Brian Van Hecke
The pew is no longer the only seat in the room. For most growing congregations, a meaningful share of the people receiving the message on any given Sunday are not in the building at all and the AV system is the only thing standing between connection and disconnection for that half of the community.
For a long time, the AV system in a sanctuary did one job: make sure the people in the room could hear the message and see the words on the screen. That job mattered, and a lot of churches did it well.
A reliable wireless mic, a clean speaker arrangement, a projector or display that everyone could read, that was the brief, and once it was met, the system mostly disappeared into the background where it belonged.
That brief no longer exists. The sanctuary today serves two audiences at the same time. There is the congregation in the building, and there is the congregation watching at home, on a phone, on a second campus, or from a hospital room.
Both audiences are equally part of the community. Both need to feel present. And the AV system is the only thing that can serve both, simultaneously, week after week, without anyone noticing it is doing the work.
That is a significantly harder job than what AV used to do in a church. And in most sanctuaries, we walk into, the system has not caught up with it.
Why the Sanctuary Has Two Audiences Now
This is not a temporary shift. Around 75% of churches in urban areas in North America have adopted technology to run both in-person and online services, according to industry research on church technology adoption. The hybrid service is now the standard model for congregations of meaningful size, not an exception left over from the pandemic.
The same trend is showing up in the way faith communities are structured. There were fewer than 200 multi-site churches in the United States in the 1990s. By 2019, there were close to 20,000, and the curve has continued upward since. Every one of those additional campuses is a room that needs to receive the message from somewhere else, in real time, and feel like part of the same community while doing it.
The implication for the AV system is significant. It is no longer a fixture in one room. It is the connective tissue of a distributed community.
When it works, the person watching from home and the person sitting in the third pew are part of the same gathering.
When it doesn’t, when the audio is muddy on the stream, when the camera misses the speaker, when the satellite campus loses the feed five minutes in, the second audience quietly disengages, and most churches never know it happened.
This is what the modern sanctuary asks of its AV system: to be invisible in the room, present on the stream, consistent across campuses, and simple enough that a rotating crew of volunteers can run it confidently on a Sunday morning. It is a lot to ask. And the systems that were designed for the older brief, get the sound right in this room, were never built to do all of it.
Why Most Sanctuary AV Systems Are Not Keeping Up
We walk into a lot of houses of worship. The same three issues show up across most of them.
The room sounds good. The stream doesn't. Worship spaces are usually designed for visual impact, high ceilings, exposed structure, hard surfaces, open architecture. The room can be acoustically tamed with the right speaker design and processing, and most churches have done that work for the in-room experience. The stream is a different problem.
A microphone feed that sounds great through a tuned room PA can sound thin, echoey, or unintelligible once it is routed through a livestream encoder and out to someone's phone. Treating the broadcast audio chain as an afterthought is the single most common gap we see.
The video tells one story. The room tells another. Multi-camera production has gotten much more affordable, which is good news. The not-good news is that most sanctuaries have added cameras without adding the production capability to use them well, operator training, switching workflow, scene presets, automated tracking, lower-thirds, lighting that flatters the camera as well as the eye.
The remote audience ends up watching a static wide shot for forty minutes while the in-room experience is full of motion and energy. Two different services, in effect, from the same building.
The system requires a specialist. The team doesn't have one. Most church AV systems are run by volunteers, and that is not a problem to be solved, it is a strength of the model. The problem is that many systems were specified as if a trained AV technician would be at the booth every Sunday.
Complex routing matrices, deep DSP menus, third-party software with steep learning curves. When the regular operator is on vacation and a fill-in takes the booth, the system that works beautifully under expert hands becomes a source of stress, and the service quality drops in a way the congregation feels even if they can't name it.
The pattern underneath all three is the same: the system was scoped for one audience and one operator. The reality is two audiences and a rotating volunteer crew. The gap between those two realities is where the modern sanctuary loses connection with the people it most wants to reach.
What Actually Works
The houses of worship that have successfully made the shift to a true hybrid model, where the in-room and remote experiences are equally strong, week after week, are doing four things differently.
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They design for the room and the stream as one system, from the start. The broadcast audio chain, the camera workflow, the streaming infrastructure, and the in-room PA are scoped together, not bolted onto an existing system after the fact. Microphone choice considers both how it sounds in the room and how it sounds through the encoder. Lighting decisions consider both how the platform looks to the back row and how it looks on camera. The result is one coherent service experience delivered to two audiences, not two separate productions sharing a building.
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They build the volunteer in as a design input. Modern control platforms from Crestron, SAVI, and similar manufacturers can hide a sophisticated AV system behind a one-touch interface. The complexity stays available for the audio director who wants it; the volunteer running the Wednesday night service sees a screen with three buttons. Designing toward that simplicity, instead of treating it as something to add at the end, is one of the highest-impact decisions a church can make.
- They standardize across campuses. Multi-site congregations get into trouble when each campus has different gear, different network design, and different service workflows. The teams that scale well pick a standard system architecture and deploy it consistently across every location, with central monitoring and one accountable service relationship. New campuses come online faster, volunteer training transfers, and the central team can see what is happening at every site without a plane ticket.
- They treat acoustic and infrastructure work as ministry investment, not equipment cost. Acoustic design, network capacity, structured cabling, redundant power on critical chains, none of it shows up on stage. All of it is what keeps the service running when something goes wrong, and what determines whether the system still works five years from now without a forklift upgrade. The communities making serious investments here are the ones treating the AV system as part of the building, not a line item to revisit when something breaks.
The OnSite Media view
We design AV systems for spaces where the experience has to land every time, retail, hospitality, fitness, restaurants, entertainment, and yes, houses of worship. The constant across all of them is that the AV system is doing real operational work, and it has to do that work without becoming the responsibility of the people in the building.
In a worship context that means designing for two audiences and a volunteer crew, picking technology that is appropriate to the room rather than impressive on a spec sheet, and standing behind the system after the install with proactive service and a single point of accountability. We work across Bose Pro, Samsung, LG, Crestron, Key Digital, Harman, and SAVI, the manufacturers whose products are most likely to still be working well a decade from now, and we are technology-agnostic on purpose, because the right answer for a 200-seat sanctuary is not the right answer for a 4,000-seat campus.
One partner. Every location. Always on. That is what we offer to growing faith communities, and it is the same thing we offer to every other multi-site operator we work with.
The Bottom Line
The sanctuary has changed. The community it serves is no longer bounded by the walls of the room, and the AV system carrying the message has to reflect that. The houses of worship widening their reach are not the ones with the most expensive gear. They are the ones who decided that the technology serving the in-person congregation, the technology serving the remote congregation, the technology serving the campus across town, and the technology in the hands of the volunteer at the booth all belong to the same system, and built it that way.
If you are leading a congregation that is feeling the gap between the experience in the room and the experience on the stream, or trying to figure out how to bring a new campus online without rebuilding everything you already have, that is a conversation worth having. No pitch. Just a look at what you have and an honest read on what it could be doing for the people you are trying to reach.
Reach out anytime, brian@onsitemedia.com, or through the contact form on our site. I read everything that comes in.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Van Hecke
Founder, President & CEO, OnSite Media
Brian founded OnSite Media to give multi-location organizations a single accountable partner for commercial AV, low-voltage, and IT systems. OSM serves clients across retail, hospitality, fitness, restaurants, entertainment, and houses of worship, and is a premier partner of Bose Pro, Samsung, LG, SAVI, Key Digital, Harman, and Crestron.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is the most common AV problem in modern sanctuaries?
The broadcast audio chain. Most churches have done good work on the in-room sound, but treat the livestream audio as a downstream tap off the main system. The result is a room that sounds great in person and a stream that sounds thin or unintelligible. Designing the broadcast chain as a first-class audio path, not an afterthought, is the highest-leverage fix.
Do we need to replace our existing AV system to support hybrid worship?
Often, no. A meaningful share of the upgrade is in the broadcast audio path, the camera and streaming workflow, the network, and the control interface, much of which can be layered onto a healthy in-room system. An honest infrastructure assessment will tell you what is reusable and what is not.
How do we make a complex AV system simple enough for volunteers?
Through the control layer. Modern control platforms can present a one-touch interface to the volunteer at the booth while keeping the full system available to the technical lead behind the scenes. The simplicity is a design decision, not a limitation, and it should be part of the original scope, not added on afterwards.
What should a multi-site church standardize across campuses?
System architecture, control interface, network design, and service relationship. Specific gear can vary by room size, but the way the system is structured, the way volunteers interact with it, and the way it is supported should be consistent. That is what lets new campuses come online quickly and what lets one central team manage the whole environment.
How does OnSite Media approach house-of-worship AV?
We start with the two audiences and the volunteer. We design the in-room experience, the broadcast chain, and the control interface together, choose hardware that is appropriate to the room rather than impressive on paper, and stand behind the system with proactive service across every campus under one accountable relationship.