Inside Broadway Church of Christ: Designing an AVL System Around a Congregation That Sings
Broadway Church of Christ in Paducah, Kentucky worships without instruments. No band, no tracks, no keys. Just the room singing together.
That one fact shaped almost every decision our team made on this install, and it is why the walkthrough Sean Bennett recorded on site is worth fifteen minutes of your time even if your church looks nothing like theirs. <div>YouTube embed goes here</div>
The problem was not the sound system. It was the back row.
Before we arrived, Broadway had two 80 to 90 inch TVs mounted on the pillars flanking the platform. They had served the church for ten or twelve years, and for most content they were fine. The trouble was sheet music. This congregation reads it, often, and from the back rows people simply could not.
We replaced both with a single Altitude LED wall, 16 by 9, roughly 10 feet by 18 feet. From the last pew, the smallest text now reads clearly.
Because of the shape of the back wall, a wall-hung installation was not an option, so the wall is flown. That brings us to the part of this project we would want every church leader to take away.
If you hang something heavy, call a structural engineer
The wall and its rigging come to about a thousand pounds. Before any of it went up, we brought in a structural engineer and got two things in writing: that the building can carry the load, and that the exact hardware we specified is rated for it.
That second point matters more than people expect. An engineer signing off on a weight is not the same as an engineer signing off on your hardware. We give them the actual shackles, clamps and steel we intend to use.
As Sean puts it in the video, if you are hanging anything in your church, a PA, a lighting bar, or something heavy like an LED wall, get a structural engineer involved. It protects the people under it long after the install crew leaves.
A PA sized for the room, not for the brochure
Chris, our install manager, walks through the loudspeaker design on camera, and it is a good illustration of restraint.
The mains are Fulcrum CCX1526s, a coaxial box with a 120 by 60 degree horn. Because the pattern is that wide, we could hang them far apart, which kept them clear of sight lines to the new LED wall while still covering the room evenly. The delays are CCX1226s, passive cardioid boxes chosen specifically to stop energy wrapping backward into what is a genuinely reverberant space.
There is no subwoofer array and no oversized rig. With voices only, the system does not need one. It needs clarity and even coverage, and it has both.
Mics pointed at the congregation, not away from it
For most churches, crowd mics are a nice-to-have on the livestream. At Broadway they are the worship mix.
The church already had four shotgun mics in the room. Good microphones, poorly placed, sitting below the soffit where they picked up very little of the singing. We raised two of them into better positions and added a pair of Shure SM81s above the rear PTZ camera to capture the reverberant character of the room.
The result is a stream where someone at home hears the congregation, not just the person at the pulpit.
The rack, and what we chose not to replace
There are two racks on this job. The main rack carries a NovaStar VX600 Pro for the LED wall, Shure SLXD wireless in a Dante configuration, LynTec power sequencing tied to an electrician-installed relay panel, an Allen and Heath DX168 stage box, a single Fulcrum amplifier and a UPS at the bottom so a power blip never interrupts a service.
The booth rack is the more interesting one, because most of it was already there. Broadway owned a Blackmagic Smart Videohub, a UniFi network, a DBX ZonePro feeding distributed audio through the rest of the building, and even the rack itself. We integrated all of it rather than replacing it. The ATEM 2ME could have handled the routing on its own, but the Videohub was paid for and it works, so it stayed and it now does real work.
One layer, one camera, and a stream that starts itself
The workstation is where the volunteer team lives, and it is deliberately simple.
The Allen and Heath Qu-5D keeps every microphone and floor pocket input on a single layer. Broadcast buses sit on the next layer, set once and left alone, so a volunteer adjusting a mic during the service is automatically adjusting the stream too. They never have to think about the broadcast mix.
A Stream Deck running Bitfocus Companion handles the rest. Page one is ATEM control, lower thirds and Canon CR-N500 camera presets, plus buttons to push the camera to the LED wall for a baptism. Page two is PTZ movement, including slowed pan and zoom for tracking shots. Page three is the page volunteers never touch, and it is the one we would steal for our own building: five minutes before service every Sunday, a button presses itself and starts the YouTube stream and the disc recording.
The same page carries LED wall brightness presets, because this room takes a lot of natural light. Forty percent on a Sunday morning, twenty for a worship night, eighty or a hundred when the afternoon sun hits the screen.
The best thing in the building was already theirs
Our favorite moment in the tour is not gear we sold them. It is a rolling wooden pulpit the church already owned and still uses every week for Bible studies and Sunday night gatherings. We mounted one of the new wireless mics to it and left it alone.
Good integration is not replacing everything. It is knowing what already works.
If you are planning a build
Broadway got a system that fits how they actually worship, that their volunteers can run, and that leaves room to grow. There is space on the ATEM for a second and third camera whenever they are ready for phase two.
If you want Churchfront to look at your room, whether it is a renovation or a new building, tell us about your project at churchfront.com/apply. We would love to help you think it through.