Transforming a Warehouse into a Worship Center: North Ridge Church Tech Tour
We recently wrapped up an exciting project with North Ridge Church in Wisconsin, helping them transform a former industrial warehouse into their new permanent worship space. After 14 years as a portable church meeting in a local community center, this congregation finally has a place to call home. Come with me on a tour through this unique space and see how we tackled some serious acoustical challenges while building out a complete AV system on a phased budget.
From Machine Shop to Meeting Place
Walking into North Ridge Church’s new building, you immediately notice the character of the space. What used to be a commercial machine shop and warehouse still has that industrial feel, but now it’s filled with natural light and purpose. The church acquired this building and knew they had something special on their hands, even if the journey to get it fully outfitted was going to take some time.
The lobby area has a great open feel to it—and honestly, if Churchfront ever grows to the point where we need a dedicated building, I’d want it to look a lot like this. It’s got that modern industrial vibe that just works.
The Worship Center: A Rectangle with Real Challenges
The main worship space is what used to be the warehouse portion of the building. Before the church took it over, it even served briefly as a pickleball court, which tells you something about the ceiling height we’re working with here. That height is fantastic for creating an open, worship-friendly environment, but it also presented our biggest challenge.
When the church first moved in, this rectangle-shaped room had almost eight seconds of reverb time. If you’ve ever been in a completely untreated warehouse, you know exactly what that sounds like. Conversations were nearly impossible, and the idea of running a quality PA system in that environment was going to be a disaster without serious acoustic treatment.
Solving the Acoustics Problem
We partnered with Prime Acoustic to get RT60 calculations for the space and run it through their models. Once we factored in the chairs and carpet that would be in the room, they helped us determine exactly how much acoustic treatment we’d need to bring that reverb time down to a manageable two-second range.
The results speak for themselves. Now people can actually have conversations in the space without battling echo—and more importantly, the PA sounds fantastic. The room went from being acoustically hostile to being a genuinely pleasant environment for worship.
The Audio System: Fulcrum Passive Speakers
For the main PA, we installed a Fulcrum passive speaker system. We’ve got 15-inch mains left and right, flown subs over the stage, and four front fill speakers covering the folks up front while also helping with side coverage. It’s a powerful yet straightforward system that delivers incredible clarity.
The whole system is powered by Powersoft amplifiers in the equipment rack. What always impresses me about these Fulcrum passive boxes is the detail you hear in the high-end range—it’s incredibly smooth and detailed without ever sounding harsh. That’s exactly what you want in a worship environment.
Working with a Phased Budget
One of the most interesting aspects of this project was how it unfolded financially. Like many church projects, North Ridge had to shell out significant capital just to acquire and renovate the building. Initially, they weren’t entirely sure what funds would be available for the AV side of things.
As the project progressed and more donations came in, they were able to add components they initially thought might be out of reach. The LED wall, for instance, was a later addition once they knew the budget was there. This kind of phased approach is actually pretty common in church projects, and it’s why having flexible infrastructure is so important.
Temporary Stage, Permanent Solutions
Right now, North Ridge is using temporary staging, which works perfectly fine for their current needs. But what we did to future-proof the installation was build out proper infrastructure with custom wall plates along the back of the stage. These plates include XLR connections, data connections, and video connections, giving them easy access to all the I/O for their system.
With the temporary stage setup, all the cabling can run underneath to wherever it needs to go, making cable management simple. We installed four of these connector plates along the back wall, and all those lines run to the equipment rack backstage. When they eventually install a permanent stage, the infrastructure will already be there waiting for them.
The Video System: LED and Projection Working Together
The centerpiece of their video system is an Altitude LED screen measuring about 14.7 feet wide by eight feet tall with a 2.6-millimeter pixel pitch. Since this was a later budget addition, we paired it with projection screens on the sides rather than going full LED across the board.
Ideally, having all LED would make color and brightness matching easier, but when budget doesn’t allow, projection can still deliver great results. We used bright, crisp projectors that deliver vibrant color and a clean image, paired with Da-Lite projection screens suspended from the ceiling at an angle for better sight lines.
Does it match the LED perfectly? No. But does it work really well for what they need? Absolutely. And that’s the kind of practical decision-making you have to embrace in real-world church projects.
Supporting the Musicians
On stage, the band is set up with a nice drum kit featuring coated Evans heads and Heartbeat Cymbals. There’s a shield to help prevent cymbal bleed into the vocal mics, which is crucial in a smaller stage environment like this. The key with any church drum setup is making sure your drummers understand they can’t play at 110% volume all the time. They need to be sensitive to the mix in a room this size.
The drummer and all the backline musicians are using ME-1 personal mixers by Allen & Heath. These are tied into the ME-U distribution hub connected via SLink to the Allen & Heath SQ console. Each band member has access to up to 40 channels they can mix on their personal mixer. No more yelling at the sound guy for “more of this” or “less of that” in their ears—it’s all right there in their control, with our custom labels making navigation simple.
The Equipment Rack: Organized and Labeled
The backstage equipment rack is the main rack on this side of the building, and it’s packed with everything needed to run the audio system. At the top, we’ve got a UDM Pro router for the AV network, followed by a 48-port USW Pro network switch. Above and below the switch are patch-bay keystone jacks, making it crystal clear what’s connected to what and which port everything is using.
This kind of detailed labeling might seem like overkill until you’re troubleshooting something six months after installation—or trying to patch in additional channels on a Sunday morning. Our technicians did a fantastic job with the heat-shrink labels throughout this rack, creating that rainbow of organized cabling you want to see.
We’ve also got an Intel NUC computer serving as the control computer for the Powersoft amplifiers. If we need to get into the DSP environment or make adjustments, we can remote in from anywhere. A Novastar processor handles sending content to the LED screen, receiving video from the computer’s DeckLink Duo through the video switcher over SDI.
For wireless, they’re running Shure SLXD4Q+ multi-channel wireless with a combination of handhelds and bodypacks. Audio is routed cleanly into the system (depending on the final signal flow, this may be via analog outputs or through networked audio infrastructure). We’ve also got Shure PSM 300 transmitter units for the musicians’ wireless in-ear packs. Each transmitter can send stereo audio to musicians, who can receive either one stereo mix or two mono mixes off each transmitter.
Both the in-ears and microphones have their own antennas and a combiner, ensuring clean, strong signals for the musicians. Down below, there are custom audio tie lines from the wall plates coming into the stagebox, all beautifully labeled and organized. When we were helping the client patch in some additional channels and a floor wedge recently, the whole process was simple because the infrastructure was done right.
At the bottom of the rack are the Powersoft amps running the mains, subs, and front fills, along with a networkable power control system that lets them power the entire system on and off in a controlled, automated way.
Front of House: The Tech Booth
Up in the tech booth, we installed one of my favorite tools for the price: the Pro Church Lights Wall Panel. For what it costs, you can hardly beat what this thing does. It gives you eight presets that you can program from whatever lighting software or console you’re using. You run DMX out of your console into the brain for this unit, record those settings, and then play them back from the panel.
If I want to take over the lighting in this room, all I have to hit is “Wall,” and it goes to whatever preset I have selected. Want to go back to LightKey control? Just hit “Console.” It’s that simple. I actually just installed one of these at my own church because it’s such a practical solution.
For audio mixing, they’ve got the Allen & Heath SQ-6 console. This is the perfect middle ground between the SQ-5 and SQ-7. The SQ-7 can be a little too big for smaller tech booths, while the SQ-5 doesn’t always have enough faders for most bands to have everything on one layer. The SQ-6 gives them the right footprint so they can quickly move through fader layers and mix all their channels to the main outputs feeding that great Fulcrum system.
The Video Production Rack
The second rack in the building lives in the tech booth, and for budgetary reasons, we consolidated what would normally be spread across two racks into this one location. Most of the computer and video switching gear that would typically live backstage is housed right here.
From top to bottom, we’ve got a Middle Atlantic PDU, followed by a patch bay for network cabling. All these patches feed into a 24-port switch that ties into the network gear in the back of the room.
Next is the E1.31 (sACN) lighting node, which takes streaming sACN from the LightKey computer and translates it into DMX. Below that is the Pro Church Lights Wall Panel Pro, which communicates with the Pro Church Lights Wall Panel. DMX flows from the node into the wall panel system and then out to the lights. When the wall panel is in “Wall Mode,” it takes over DMX output to the fixtures.
The DMX distribution unit is next in line, taking a single DMX signal and distributing it to the lights in the room. Below that, we have the ATEM Constellation 2 M/E HD switcher, which shows up in so many of our builds. This is a great value solution for churches in the 100–500 person range, and honestly, it can scale to even larger environments. The amount of future-proofing you get with this switcher is incredible.
Streaming and Recording
For streaming, we’ve got a Blackmagic Web Presenter. The program feed from the Constellation switcher goes into the Web Presenter, and from there, they can stream to any RTMP destination like YouTube or Facebook. It streams to one destination at a time, but it’s a reliable, robust option that doesn’t require paying monthly fees for streaming services.
Next to it is a Blackmagic HyperDeck recorder, which records video feeds directly onto SD cards. This is super useful for capturing a clean feed of the service without lower thirds—or even recording a single camera output. After the service, you’ve got the file ready to go without any complicated extraction process.
We also installed a Kiloview NDI encoder, which takes the program feed and converts it to NDI. Somewhere else on the network, they can decode that feed for purposes like displaying content on a lobby TV or sending it to another location in the building.
The Mac Mini Setup
A Sonnet RackMac enclosure holds multiple Mac minis in the rack, keeping everything clean, serviceable, and space-efficient.
Below that is the Echo III expansion chassis, also by Sonnet. This is where you can install PCIe cards like the Blackmagic DeckLink Duo that would normally go in a desktop tower. The chassis connects to the Mac mini via Thunderbolt, giving you access to PCIe expansion without needing a full-size computer.
And of course, there’s battery backup and power conditioning in the rack to keep everything protected.
Lighting and Content Control
Next to the audio mixing station, they’ve got ProPresenter and LightKey running on dedicated screens. In this case, North Ridge worked with Pro Church Lights to install lighting independently from our work, but you’ll see this same basic layout in many of our installations.
LightKey gives them incredible control over their lighting. The interface is clean and intuitive, and we’ve set up a ton of macros in ProPresenter that let them control lighting directly from the presentation software. If they fire “Song 2,” for instance, it triggers the corresponding lighting setting. It’s a perfect example of one operator doing two jobs efficiently.
Camera Control and Multiview
For video production, they’re running PTZOptics Move SE cameras. They only have two cameras in this location, and I actually really like this configuration. If you’re only going to have two cameras, I’d rather have both of them shooting from the center of the room before trying to get creative with side angles.
With two center cameras, it’s easy to get a tight shot on one person and then switch to a nice wide shot of the full band. If you’re going to add a third camera, that’s when you can get creative with off-center perspectives and different angles.
Their multiview monitor displays feeds from the Blackmagic Constellation switcher, and they’re using both multiview outputs. You can configure these however you want, showing anywhere from four to 16 video feeds in customizable grids. Next to that is a computer running Companion that works with their Stream Deck for switching operations.
They can launch their livestream directly from here and access PTZ camera settings. There’s also a PTZ joystick controller for manual camera control, though most of the time they’re recalling presets programmed into the Stream Deck. And of course, they’ve got a confidence monitor so singers and musicians can see lyrics while they’re on stage.
Final Thoughts
This project was a blast to be part of. Watching a church go from 14 years of portable setups to finally having a permanent home is always special, and being able to help North Ridge build out the technical systems to support their ministry is what Churchfront is all about.
The phased approach to this project is a great model for other churches in similar situations. You don’t have to do everything at once. Start with solid infrastructure, get the core systems right, and then add components as budget allows. The key is planning ahead so those additions can integrate seamlessly when the time comes.
If you’re interested in partnering with Churchfront for your church’s AV needs, head over to churchfront.com and reach out to us. We’d love to help you create the right technical foundation for your ministry to thrive.
