you like,
there's a super old sanctuary in there.
Very bright pink.
It's wonderful.
Built the building, presbyterian church.
It grew.
It grew so fast that like, 20 years later,
they went from a building that sat, like literally 80 people
to the sanctuary, which we've done a ton of stuff to,
but it used to sit about 350.
And they went from, like a hundred people,
until 1980-something they had over 1200 people coming.
Three services, super innovative
for a presbyterian church.
And then in the 90s, something happened.
Like, no one knows, like I've not been told anything.
All I know is that it went from 1200
to, in 15 years, 50.
And they said to us, that they want the building,
they basically said like, we want the Easter story
of our church to be that, as we die
new life comes from that, which is us
and we're the new church that takes over.
- [Jake] It's kind of like, Vegas wedding chapel.
- [Josh] Yeah, totally. Yeah.
- [Jake] One thing I really admire about
Josh's leadership and what they've done at Lighthouse,
is that they've really had to bootstrap the church plan.
They didn't have a bunch of money, like tens of thousands,
or hundred thousands of dollars, to launch a church.
They had to start with very little and Josh went out
and raised the funds, and then he's been able to,
like, build the church, you know, both obviously
getting people to come there.
But then also, the infrastructure of the church
that you'll see in a minute.
He's been able to build those things on a relatively
lower budget.
- Because they're too close together so
you can't really like...
You can't get out of a pew unless someone gets out.
They're so close.
Up here, for confidence monitors.
- It's like an IMAX experience in here.
- [Josh] That's all our church.
- How big is this screen?
- I think maybe it's 18 feet wide
and 13 and a half feet tall.
It's a 16:9 one, so it's a big screen.
- It's huge.
- So there's a company called Carl's Projection.
- OK.
And you can make your own projection screens.
- I think I've seen that online.
- They'll sell you the screen.
- Yeah.
- And then they will sell you cornered ends of metal.
- And you go get the pipe at Home Depot?
- And you go get it cut and you build it.
- OK.
- And that screen.
- Was it like 400 bucks?
- [Josh] This package was $699.
- Oh, OK.
- [Josh] Because we've got the rear projection package.
If we got a front projection package white,
it would've been like, $399.
- Wow.
- [Josh] The screen, which is more expensive,
because we do rear projection.
OK. Yeah.
Wow.
- So, we got the screen and the ends,
and the schematics for it, for like 600 or 400 some bucks,
and then the rest of the piping took a day to cut.
- [Jake] Wow.
- And then the rest of it, that cost us 150 bucks.
So we literally got a functional like you know,
15 foot screen, fills an entire sanctuary
for less than a thousand dollars.
Because there was no stage here.
- [Jake] Yeah.
- We're extending the stage out another four feet next week.
- And Josh was telling me about how they installed
the whole audio system themselves.
Like, they put up the new speakers.
They created all their cabling.
He got a good deal on a lot of the gear
because he has a friend who works for an audio company
and was able to basically get everything for them at costs.
So that saved them a lot of money as well.
- And we installed all of it ourselves.
We built all of our own cables.
So, we didn't buy any Cat5s.
We made all of them, made all of our own XLRs,
made all of our own PowerCons.
- [Jake] Wow.
- And it took us a week and a half and we installed
the entire sound system and the lighting system,
all LEDs, all running on Luminare, on an iPad app.
Everything is completely digital and WiFi based,
and it only cost us a full sound lighting system,
for a church, that can functionally,
if we ran three services, we'd be right around,
a thousand people and it only cost us about $7500
for the entire thing.
There's one and then they, this signal gets ran to
one of our routers.
- [Jake] K.
- And this guy's a DMX out and it gets sent
to all of our lights and we have an iPad in the back.
And the iPad runs all of our scenes for our lights.
We've got movers, everything, it memorizes all of that
on scenes.
There we go.
- [Jake] Yeah.
(echoed music)
- [Josh] There it is, you've got more
- [Jake] Yeah.
- [Josh] Delay and then I think you've got
some compressors and you've got a EQ as well.
- So, overall, Josh was telling me that like,
they were able to basically put in this great
audio, video and lighting system for less than $8000
which, you know, sounds like a lot, but in the world of
tech and gear and production, that's like, nothing.
That's like, you usually pay someone $8000 just to come
install your projector and screen or something like that,
because labor costs so much.
I've been in churches where they've spent
a half a million dollars on basically achieving
the same thing.
So, I just hope your take away from this,
I know my take away is just a reminder of like, man,
you do not have to spend hundreds of thousand or even
tens of thousands of dollars to have
amazing production equipment at your church.
Like there's so many ways, if you do the research
and you just shop around and you just learn
how this stuff works, you can figure out
how to do it on your own, and save your church
and your ministry a bunch of money.
So thank you Josh, if you're watching this, for taking time
to give me a tour and also the Church Front community,
a tour of your space.
I love what you guys are doing at Lighthouse Church.
If you want to learn about Lighthouse Church,
go to lighthousechurch.tv.
You can learn all about the church and follow
their social accounts and such, so.
Yet again, if this video's helpful for you and your ministry
hit that like button.
Share it with other folks who it could be helpful with.
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OK.
- [Josh] We haven't hung those yet.