Matt Christian, the director of Praise & Worship at the Grace Bible Church in Sebring, Florida, knew the rule of thumb: when building a new church facility, allocate about 20 percent of your overall construction budget for the A/V systems. But reality doesn’t always play by the rules. For various reasons, the budgets for sound, video and lights worked out closer to half that percentage for the $1 million project in this quintessentially central Florida city, located almost exactly halfway on the east-west axis between Sarasota and Ft. Pierce, and Jacksonville and Key West north and south.

“We knew we had to make some very basic choices early on when it came to technology,” says Christian.

And they did. Reasoning that music would be fundamental to establishing their highly contemporary style of worship, Christian and the church leaders opted to put the largest share of the $100,000 they could safely spend on technology into a JBL VRX-928 line array sound system powered by a total of 22,000 watts from Crown amplifiers and mixed through a Yamaha LS9-32 32-mic/line input 64-channel digital console for the 800-seat church that they moved into in January 2011. The system also includes a pair of dual-18-inch subwoofers.

“The old church building was really designed for organ and choir music, and we wanted this new church to be the exact opposite of that, able to handle almost any kind of music, from rock to hip-hop to gospel,” says Christian.

That argued for a line array system, which would offer better dispersion characteristics for the 44-foot-high-ceilinged structure while still providing a high degree of intelligibility. They sought to strike the balance that every house of worship has needed since amplified music and sound

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Sometimes Worship Facilities Have to Choose Between A and V

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