Easter Sunday at my home church included a sunrise service on the beach.
Vocals, acoustic guitar, piano, a pastor’s mic, and a TV screen for ProPresenter lyrics — that was the brief. Everything had to be portable, battery-powered, sand-tolerant, and set up by a small volunteer crew who didn’t have time to troubleshoot anything fancy.
Instead of just renting gear and getting through Easter, I treated it as a chance to prototype something a lot of churches need: a portable AV rig that’s actually well-designed, not just thrown together.
The Two-Rack Architecture
Most portable church setups end up as a pile of separate cases — a console here, a powered speaker there, a laptop bag, a snake on a spool. Setup takes forever and tear-down is worse.
We went with a two-rack approach instead.
Rack 1: Front Of House. A compact Allen & Heath rackmount mixer (with an SQ5 as the easy upgrade path if a church needs more channels), a router and switch for the network, an ATEM Constellation 2ME for video switching, Kiloview NDI encoders, and a Sonnet Thunderbolt expansion chassis for the ProPresenter computer’s video I/O. Pull-out side tables on the rack itself give the operator a place to set the laptop and monitor — no separate FOH table required. Roll it out, pop the lids, and everything’s already wired.
Rack 2: Stage. Furman PDU, network switch, an Allen & Heath AR2412 stage box (a budget pick that punches above its price for this scale), and a 4-channel LEA Connect amplifier for the PA. Patch panel up front for power input, network, NDI video output to the lyric TV, and four speak-on jumpers to the amp.
Three cables connect the two racks: an extension cord for power, S-link for the console, and a single network run. That’s it.
Color-Coded Everything
The single most important design decision in the whole system was the color coding.
Every cable, every connector plate, every speaker input — all matched by color. Red cable goes into the red connector and out to the red speaker. Yellow to yellow. Green for network. Green-and-white for S-link. The labels live on both ends and on every patch panel.
This is the difference between a system a paid AV tech can use and a system a volunteer setup crew can use. When you’re on a beach at 5:30 a.m. trying to be ready by sunrise, you don’t want to be reading manuals or guessing which output goes where. Match the colors and the system works.
The crew rated the first-time setup a 9 out of 10. That number is the whole point of this build.
Why We Went Passive On The PA
The PA is four DOS Audio VanTech 12s (left, right, and two outfills for the wide spread you get when people spread out on a beach) with VanTech 18 subs underneath. They’re passive — no built-in amps — driven by the LEA Connect.
I made this call deliberately. Powered speakers are great until you have to run an extension cord to every single box. On a beach, in a park, or in any setup where every cable run is exposed, fewer power drops means a faster, safer, cleaner setup. One amp in the rack, speak-on cables out to each speaker, done.
The full-birch plywood cabinets on these DOS boxes are also more durable than the composite enclosures most powered speakers ship with. They’re not the most refined-sounding boxes on the market, but with a little EQ and all-pass filter work in the amp, they’re more than capable for portable services. And they’ll survive a thousand load-ins.
If a church wanted to upgrade the network audio path later, the LEA Connect Dante series is one tier up — same form factor, just adds Dante I/O.
Battery Power For True Off-Grid
The whole rig ran on an EcoFlow Pro battery — about $2,000 to $2,500, on wheels, with a built-in display showing percentage, current draw, and runtime remaining. Multiple 20A outlets, a 30A, and a 240V output if you ever need to hit a real power distro.
For a beach service or a park gathering, this completely eliminates the generator-noise problem. For an indoor portable church, you’d skip the battery and run two dedicated circuits instead — one 20A for the amp (because amps draw in peaks during transients like kick hits, and a near-threshold circuit will trip over time) and one 20A for everything else in the stage rack. Pull a single power run out to FOH alongside the network cable and you’re set.
What We’d Change For V2
I always do a post-mortem after a real-world test. The honest list from this one:
Doors instead of screw-in rear blanks on the stage rack. First-time setup, the crew had to unscrew rear blanks just to flip the stage box on. A flip-down access door fixes that in five seconds.
More amplification. Coverage was acceptable for a small Easter service, but for a bigger crowd next year, a second amp and a couple more boxes would give us real headroom.
Wireless IEMs in the next iteration. V1 used wired headphone amps off the stage box to keep things simple. The next version has space for a four-channel Shure SLXD wireless system and PSM 300s — still rack-mountable, still color-coded, still volunteer-friendly.
Speaker swap eventually. The DOS VanTechs got us through Easter, but a higher-end passive option is on the wishlist for V2.
Why This Matters For Other Portable Churches
Portable church is harder than building-based church. The setup crew is volunteer. The setup window is tight. The gear gets handled by people who didn’t pack it. And every Sunday morning, something the team relied on the previous week is suddenly missing or broken.
Most portable AV systems fail one of those tests. The ones that work do it with a few specific principles: tight rack architecture so the system arrives intact, color-coded cabling so volunteers can’t misroute, passive PA so power runs stay simple, and a real power plan so nothing drops mid-service.
That’s the whole design philosophy behind this V1.
It worked. It’ll get better. And it’s the kind of system any portable church should be running in 2026.
Want Help Designing One For Your Church?
If you’re a portable church planning a new launch, an Easter or Christmas off-site, or you’re rebuilding a tired rig that’s been bandaided for years — this is exactly the kind of project our consulting and design process is built for.
Head to churchfront.com and click Get Started, or apply directly at churchfront.com/apply/.
