How do we get somebody from simply watching to actually engaging?

So we started working on that. We have online hosts. We built timed chat prompts. We ask people where they’re watching from. We give them opportunities to request prayer, connect with us, give, view sermon notes, and take a next step. On Church Online, we also built specific Moments into the service flow for things like welcome, Connect Card, prayer, salvation, giving, Next Steps, and sermon notes.

The opportunities are there. The viewers are there too.

The visible response, however, is usually pretty quiet.

That has forced me to start asking a different question: what if we’re trying to solve the wrong problem?

We assumed engagement meant interaction

When we first started paying closer attention to the online side of Sunday, chat seemed like an obvious measurement. If people are watching, ask them something. “Where are you watching from?” “How can we pray for you?” “Say hello in the chat.” Those aren’t bad questions, and I still believe there should be somebody on the other side of the livestream who is available to welcome people, answer questions, pray with them, and help them take a next step.

But we’ve learned that simply giving people more opportunities to respond doesn’t mean they will.

September 20 was a pretty good example. During our 10:30 service, Church Online showed 16 unique attendees, a peak of 12 concurrent viewers, 599 total minutes watched, and an average viewing time of 37 minutes and 26 seconds. People were not just opening the page and immediately leaving.

Yet the visible interaction was almost nonexistent. At the 9:00 service, we had one guest participate in chat with one message. At 10:30, the chat consisted of our host. Across the two services, we recorded one interaction with the Give Moment and one interaction with an Events Moment, with zero prayer sessions and zero salvation responses.

That contrast is what has been bothering me.

We had people watching for meaningful amounts of time, but almost no one was talking back.

The audience is real, even when the chat is quiet

The following Sunday made the same point in a different way.

On September 27, our 9:00 stream averaged about 44 concurrent viewers through Restream and peaked at 60. YouTube accounted for roughly 36 average viewers, with Facebook around 7. At 10:30, the combined stream averaged about 21 and peaked at 27, with YouTube again carrying most of the audience.

Church Online also had an audience that morning. The 9:00 service recorded 20 unique attendees, a peak of 15, 726 total minutes watched, and an average viewing time of 36 minutes and 16 seconds. The 10:30 service had 16 unique attendees, a peak of 8, and 390 minutes watched.

Those are not enormous numbers, but they are real people spending real time with the service.

That matters because it changes the way I look at a quiet chat room.

If somebody watches for thirty or forty minutes without typing anything, it becomes harder to argue that they weren’t engaged simply because they never said hello.

Watching quietly is still watching

When somebody walks into the physical auditorium on Sunday morning, we don’t require them to prove they’re engaged. They don’t have to raise their hand every ten minutes, answer a question from an usher, or fill out a Connect Card before we consider their attendance meaningful.

Some people participate visibly. Some don’t.

Why would online automatically be different?

Someone could watch an entire worship service without ever typing a word into the chat. They could listen to the message, worship from their living room, pray during the response, and leave having genuinely been impacted by what happened.

From our side of the screen, that person may only look like a viewer count.

That doesn’t necessarily mean nothing happened.

And I’m starting to think that distinction matters a lot.

We’ve also learned what happens when the tools aren’t used

There’s another side to this that I don’t want to ignore. Sometimes the engagement tools aren’t the problem because we never actually give them a fair test.

On September 13, our Church Online attendance was 28 unique viewers at 9:00 and 15 at 10:30, with peaks of 14 and 10. The 9:00 service generated 774 minutes watched, while 10:30 generated 472 minutes.

But our hosts did not trigger any of the Church Online Moments during either service that week.

There was also no guest chat participation, no prayer activity, and no salvation responses.

That Sunday taught me something different. We can’t evaluate whether a tool works if we don’t actually use it consistently.

At the same time, the following week we did use more of the engagement tools, and the response was still limited. That’s why I don’t think the answer is simply “use more Moments” or “post more chat prompts.”

Consistency matters. But consistency alone doesn’t guarantee interaction.

Maybe we’ve been treating chat like attendance

Visible engagement feels satisfying because we can measure it. Five people commented. Two people requested prayer. Someone filled out a Connect Card. Somebody clicked Next Steps.

Those actions give us evidence that a person moved from being anonymous to identifiable.

A silent viewer is harder.

That person may be a regular attender who is sick at home. They may be traveling. They may live in another state. They may have found the church for the first time that morning. Or they may have landed on the stream accidentally while scrolling Facebook.

That uncertainty makes chat appealing because chat turns a viewer into someone we can see.

But I’m becoming less convinced that chat should be the primary definition of successful online ministry.

Maybe chat is one signal.

It just isn’t the only signal.

We don’t really have one online audience

Another mistake I think we make is talking about “the online audience” as if everybody watching is there for the same reason.

They aren’t.

Someone who intentionally goes to our website at 10:30 on Sunday morning because they cannot attend in person is very different from someone who encounters a piece of the service while scrolling Facebook. Someone who regularly attends Freedom but is out of town is different from someone who has never walked through our doors. Someone watching a sermon replay on YouTube three days later is different again.

We currently distribute the service across YouTube, Facebook, and Church Online, and those environments naturally create different viewer behaviors.

YouTube has increasingly become the largest part of our live audience. Church Online gives us the strongest dedicated engagement tools. Facebook gives us another discovery point. Each platform can serve a purpose, but expecting viewers on all three to behave identically probably isn’t realistic.

That also means one engagement strategy may not fit every platform.

Church Online has made this especially interesting

Church Online is intentionally designed around interaction. It gives us hosts, chat, prayer, and Moments for things like connection, salvation, giving, and next steps.

On paper, that sounds like exactly what we want.

Our actual experience has been more complicated.

People do use the platform. They spend meaningful time there. But the built-in opportunities to interact have not automatically translated into people taking action.

That has challenged one of my assumptions about online ministry:

Adding more engagement tools does not automatically create more engaged people.

The platform can open the door. Someone still has to want to walk through it.

More prompts may not be the answer

When the chat is quiet, the natural reaction is to start talking more.

Ask another question. Post another call to action. Remind people that prayer is available. Ask them to tell us where they’re watching from. Drop another link.

Eventually, though, that can turn the online experience into a stream of somebody constantly asking the viewer to do something.

The host is trying to help, but the viewer may simply be trying to watch church.

I’m starting to think the answer may be fewer, better opportunities to respond rather than trying to manufacture a busy chat room.

Maybe we ask a couple of meaningful questions instead of ten generic ones. Maybe we make prayer extremely obvious without repeatedly asking people to use it. Maybe we put the next step in front of someone at the moment it actually makes sense instead of because we’re worried the chat looks empty.

And maybe sometimes we allow silence.

So what should we actually measure?

This is where I think our definition of engagement needs to get broader.

Chat participation still matters. Prayer requests matter. Connect Cards matter. Salvation responses matter. Those are exactly the kinds of ministry outcomes I want us to see.

But I also want to know whether people are staying.

Are they watching for thirty minutes instead of three? Are they returning the following Sunday? Are they watching the message? Are they clicking through to learn more about the church? Are they eventually taking a next step? Are people who first encounter us online eventually walking through our physical doors?

Those signals can be harder to connect than a chat message, but they may tell us much more about what is actually happening.

I would rather have someone quietly watch for forty minutes, come back for several Sundays, and eventually connect with the church than have someone type “Good morning” once and disappear.

Both are forms of engagement.

They just aren’t the same kind.

This doesn’t mean we’re giving up on hosts or interaction

I still want an online host. I still want somebody welcoming people. I still want prayer available. I still want clear opportunities for someone to tell us they made a decision to follow Jesus, and I still want an obvious way for someone to connect with Freedom.

The difference is that I’m starting to think those things should function more like open doors than assignments.

We should make it incredibly easy for somebody to engage when they’re ready. I’m less convinced that we need to continually ask them to prove they’re engaged before then.

That may also change what success looks like for the online host. Maybe the host’s job is not to keep the chat constantly moving. Maybe the host’s job is to make sure that when someone finally does speak, there is a real person there ready to respond.

That feels like a healthier goal.

The bigger question

Our goal with online ministry has never really been to create a busy chat room.

The goal is to help people find Freedom, encounter Christ, respond, connect, and, when possible, eventually become part of the church community.

Chat can help with that. Church Online can help with that. YouTube can help with that. Facebook can help with that.

But none of those things are the mission themselves.

We have viewers. We have hosts. We have prompts. We have tools specifically designed to encourage interaction. We now even have Sundays where the analytics show people staying for thirty minutes or more.

And often, the chat is still quiet.

I’m becoming less convinced that the answer is simply to talk louder.

Maybe the better question isn’t, “How do we get more people to type something?”

Maybe it’s, “How do we make sure that when someone is ready to take a step toward us, there’s a clear and easy way to do it?”

I don’t have that completely figured out yet.

But I think that may be a much better way to think about online engagement.

Manual focus solved that obvious problem because the camera couldn’t suddenly decide the LED wall was more important than the pastor. But it created another issue: nothing was ever quite as crisp as I wanted it to be. Our stage is wide enough that two people can easily be thirty feet apart, so even if the focus looked good at the beginning of a shot, it might not stay that way once someone moved across the stage.

Technically, the answer is simple: adjust the focus. Operationally, that’s not so simple. Like a lot of churches, we rely heavily on volunteers, and while we can teach someone how to frame a shot, zoom, and follow someone around the stage, expecting every volunteer to constantly evaluate critical focus while also doing everything else hasn’t been particularly successful for us.

That’s when I started thinking differently about the problem. Maybe the goal wasn’t to decide whether manual focus or autofocus was “better.” Maybe the goal was to configure autofocus well enough that the camera could handle the technical part while the volunteer focused on composition, timing, and storytelling.

Manual focus was safe, but not necessarily good

There was a reason we stayed with manual focus for as long as we did. It was predictable. Once the camera was focused, it stayed there, and we didn’t have to worry about the LED wall suddenly stealing focus in the middle of a shot.

The downside was that predictable did not always mean sharp. If someone moved forward, backward, or across the stage, the focus could quickly become just soft enough to notice. It may not have been dramatically out of focus, but it also wasn’t the crisp image I knew the cameras were capable of producing.

That was especially noticeable on tighter shots. Eyes, facial hair, clothing texture, and other small details are where slightly soft focus starts to show up. The average viewer may not identify the problem as focus, but the image still feels less polished.

We had invested in good cameras, lighting, an LED wall, switching, broadcast audio, and everything else that goes into making the stream look intentional. It didn’t make much sense to settle for “close enough” focus simply because autofocus had caused problems in the past.

A wide stage makes manual focus harder than it sounds

Our stage width was a major part of the problem. People can easily be thirty feet apart from one side of the stage to the other, and our cameras regularly move between subjects who are nowhere near the same focal distance.

One shot might be a vocalist on one side of the stage. The next shot might be the pastor standing somewhere completely different. Someone may walk toward the front of the stage or move deeper into the room, and every one of those movements changes what the camera needs to focus on.

In a perfectly staffed production environment, you could simply have a camera operator continuously ride focus. But that isn’t always realistic in a volunteer-driven church environment. Our operators are already thinking about framing, movement, zoom, shot composition, and following the person on stage. Adding constant critical-focus adjustments on top of all that creates another place where things can go wrong.

The more I looked at it, the more I realized that we were asking volunteers to compensate for a technical problem we might be able to solve another way.

The LED wall was the reason we didn’t trust autofocus

The biggest problem with autofocus in our room has always been the LED wall. To the camera, that wall can look incredibly attractive.

It has bright colors, sharp edges, text, moving graphics, changing contrast, and a huge amount of visual information. Depending on what is being displayed, the wall can present a much stronger autofocus target than the person standing in front of it.

That means simply turning autofocus on is not enough. If you give the camera the entire frame and let it decide what matters, there are situations where it may decide incorrectly.

That was exactly what we wanted to avoid. We did not need autofocus that was technically active. We needed autofocus that behaved properly in our environment.

The goal became lower-maintenance operation

This is where the philosophy of the camera setup started to change for me. I stopped asking, “What gives the operator the most control?” and started asking, “What gives the volunteer the best chance of getting a consistently good shot?”

Those are not always the same thing.

A camera setup that works beautifully when an experienced production person is running it but falls apart when a volunteer sits down is not necessarily a good system for a church. The technical setup needs to support the people who actually operate it every week.

If the camera can reliably keep a subject sharp, I don’t need to make focus another constant task for the operator. I would rather have the volunteer spending their attention on the creative decisions that matter more: framing the shot, anticipating movement, following the right person, and knowing when to move.

That doesn’t remove the operator from the process. It just lets the camera handle a repetitive technical correction that it may actually be better equipped to make.

What we actually changed on our cameras

For context, our cameras are Panasonic AG-DVX200s, so the exact menu names and numeric values in our setup are specific to those cameras. If you’re running Sony, Canon, Blackmagic, PTZ cameras, or something newer, your autofocus controls may be labeled differently.

The important part is not necessarily copying our numbers. It’s understanding what we were trying to make the autofocus system do.

We left the rest of the camera operating manually the way we wanted it. Exposure, iris, white balance, and the overall image were still under our control. We were specifically trying to automate focus, not hand the entire camera over to an automatic mode.

On the DVX200, we enabled Custom AF so we could control how aggressively the camera reacted. From there, the three settings that mattered most for us were AF Speed, AF Sensitivity, and AF Area Width.

Our starting point became roughly:

Custom AF: ON
AF Speed: -2
AF Sensitivity: 1
AF Area Width: approximately the center 30–40% of the image

Those settings are not a magic preset, and I would not suggest blindly copying them onto another camera. They are simply where we landed after trying to make our cameras behave the way we needed them to in our room.

We slowed down the autofocus response

The first thing we changed was AF Speed.

We ended up around -2, which slows down how aggressively the camera changes focus. We didn’t want focus snapping quickly from one distance to another every time something changed in the frame.

A slightly slower focus transition also looks more natural in a live broadcast. If somebody moves toward or away from the camera, I would rather see focus make a controlled correction than visibly jump.

On another camera, this setting might be called something like AF Transition Speed, Focus Transition Speed, AF Drive Speed, or Response Speed. The terminology will vary, but the principle is the same.

We wanted autofocus to move deliberately, not react instantly to every change in the image.

We made the camera less eager to abandon the subject

The next adjustment was probably even more important in our room: AF Sensitivity.

We set ours very low, around 1.

The goal was to make the camera less willing to abandon whatever it already had in focus just because something visually interesting appeared somewhere else in the frame.

That matters a lot when the background is an LED wall. The pastor might be standing in front of a relatively dark graphic, and then the next slide suddenly has bright white lyrics, hard edges, and a lot more contrast. We didn’t want the autofocus system seeing that change and immediately deciding the background deserved its attention.

We wanted the camera to essentially say, “I already have something here. I’m going to stay with it unless I have a good reason to move.”

Different manufacturers may describe this as tracking sensitivity, subject-switching sensitivity, responsiveness, stickiness, or something similar. Again, the exact label is less important than the behavior.

If your autofocus keeps jumping away from the person and grabbing the background, look for the setting that controls how easily it changes subjects or focal distance.

We stopped letting autofocus look at the whole frame

The third major change was AF Area Width.

Instead of allowing autofocus to evaluate the entire picture, we narrowed the active area to roughly the central 30–40% of the frame, where our subjects normally appear.

That was a balancing act.

If the autofocus area is too wide, the LED wall has more opportunity to influence focus. If it is too narrow, the volunteer has to keep the person perfectly centered or risk moving them outside the active autofocus region.

We wanted enough room that volunteers could still frame naturally without constantly worrying about an invisible focus box, while also excluding a significant amount of the LED wall from what the camera was evaluating.

Different cameras may call this AF Area, Focus Zone, Flexible Zone, Focus Box, AF Frame, or Focus Region. Whatever your camera calls it, the idea is straightforward: don’t ask autofocus to pay attention to portions of the image where your subject is almost never going to be.

That adjustment made a lot of sense for the way we shoot. Our pastor, worship leaders, and other subjects are generally somewhere around the middle of the shot. There was very little reason for the camera to be making focus decisions based on the extreme edges of the LED wall.

We automated focus, not the camera

I think that distinction is important.

When people hear “we switched to autofocus,” it can sound like we put the camera in full auto and let it start making all the decisions.

That isn’t what we did.

We still want intentional exposure. We still want intentional white balance. We still want the operator determining the shot, the zoom, and the composition. We simply decided that maintaining critical focus was something the camera could help us with.

We automated focus. We didn’t automate the camera.

That is really the philosophy behind the change.

Don’t copy our numbers. Copy the behavior.

I don’t want someone with a different camera—or even another DVX200 installation—to read this and assume that -2 / 1 / 40% is some universally correct autofocus formula.

It isn’t.

Those settings worked as a starting point for our cameras, our stage, our LED wall, our shooting positions, and the way our volunteers operate.

What is transferable is the behavior we were trying to create.

If autofocus feels too sluggish when someone walks toward or away from the camera, increase the focus speed slightly. If the camera keeps abandoning the person and jumping to the LED wall, reduce its tracking or subject-switching sensitivity. If the background still influences focus too much, tighten the autofocus region. If volunteers are frequently framing people outside that region, widen it again.

That is a much better way to tune autofocus than copying somebody else’s settings and assuming they should work in your room.

Test autofocus under the worst conditions, not the best ones

This is another piece I think matters.

An empty auditorium with one person standing under good lighting and a static background is probably the easiest autofocus test you can give a camera.

That isn’t Sunday morning.

If you’re trying to make autofocus work in front of an LED wall, test it with the LED wall doing the things that normally cause problems. Put lyrics on it. Run bright graphics. Use motion backgrounds. Switch suddenly from a dark slide to a bright slide.

Then put somebody on stage and have them move. Have them walk toward the camera, away from it, and from one side of the stage to the other. Zoom in. Zoom out. Change the composition. Have someone cross through the frame.

Try to make the autofocus fail.

That will tell you far more than watching it lock onto one person in an empty room.

The goal is not to prove the autofocus works under perfect conditions. The goal is to understand where it fails and then adjust the camera until those failure points become manageable.

The shot itself still matters

Settings are only part of the equation.

If your subject is tiny in the frame and surrounded by a giant, bright LED wall, you are giving the autofocus system a much harder decision to make. If you’re on a reasonably tight shot and the person occupies a meaningful portion of the autofocus region, you’re giving the camera much better information.

That doesn’t mean every shot needs to become a close-up. It just means we still need to think about what we are asking the autofocus system to see.

Good autofocus settings cannot completely overcome bad composition.

What we’re really doing is trying to stack the odds in favor of the camera making the same decision we would make manually.

For us, that meant slowing it down, making it less willing to switch targets, and limiting the part of the image it was allowed to evaluate.

Autofocus isn’t about making the cameras completely automatic

I still don’t want the cameras making every decision. Framing matters. Shot selection matters. Zoom speed matters. Following the right person matters. Knowing when to move and when to leave a shot alone matters.

Those are creative decisions, and I absolutely want a person making them.

But whether the pastor’s eyes are sharp should not need to be one of those decisions every five seconds.

That’s the distinction I keep coming back to. Good automation should remove repetitive technical work without removing human judgment from the production.

If autofocus can take care of focus while the operator concentrates on the shot, that is not giving up control. It is using the technology for the part of the job it can handle well.

Sharpness matters more than we sometimes admit

One thing this process reminded me of is how much focus affects the overall quality of a broadcast.

A slightly soft shot is not always obvious enough to trigger an immediate reaction from the viewer. Most people watching from home are not going to stop and say, “The focal plane is wrong.”

They just see an image that feels a little less professional.

When the eyes are sharp and the face has good detail, the entire image feels better. The camera looks better. The lighting looks better. Even the overall production feels more intentional.

That’s why I don’t think focus is a small detail. It’s one of those things that quietly affects everything else on screen.

Technology should reduce volunteer workload

There is a broader lesson here that applies to more than cameras.

Sometimes we keep systems manual because manual feels more professional. A professional camera operator rides focus. A professional engineer makes every adjustment. A professional production person controls everything.

That philosophy makes sense in environments staffed entirely by professionals. Church production is often different.

If a piece of technology can reliably handle a repetitive technical task, there is no prize for making a volunteer do it manually just because that is how it has traditionally been done.

The goal should be to make the system easier to operate without lowering the quality of the result. In the best cases, good automation actually does both: it lowers the burden on the operator and improves consistency.

That is exactly what we are trying to accomplish with focus.

The bigger lesson

For a long time, manual focus felt safer because autofocus had burned us before. The LED wall would grab attention, the camera would hunt, and a perfectly usable shot could suddenly become soft because the background became more interesting than the person on stage.

Turning autofocus off fixed that problem, but it did not really solve focus. It simply moved the responsibility from the camera to the volunteer.

Once our stage got wide enough, our subjects moved enough, and our volunteer operators became part of the equation, that tradeoff stopped making sense.

So I don’t think the real question is whether manual focus or autofocus is better. The better question is:

How do we configure the camera so the easiest way to operate it is also the best way to operate it?

For our Panasonic AG-DVX200s, the answer has been Custom AF, a slower autofocus response, low sensitivity, and a restricted autofocus area. Your camera may give you completely different controls, but the goal can still be the same.

Make the camera reluctant to chase the LED wall and much more interested in staying with the person you actually care about.

If we can do that reliably, it’s one less thing a volunteer has to fight on Sunday morning—and one more thing we can make better behind Sunday.

At the same time, we were also dealing with interference on one of our wireless acoustic guitar systems. Nothing is more fun during a Sunday morning than troubleshooting a problem that only seems to happen when everyone is actually using the system.

At first, there wasn’t one obvious culprit. But we have a lot of wireless equipment operating in the same building, and nearly all of it is trying to find space in the UHF spectrum. Eventually I started asking a different question: what if the individual wireless systems weren’t really the problem? What if the problem was the RF environment we were putting all of them into?

That sent me down a much deeper rabbit hole than I expected.

We had 27 wireless frequencies in one building

Once I started looking at the entire system instead of one troublesome pack at a time, the scale of the problem became pretty obvious. Between our wireless microphones, in-ear monitor systems, instrument wireless and other gear, we had 27 wireless devices operating in the building.

Until this point, most of those systems had essentially been treated individually. Find a clear frequency, make sure it works, and move on. That can work when you only have a handful of wireless channels, but once you get into a system our size, it gets more complicated.

You’re not only trying to avoid television stations and other outside RF sources. You also have to make sure your own transmitters aren’t too close together, that the frequencies work within the tuning range of each specific device, and that the combination of frequencies isn’t creating intermodulation products that land on top of something else you’re trying to use.

I knew enough about RF coordination to know that calculating all of that manually was not something I wanted to do. That’s when I found SoundBase.

SoundBase changed the way I looked at the problem

SoundBase is designed specifically for RF coordination. Instead of looking at one wireless system at a time, you can build an inventory of everything operating at the venue and then evaluate the RF environment as a whole.

It can identify known television stations based on your location, use RF spectrum scans that have already been collected nearby, and also accept your own spectrum scans so you can see what the RF environment actually looks like inside your venue.

We were fortunate enough to find a scan that had been performed nearby at TBN’s facility in Hendersonville, roughly seven miles from us. That gave us a much better starting point than simply guessing where the clean spectrum should be.

But I really wanted to know what was happening inside our building, and that presented another problem.

I wanted a spectrum analyzer. I did not want the spectrum-analyzer price.

One way to capture the RF environment would have been to purchase a dedicated spectrum analyzer. The RF Venue RF Explorer Pro I was looking at was around $1,599.

I like buying new production toys as much as the next person, but spending $1,599 just to figure out what was happening in our wireless spectrum was a difficult purchase to justify. Then I started thinking about something I had already been experimenting with: software-defined radio.

An SDR is essentially a radio receiver that lets software handle much of the tuning and signal-processing work. If I could make one scan the frequency range we needed and export that information in a format SoundBase could understand, I might be able to accomplish a similar diagnostic task for a fraction of the cost.

I settled on a Nooelec NESDR SMArt v5 HF/VHF/UHF bundle for $54.95.

There was definitely some tinkering involved. I used ChatGPT to help work through the utility software and eventually build a one-click process that would scan the section of spectrum we needed and generate a file that could be imported into SoundBase.

There were a few failures along the way, but eventually it worked. For about $55, I now had a way to take an RF spectrum scan inside our own building.

That’s when things started getting interesting.

First, we had to inventory everything

Before SoundBase could tell us what was wrong, we had to tell SoundBase exactly what we had. That meant going through every wireless device and documenting the manufacturer, model, frequency band, current operating frequency, and group or channel settings where applicable.

This was probably the least exciting part of the project, but it may have been the most important. Once all 27 devices were entered accurately, SoundBase could finally evaluate the system as a complete RF environment instead of a collection of unrelated wireless boxes.

Then I ran the health check.

20 of the 27 devices had issues.

That was the moment this stopped feeling like a couple of random wireless dropouts. We had an RF coordination problem.

There wasn’t just one problem

SoundBase identified several different types of issues. One was the RF noise floor, which is essentially the amount of background RF energy already present in the environment. Your wireless system needs enough separation between that noise and the signal you’re actually trying to receive.

The spectrum scans showed areas where that noise floor was something we needed to take seriously. We also had interference involving television broadcast spectrum, which was something I had already suspected as changes were occurring in the TV spectrum around us.

Then there were simple spacing problems. Some of our devices were operating too close together in the spectrum. On top of that, there was intermodulation distortion, which happens when multiple RF signals interact and create additional frequencies that weren’t intentionally transmitted.

With enough wireless devices operating together, those unwanted products can land right where another receiver is trying to listen. That means you can select frequencies that individually look clear and still create a problem once the rest of the system is turned on.

Looking at the system as a whole, it was pretty obvious why chasing individual dropouts hadn’t solved anything. It was a mess.

Then SoundBase rebuilt the frequency plan

This is where the software became incredibly useful. Because SoundBase already knew the tuning ranges and characteristics of the wireless equipment we had entered, it could work through the available spectrum and calculate a set of frequencies designed to coexist.

It was taking into consideration the RF environment, television interference, spacing between devices, intermodulation products and the frequency ranges each piece of equipment could actually use. Instead of me trying to find 27 frequencies that looked clear one at a time, we could coordinate the entire system together.

After working through the new frequency plan, we ran the health check again.

All 27 devices passed.

SoundBase also gave us a table showing the frequency each device needed to be programmed to.

Now we weren’t randomly moving frequencies until the interference disappeared. We had an actual coordinated RF plan.

The biggest thing I learned

The biggest lesson for me wasn’t really about SoundBase or SDRs. It was realizing how easy it is to troubleshoot wireless gear one device at a time when the problem actually exists at the system level.

If an IEM pack drops out, we naturally look at that pack. Is the antenna bad? Is the transmitter failing? Is the receiver too far away? Did somebody change the frequency? Those are all reasonable questions.

But once you have a building full of wireless microphones, instrument packs and in-ear monitor transmitters, every transmitter becomes part of the RF environment for every other receiver. At some point, wireless coordination stops being optional.

You probably don’t need a $1,600 analyzer to start

The other takeaway was how accessible this kind of troubleshooting has become. Would I love to have a professional RF spectrum analyzer sitting in the production room? Absolutely.

But for what I needed to accomplish, spending roughly $55 on an SDR gave me a way to see what was actually happening in our building and feed that information into a proper coordination tool. That’s a pretty remarkable difference.

It also gave us something we didn’t have before: a repeatable process. If we add another wireless microphone, replace an IEM system, change frequency bands or start experiencing interference again, we don’t have to start blindly scanning channels. We can scan the room, update the inventory and coordinate the system again.

Wireless should be treated like a system

This whole project changed the way I think about RF at church. We spend a lot of time thinking systematically about audio routing, Dante networks, console files, lighting networks and video signal flow, but wireless can easily become something we treat as a bunch of independent boxes.

Turn on the receiver, find a clear channel, sync the transmitter and move on. That may work for a while, but when enough wireless systems start sharing the same space, RF needs the same intentional planning as everything else in the production system.

For us, it took IEM dropouts and an unreliable acoustic guitar pack to finally force us to look at the bigger picture. When we did, we discovered that 20 out of 27 devices had some kind of problem in the frequency plan.

Now all 27 pass.

That’s a much better place to start Sunday morning.

Special thanks to my friend Keith Faber for helping navigate this, and essentially get it all sorted out for Freedom Church!!

At first, that seemed strange. We’re a church, we have our licensing in place, and the songs are being performed during an actual worship service. We aren’t uploading somebody else’s album or trying to pass off another artist’s recording as our own.

So why is YouTube telling us there’s a copyright problem?

The answer is that there are actually two different questions being asked. Do you have permission to stream the song? And do you have the right to make money from the song? Those are not the same thing, and I think a lot of churches—especially those starting to take YouTube more seriously—can easily confuse the two.

A copyright claim is not automatically a copyright strike

Seeing the word copyright inside YouTube Studio can immediately make you think something is wrong with your channel, but a Content ID claim and a copyright strike are not the same thing.

YouTube automatically scans uploaded content for material that matches copyrighted works registered in its Content ID system. When it finds a match, the copyright owner can have a policy attached to that content. Depending on the owner, that could mean the video is tracked, monetized by the copyright holder, restricted in certain places, or occasionally blocked.

That doesn’t necessarily mean your church did something malicious, and it doesn’t automatically mean YouTube is about to shut down your channel. For churches streaming modern worship music every Sunday, seeing Content ID matches on archived services is not particularly surprising.

But we have a CCLI Streaming License...

That was the part I wanted to understand better.

A CCLI Streaming License gives churches permission to stream covered songs as part of their worship services. That is incredibly important, but the license does not suddenly make your church the copyright owner of those songs. The songwriter, publisher, label, or other rights holder still owns that intellectual property.

According to CCLI’s licensing terms, copyright owners retain the right to monetize their songs when those songs appear in videos uploaded to services such as YouTube. That means your church may be properly licensed to stream the song while the copyright owner still retains the right to monetize the video containing that song.

There really isn’t a contradiction there. You have permission to use something, but you do not own it.

The problem with thinking of Sunday morning as “content”

Churches are increasingly being encouraged to think like content creators. Optimize the thumbnail. Improve the title. Watch retention. Build subscribers. Post Shorts. Improve discoverability.

I actually think we should pay attention to all of those things. If somebody is searching YouTube at 11:30 on a Sunday night because their marriage is falling apart, their anxiety is through the roof, or they suddenly have questions about God, I want good ministry content available for them to find.

But our full Sunday service is a strange piece of “content.”

A typical service might contain original preaching, copyrighted worship songs, licensed backing tracks or multitracks, announcement videos, bumper music, testimony videos, graphics, prerecorded media, and other elements created by several different copyright holders.

We experience all of that as one church service. YouTube experiences it as a video file containing a whole bunch of potentially identifiable intellectual property.

Those are very different ways of looking at the same 75 minutes.

Maybe the full service doesn’t need to be your monetization strategy

That was probably my biggest takeaway from looking into this.

I had been thinking about whether churches could use things like YouTube pre-roll ads to generate a little revenue from their livestream audience without interrupting the service itself. Technically, monetization tools make that idea tempting.

But once you start looking at all the rights involved in a worship service, it becomes obvious that the full Sunday broadcast is probably the wrong place to build that strategy. And honestly, I think that’s okay.

The livestream can simply do its job: serve people who cannot be in the room.

Let the full service be ministry-first. Then treat the content your church actually owns differently.

The sermon is a different story

After Sunday, take the message and make it its own video. Now you potentially have something much cleaner.

There’s no worship set, no copyrighted song performances, no five-minute countdown with music you forgot came from somewhere else, and no worship transition underneath the first two minutes of the sermon. It’s just the message.

From there, you can start building a much more intentional content strategy around material your church actually created. That might include the full sermon, shorter teaching segments, focused clips, YouTube Shorts, testimony videos, podcast episodes, or pastor Q&A content.

There’s another benefit too. Someone searching YouTube for help with anxiety probably isn’t searching for “September 6, 2026 | 10:30 AM Sunday Service.” They’re searching for something related to what they’re actually going through.

Separating the teaching from the livestream gives you the opportunity to package ministry around the questions people are asking. That may ultimately be far more valuable than whatever a pre-roll ad on the full service would have generated anyway.

One more thing: check the claims

I also wouldn’t just ignore every copyright claim because your service contains worship music. Open them and look at the timestamps.

If YouTube identifies the actual worship song your band performed, that makes sense. But if the claim points to your countdown, announcement video, sermon bumper, or some piece of background music you forgot existed, you may have found something worth fixing.

There’s no reason to create unnecessary copyright problems. If we can replace a piece of production music with something we actually have the appropriate rights to use, we should.

Sometimes the most useful part of a Content ID claim isn’t fighting it. It’s discovering what is actually inside your broadcast.

The bigger lesson

Church production has changed.

We aren’t just putting cameras in a room anymore. The moment Sunday morning leaves the building, we’re dealing with streaming platforms, algorithms, copyright systems, licensing agreements, music publishers, audience retention, metadata, and distribution.

That doesn’t mean we need to become media companies, but it does mean we need to understand the environment we’re sending our ministry into.

Having permission to stream something does not necessarily mean we own the right to monetize it. And maybe the better strategy isn’t trying to squeeze revenue out of every minute of Sunday morning anyway.

Let the service be the service.

Then take the ministry your church actually created and give it another life on Monday.

That is probably the most important place to start.

We are not moving away from our Yamaha TF5 because it suddenly became a bad console or because our livestream sounds terrible. The problem is simpler than that.

We are beginning to outgrow the architecture.

Our current church audio system is built around Yamaha consoles, Tio stage boxes, Dante, and Waves processing. FOH has its own TF5, monitors are handled from a TF Rack, and broadcast has another TF5 dedicated to the online mix.

That setup has served us well. But as our production has grown, one limitation has become increasingly difficult to ignore:

32 channels.

When the system starts making decisions for you

Thirty-two channels sounds like plenty until you start actually counting.

Drums can consume a large portion of that by themselves. Then add bass, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, keys, tracks, playback, worship leaders, background vocals, speaking microphones, ambience microphones, and anything else the broadcast mix needs to access independently.

Suddenly 32 channels does not feel very large.

The issue is not that we physically cannot make Sunday happen. We can.

The issue is that we are getting closer to making production decisions based on what fits into the console instead of what would create the best broadcast mix.

That is the point where I start asking whether the architecture needs to change.

And it led to a question I probably would not have seriously considered a few years ago:

Does our broadcast mix actually need to live on a traditional console?

Why not just buy a bigger console?

That would certainly be the conventional solution.

We could replace the broadcast TF5 with a console that has more input channels, more buses, more processing, and more room to grow. There is nothing wrong with that approach.

But once we started looking at what we actually needed from the next broadcast system, I realized that channel count was only one part of the conversation.

We also want better recording capability.

We want more flexible routing.

We want a dedicated monitoring workflow for the broadcast engineer.

We want tactile control without being permanently tied to the processing architecture of one physical console.

And eventually, I want us to be able to capture what happens on Sunday at a level that could actually be used for music production afterward.

Once those requirements were on the table, simply buying a larger broadcast console stopped feeling like the only obvious answer.

We already live in a Dante world

One reason this idea makes sense for us is that the rest of our system is already heavily networked.

Our stage inputs are already moving around the building through Dante. Our Yamaha consoles and Tio stage boxes are already part of that network.

So the question became:

What if the broadcast system simply received those Dante channels directly into a computer?

That is where Pro Tools entered the conversation.

And importantly, this does not mean throwing away the software processing environment we already use. Our current broadcast Waves computer will become the Pro Tools broadcast machine, and the Waves plugins we already rely on can be integrated directly into the Pro Tools session.

So rather than maintaining a separate Waves processing workflow beside the broadcast console, the goal is to bring the mixing, processing, routing, and recording environment together inside Pro Tools.

Here’s what that architecture is designed to look like:

The diagram also shows an important distinction in the new system: the Avid surfaces are the control layer, not the audio engine. Pro Tools is doing the mixing and processing while the S1s, Dock, and iPad give the engineer a tactile interface.

But I still want faders

I have no desire to mix an entire Sunday service with a mouse.

Yes, technically it can be done. That does not mean I want to do it.

Live mixing is tactile. I want to be able to grab a vocal immediately. I want multiple faders under my hands. I want channel selection, banking, transport control, and the ability to interact with the mix without constantly hunting around a computer screen.

That is why the control and monitoring side of the proposed system includes:

• 2 Avid S1 control surfaces

• Avid Pro Tools Dock

• 1 Apple 11-inch iPad

• Focusrite RedNet AM2

The S1s and Dock do not become the audio engine.

Pro Tools remains the engine.

The iPad becomes part of the Avid control environment, while the physical surfaces give the engineer tactile access to the mix.

That distinction is one of the things I find most interesting about this whole approach.

We are separating what processes the audio from what the engineer physically mixes on.

Broadcast also needs a real control room

One requirement I did not want to compromise on was monitoring.

Our broadcast engineer needs to hear the same complete mix the online audience is hearing. But the engineer also needs the ability to inspect individual sources without affecting that audience.

If the lead vocal sounds strange, I may want to listen to only that microphone.

If something is happening with an acoustic guitar, I want to hear it by itself.

If I need to inspect an ambience microphone, I should be able to do that without suddenly sending a soloed ambience mic to everyone watching online.

So the architecture is being designed around two separate stereo destinations.

Program path

The complete livestream mix leaves Pro Tools over Dante and goes to the video production system.

That is what the audience hears.

Monitor path

A separate stereo output goes to the RedNet AM2 in the broadcast room.

That feeds the engineer’s studio monitors and headphones.

Under normal circumstances, the engineer hears the complete broadcast mix. When something needs to be inspected, the monitoring workflow can change what the engineer hears without changing the actual program feed.

That may sound like a small feature.

When you are actually mixing live broadcast, it is not.

The immediate goal is more freedom in broadcast

All of this started because we want a broadcast system that is no longer boxed into the same 32-channel limitation.

Moving into Pro Tools gives us a much larger environment for routing and mixing. We can build the session around what the broadcast actually needs instead of constantly asking which channels will fit.

But the more we have designed this system, the more I have realized that solving the broadcast problem could unlock something much bigger.

Sunday becomes recordable

This may be the part of the project I am most excited about.

For the first time, we are building a system where the same channels coming into the broadcast mix can also be captured as individual multitrack recordings.

Not just the stereo livestream.

The actual sources.

Drums.

Bass.

Acoustic guitar.

Electric guitars.

Keys.

Tracks.

Lead vocals.

Background vocals.

Speaking microphones.

Room microphones.

Potentially everything we decide is worth capturing.

That fundamentally changes what happens after Sunday.

Until now, the service has mostly been something we mix in real time. Once it is over, we have the finished livestream recording.

That recording is useful, but it is not the same thing as having the individual performances available afterward.

With multitrack recording, Sunday does not have to disappear once the service ends.

A live worship project becomes possible

There have been Sundays where something happens during worship and you immediately think:

I wish we had actually captured that.

Not simply the livestream.

The performance.

The lead vocal.

The harmonies.

The drums.

The band.

The room.

The congregation singing.

The kind of recording you could take back afterward and actually work with.

We have never really had the infrastructure to do that properly.

That is what this new system could change.

If we capture those individual tracks, we can bring them back into a post-production environment later and build an entirely different mix specifically for music.

We could rebalance instruments, work on the vocals, process the drums differently, shape the room microphones, edit where appropriate, and create a final mix that is not limited by whatever decisions had to be made during the live broadcast.

For the first time, producing a legitimate live worship release becomes a realistic possibility for us.

That was not the original reason we started redesigning the broadcast system.

But it may eventually become one of the most valuable things the redesign gives us.

Livestream and music production are two different mixes

This distinction matters.

The mix I want for someone watching church live on Sunday is not necessarily the mix I would create for a worship album.

During the livestream, the broadcast engineer is responding to what is happening in real time. The mix has to support the service as it unfolds.

There are host moments.

There is preaching.

There are transitions.

There are unexpected changes.

There is no opportunity to stop and say, “Let’s do that chorus again.”

A music release is different.

Once we have the multitracks, we can make decisions specifically around the music.

That is why simply recording the final livestream output has never really given us the same opportunity.

The stereo livestream captures the event.

The multitracks preserve the ingredients.

That is a completely different level of flexibility.

Then there is virtual soundcheck

Multitrack recording opens another door that has nothing to do with releasing music.

Training.

Once we have a full Sunday recorded, we potentially have material that can be used to develop the broadcast mix when the band is not physically on stage.

Instead of asking musicians to stand around while an engineer experiments with compression, EQ, Waves plugins, routing, or balance, we can work with previously recorded material.

That could become incredibly useful for training volunteers.

A developing engineer can practice mixing a real worship set without the pressure of an actual service happening.

We can experiment with Pro Tools templates.

We can test processing.

We can refine the workflow.

We can compare different approaches.

We can train someone on a Tuesday using the exact same inputs they may eventually be responsible for mixing on Sunday.

One Sunday service can continue teaching us long after Sunday is over.

The upgrade starts solving more than one problem

This is where the project became much easier for me to evaluate.

If the only benefit were:

We can go beyond 32 broadcast channels.

then we would compare the cost of this system directly against the cost of a larger console.

But that is no longer the whole picture.

The architecture we are building potentially gives us:

• More broadcast input capacity

• Much greater routing flexibility

• Direct integration of our existing Waves plugins

• Dedicated broadcast monitoring

• Tactile hardware control

• Multitrack recording

• Post-production capability

• Virtual soundcheck

• Better volunteer training material

• Archival recordings

• The foundation for future live worship releases

Now we are not simply replacing a console.

We are building a broadcast and recording environment.

That is a much more interesting investment.

What does the system cost?

For the portion of the upgrade we still need to purchase as part of the current proposal, the budget looks like this:

ItemCost2 Avid S1 Control Surfaces$2,590.00Avid Pro Tools Dock$889.00Focusrite RedNet AM2$559.00Pro Tools Studio Annual Subscription$299.00Apple 11-inch iPad$399.99Current proposal total$4,736.99

There are two major pieces I am intentionally keeping outside that number.

The Mac

We are not purchasing another computer specifically for this proposal.

Our existing Waves computer will be repurposed as the Pro Tools broadcast machine.

That means the computing power we already invested in continues to serve the broadcast system, just in a different role.

Focusrite RedNet TNX

The RedNet TNX is also being handled separately from this particular proposal.

That becomes the bridge between our Dante network and the Mac over Thunderbolt, allowing Pro Tools to receive the channels already moving through our existing Dante infrastructure.

And because we already have a Waves plugin ecosystem, we are not abandoning that processing either.

Instead of Waves living in a separate processing path around the console, the plugins can become part of the Pro Tools session itself.

That means the new architecture is less about replacing everything we already own and more about reorganizing the pieces we already have around a different mixing engine.

I think showing those numbers matters.

“Moving broadcast into Pro Tools” can sound like an expensive science project until you separate what actually needs to be purchased from the infrastructure you already own.

For us, the current additional investment in this proposal is $4,736.99, while the Mac, Dante infrastructure, RedNet TNX, and Waves ecosystem are being handled separately or repurposed from equipment already in the system.

And that investment is not only increasing our broadcast capacity.

It is giving us the control environment, monitoring, recording capability, and software foundation that we hope will carry us into multitrack recording and eventually live worship production.

There are tradeoffs

I also do not want to pretend that moving broadcast into Pro Tools is automatically better than using a console.

It is more complicated.

We become increasingly dependent on the computer.

Dante becomes even more mission critical.

The interface becomes mission critical.

The Pro Tools session becomes mission critical.

The control surfaces and monitoring environment need to be designed correctly.

And volunteers who understand a Yamaha TF5 will not automatically understand this workflow.

There is also the larger question of failure.

If a traditional console has a problem, most experienced church production people have a pretty good understanding of where to start troubleshooting.

A software-based broadcast system introduces more layers:

Computer.

Operating system.

Pro Tools.

RedNet TNX.

Dante.

Network.

Control surfaces.

Waves plugins.

Routing.

That complexity has to be respected.

A system is not better simply because it is more powerful.

It is better only if we can operate it reliably.

Would I recommend every church do this?

Absolutely not.

If a church has 24 inputs and a console that handles everything comfortably, I would not tell them to replace a stable broadcast workflow with Pro Tools because software mixing sounds more interesting.

That would be solving a problem they do not have.

And if another console is the simplest, most reliable way to accomplish what your church needs, then buy the console.

The point of this project is not:

Pro Tools is better than consoles.

The point is:

Our requirements changed, so we are questioning whether the architecture that got us here is still the best architecture for where we want to go next.

That is a very different conversation.

Good upgrades should solve today’s problem without closing tomorrow’s doors

That may be my biggest takeaway from this project so far.

We started with a limitation:

Our broadcast mix is running into a 32-channel ceiling.

The easy response would have been to buy another console with more channels.

Instead, that limitation forced us to step back and ask what else we wish the system could do.

Record everything.

Train engineers differently.

Improve post production.

Build a better broadcast control room.

Capture worship.

Potentially produce music.

Once those goals entered the conversation, the solution started looking different.

That does not automatically mean this will be the perfect system.

We have not lived with it yet.

There will almost certainly be things we learn once it is actually running every Sunday.

And when that happens, I plan to share those too.

Because the goal here is not to show off the finished rack.

It is to show the work.

So, does a church broadcast mix still need a console?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

I think the better question is:

What does your broadcast system actually need to accomplish?

For us, the answer is becoming bigger than a live stereo mix.

We want to mix Sunday.

We want to record Sunday.

We want to train from Sunday.

And someday, we want the ability to take what happens during worship on Sunday and turn it into something people can keep listening to long after the service is over.

If one system can help us do all of that, then moving the broadcast mix out of a traditional console starts making a lot more sense.

And that is exactly what we are about to find out.

I know there are churches already mixing broadcast completely inside Pro Tools, Logic, Reaper, Ableton, and other DAWs, while others would never consider giving up a dedicated console.

I’d love to hear both sides.

Are you mixing your church broadcast on a traditional console, inside a DAW, or using some combination of the two?

And if you made the move to software, what did you learn that you wish you knew beforehand?

Carlos Sanchez
Behind Sunday

Behind the work. Elevating the mission.

The main idea was simple:

Every screen needs a job.

That article generated more conversation than I expected, and one question naturally follows from it.

If we stop putting every announcement on the lobby TVs, what should actually be on them?

I don’t think there is one universal playlist that every church should copy. The better approach is to think about the lobby television in different states based on who is in the building, what they are doing, and what would actually be useful to them at that moment.

For us, I’m beginning to think about four primary states:

Weekday. Pre-service. During service. Post-service.

Same television. Four different jobs.

State 1: Weekday

Walk into a lot of churches during the week and the lobby TVs are either turned off or still rotating last Sunday’s announcements.

I think there is a better opportunity here.

During the week, the screen should function primarily as part of the environment. Someone may be coming in for a meeting, counseling appointment, rehearsal, student event, small group, or simply visiting the building for the first time.

They probably do not need a slideshow telling them about six upcoming Sunday events.

They need to know where they are and get a quick sense of who the church is.

For a weekday lobby screen, I would keep things extremely simple:

• Church logo

• Mission or vision statement

• Service information

• One QR code for more information

That may be enough.

At our church, one of the phrases we use is:

We Exist to Reach People to Know God

That kind of message makes much more sense to me on a weekday display than a rotating collection of event flyers.

It reinforces identity.

It gives the room some intentionality.

And if somebody wants details, the QR code gives them a way to get there.

The screen does not have to explain everything the church does.

It just needs to help the space make sense.

State 2: Sunday pre-service

Sunday morning changes the audience completely.

Now the lobby is full of people arriving, checking in kids, getting coffee, finding friends, asking questions, and making their way toward the auditorium.

Attention is scarce.

That means our screens need to become more useful, not more complicated.

This is where I think many churches make the mistake of loading up a ten-slide announcement rotation because Sunday is when the most people are in the building.

More people does not automatically mean more information will be absorbed.

In fact, I think the opposite may be true.

Sunday morning is one of the busiest environments we create. If someone glances at a television for three seconds, we need to decide what deserves those three seconds.

My ideal pre-service lobby screen would probably contain three types of information.

Welcome and identity

First, establish the environment.

Church logo.

A welcoming message.

Mission or vision.

Something that immediately communicates, “You’re in the right place.”

For a first-time guest, that matters more than knowing about an event three weeks from now.

One priority

If there is something the entire church genuinely needs to know about, highlight it.

One thing.

Not eight.

Maybe baptisms are coming up.

Maybe groups launch next week.

Maybe registration closes today for a major event.

Give that message some actual room to breathe instead of forcing it to compete with everything else happening at the church.

This does require somebody to make a decision about what gets priority.

That is not always easy, but I think that decision is part of good communication.

One obvious next step

Then give people somewhere to go if they want more.

For us, I like the idea of one QR code leading to a central place where someone can find events, giving, groups, serving opportunities, baptism information, and other next steps.

The screen does not need to contain all of that information.

It just needs to provide the doorway.

Again:

The screen creates clarity. The phone handles complexity.

State 3: During service

This is the easiest decision for me.

Once service starts, I think the most useful thing our lobby TVs can become is an extension of the auditorium.

Put the live program feed on them.

At that point, the announcement rotation has largely finished doing its job.

The people remaining in the lobby are there for different reasons. A parent may have stepped out with a child. A volunteer may be serving at a desk. Someone may have arrived late. Someone else may simply need to step out of the auditorium for a few minutes.

Showing them another event graphic is probably not particularly useful.

Letting them continue participating in the service is.

The worship feed, message, host moments, baptism, or whatever is currently happening in the room now becomes the most relevant content available.

This is also a good example of why I like thinking in terms of screen states rather than playlists.

Nothing about the physical television changed.

Its purpose changed.

Before service, it helped people arrive and get connected.

During service, it helps them stay connected to what is happening in the room.

What about audio?

If you are sending the live program feed to lobby displays, I would also think intentionally about audio.

A television speaker turned up loudly in every hallway is probably not the answer.

But strategically placed program audio in lobby areas can make the transition outside the auditorium feel much less disconnected.

The goal should not be to recreate the PA system in the hallway. It should simply allow someone who steps out to continue following what is happening.

This is one of those details that is easy to overlook because technically the television is already showing the feed.

But video without useful audio may not actually solve the problem.

State 4: Post-service

Once service ends, the screen gets another job.

People are no longer arriving.

They are leaving, talking, making decisions, finding ministry leaders, picking up children, and figuring out what comes next.

That makes post-service a great time for next-step communication.

Again, I would resist turning the screens back into a twelve-slide carousel.

Instead, I’d prioritize things that make sense immediately after someone has experienced the service.

Maybe:

NEW HERE?

READY FOR YOUR NEXT STEP?

NEED PRAYER?

FIND A GROUP

SERVE WITH US

You may still highlight one major upcoming event, but I would keep the overall message focused on action.

This is also where a QR code becomes particularly useful because somebody is much more likely to take out their phone after service than while rushing through the lobby before it.

Think about location too

Not every television in the building needs to show identical content.

A screen near kids check-in has a different audience from one near the auditorium doors.

A television in the student area may need different information from the main lobby.

A screen beside a Next Steps area may be much more action-oriented than one mounted over the coffee station.

This is where digital signage gets interesting.

Instead of asking:

“What should be on our TVs?”

we can ask:

“What should be on this TV, in this location, for this person?”

That is a much better design question.

You may eventually end up with different content zones throughout the building.

Main lobby

Welcome, identity, priority communication, live program.

Kids area

Check-in information, kids branding, pickup instructions, relevant family communication.

Next Steps area

Groups, serving, baptism, prayer, connection.

Auditorium overflow or lobby

Live program feed during service.

Now the screens are actually responding to their environment.

Don’t design a lobby slide like a flyer

There is another practical issue underneath all of this.

Even when we choose the right information, we can still communicate it poorly.

A lobby television is not a flyer.

It is not an email.

It is not an event registration page.

Someone may only look at it for a few seconds, often from twenty feet away.

That means the design needs to reflect reality.

A good lobby graphic probably needs:

• One strong headline

• Very little supporting copy

• Large typography

• High contrast

• One obvious action

If somebody has to stand directly in front of the television and read three sentences to understand the announcement, the design is asking too much from the environment.

Give them the idea.

Then give them somewhere else to get the details.

I’d rather have four great slides than fourteen mediocre ones

There is a temptation with digital signage to think more content equals more value.

I’m starting to believe the opposite.

I would rather have a small number of intentional screens or slides that someone can actually understand than a huge playlist trying to represent every ministry equally.

Imagine a pre-service rotation containing:

1. Welcome / church identity

2. This week’s priority

3. Next Steps / QR code

4. One strong environmental or mission graphic

That is four slides.

Someone walking through the lobby might realistically see two of them.

They still have a chance of understanding something.

Compare that with fourteen slides rotating every eight seconds. A person could stand in the lobby for almost two minutes and still never see the announcement that was supposedly important enough to include.

More content does not automatically equal better communication.

Someone has to decide what gets priority

This is probably the hardest part of the whole framework.

Technology makes it easy to add another slide.

Leadership requires deciding whether we should.

Every ministry has legitimate things happening. Every leader understandably wants people to know about those things.

But the communication system cannot treat every message as the highest priority simultaneously.

Somewhere, somebody has to curate.

That might be a communications director, creative director, pastor, or small group of leaders. The structure will look different in every church.

But there needs to be some answer to:

What are we asking people to pay attention to this week?

If the answer is “everything,” we probably have not actually answered the question.

A simple framework you can use this Sunday

If I were starting from scratch with lobby TVs this week, I would use this:

WEEKDAY

Job: Reinforce identity
Content: Logo, mission, service information, one QR code

SUNDAY PRE-SERVICE

Job: Welcome and orient
Content: Welcome, one priority message, Next Steps, one QR code

DURING SERVICE

Job: Extend the auditorium experience
Content: Live program feed

POST-SERVICE

Job: Help people respond
Content: Next Steps, prayer, groups, serving, one priority

That is not a rigid formula.

It is a starting point.

Your church may need something completely different. But simply assigning each state a purpose forces us to think beyond:

What slides do we have available?

And toward:

What would actually help someone right now?

The bigger principle

This whole conversation is really about something bigger than lobby televisions.

Creative ministry should not simply fill available space.

Production should not simply make signals appear on screens.

Communications should not simply distribute every piece of information everywhere.

We are designing an experience.

And good experiences usually come from clarity, hierarchy, and intentionality.

The television in your lobby is one small piece of that system.

Give it a job.

Give it the information it needs to accomplish that job.

Then let everything else go somewhere better suited to handle it.

Because sometimes the best thing we can do with a screen is not put more on it.

It is finally decide what belongs there.

If you’re using lobby TVs or digital signage at your church, I’d love to hear how you handle the different parts of Sunday.

Do your screens change once service begins, or are you running the same content all day?

Drop your setup in the comments. I’m especially interested in how other churches are handling live program feeds, lobby audio, and different content zones around the building.

Carlos Sanchez
Behind Sunday

Behind the work. Elevating the mission.

Upcoming event? Put it on the screen. Small group registration? Screen. Baptism? Screen. Volunteer signup? Definitely the screen.

Before long, the lobby TV becomes a digital church bulletin cycling through twelve announcements every few seconds while almost everyone walks right past it. Technically, we communicated everything. The better question is whether anybody actually received anything.

That question has started changing how I think about screens in church.

Every screen needs a job

One of the biggest mistakes we can make in a church environment is treating every display as though it serves the same purpose. It doesn’t.

The LED wall in the auditorium has a different job than the television hanging in the lobby. That lobby television has a different job during the week than it does once Sunday service begins. A screen near kids check-in has a completely different audience from the screen behind the worship team.

And a display somebody sees for three seconds while walking past it should not be designed the same way as a screen people will look at for an entire service.

That seems obvious, but a lot of churches still take the same 16:9 announcement slides and distribute them everywhere: auditorium, lobby, kids areas, website, social media. Same graphic. Same amount of information. Same expectation that someone will stop long enough to read it.

I think we can be much more intentional than that.

Start with the environment, not the announcement

A screen is part of the room before it ever becomes a communication tool.

If somebody walks into your church during the week and sees a television mounted in the lobby, that screen contributes to how the building feels. It can make the space feel intentional or neglected, welcoming or cluttered, current or dated.

So instead of starting with, “What announcements need to go on the lobby TVs?” I think the better question is:

What should this space feel like, and what information would actually be useful here?

Once you ask that, the answer may not be twelve rotating slides. It might simply be your church identity, your mission, service information, and one clear QR code where people can find everything else.

The screen is still useful. It just stops fighting for attention.

The auditorium LED wall has a completely different job

The auditorium is where restraint becomes even more important. A large LED wall is visually powerful, which is exactly why we shouldn’t feel obligated to fill every pixel with information.

During worship, the screen should support what is happening in the room. Sometimes that means lyrics. Sometimes it means a subtle motion background. Sometimes it means IMAG. And sometimes the best thing the screen can do is almost disappear.

The question should not be, “How much content can we display?”

It should be, “What helps the room right now?”

An LED wall can create atmosphere, reinforce visual identity, help people participate, and focus attention. It can also become the loudest thing in the room if we aren’t careful.

Creative teams need to remember that visual volume is real. Something doesn’t have to make sound to be loud.

Lobby TVs shouldn’t become digital bulletin boards

This is probably where my thinking has changed the most.

Rotating announcement slides make sense on paper. You’ve already created the graphics, you have televisions in the building, so you put the graphics on the televisions. It feels efficient.

But think about how people actually move through a church lobby. They’re walking, talking, checking in kids, getting coffee, finding friends, or trying to figure out where they’re supposed to go. You may have their attention for three seconds.

A slide containing an event name, date, time, registration deadline, two paragraphs of copy, a website, and a QR code isn’t really communication anymore. It’s homework.

And before someone finishes processing it, the slideshow has already changed.

Give people one obvious action

This is where QR codes can be extremely useful—if we’re disciplined with them.

I’m not against QR codes. I use them. What I don’t like is putting several different QR codes on the same screen and asking people to figure out which tiny square applies to them.

A better lobby screen might simply reinforce the identity and mission of the church:

WE EXIST TO REACH PEOPLE TO KNOW GOD

Then underneath:

Scan for more information

One QR code. That’s it.

Once someone scans it, the phone becomes the place where all the detailed information lives: events, Next Steps, giving, groups, baptism, serving, and everything else.

That gives each device a clear role:

The screen creates clarity. The phone handles complexity.

I think that is a much better division of labor.

The same screen can have different jobs throughout the day

Another thing I think churches underuse is the ability for a screen to have different states.

A lobby television does not have to display the same thing seven days a week. Think about it as part of an environmental system.

During the week, it might be primarily branded: church identity, mission, service information, and a QR code. Clean, evergreen, and useful to somebody walking into the building on a Tuesday afternoon.

On Sunday morning before service, that same screen can shift slightly. Maybe it becomes more welcoming. Maybe it highlights where guests should start. Maybe the QR code becomes more prominent. Maybe there is one important next step worth reinforcing.

Then once service begins, the job changes again. At that point, the lobby TVs may be far more useful showing the live program feed.

A parent steps out with a child and can still follow the message. A volunteer serving in the lobby doesn’t completely miss service. Someone arriving late immediately understands what is happening in the room.

Same television. Three different jobs.

That is the kind of thinking I want our creative systems to move toward.

Announcements still matter

None of this means churches should stop communicating events. It means we need to think harder about where each kind of communication works best.

An upcoming event may need a stage announcement for awareness, a social post for sharing, an email for details, a website page for complete information, and perhaps a text message when the date gets closer. A lobby screen may help reinforce it, but the lobby TV should not be expected to do the entire job.

Good communication is a system. Each channel should do the part it is best at.

The same principle applies during the service.

Take a Next Steps slide during a host moment. If the person on stage is already explaining the action verbally, the screen does not need to repeat the entire speech. Instead, the visual can reinforce the decision:

NEED PRAYER?

LOOKING FOR MORE?

Then give each option one obvious action.

The person on stage provides context. The screen provides clarity.

That is what good communication channels should do together.

Fewer messages can communicate more

This is probably the hardest part because churches have a lot happening, and all of it feels important.

The ministry leader cares about their event. The kids team needs volunteers. Groups are launching. Baptisms are coming. There is a conference next month. Giving matters. Prayer matters. Next Steps matters.

None of those things are unimportant.

But when everything receives the same visual priority, nothing has priority.

Sometimes creative leadership means saying, “This matters, but this isn’t the right screen for it.”

Sometimes it means saying, “We can communicate this, but we need to simplify the message.”

And sometimes it means deciding that something else needs the attention this week.

That isn’t withholding communication.

That’s designing communication.

Production and creative should design experiences

This is where I think church production and church creative overlap more than we sometimes realize.

Production shouldn’t only be concerned with whether the television receives a signal. Creative shouldn’t only be concerned with whether the slide looks good.

The larger question is:

What experience are we creating for the person in the room?

When someone walks into the lobby, what do they see? What do they immediately understand? Where should their attention go?

When they enter the auditorium, does the visual environment feel connected to the lobby? When worship begins, do the screens support participation? When the host communicates a next step, does the visual make that action obvious? When someone leaves, do they know where to go if they want more information?

Those are systems questions.

That’s why I don’t think digital signage should simply receive a folder of announcement graphics every Monday with the instruction, “Put these on rotation.”

We should be more intentional than that.

My new rule: every screen gets a purpose

Before deciding what goes on a screen, I want to answer three questions.

Who is looking at this screen?

Is it a worshipper sitting in the auditorium? A guest walking through the lobby? A parent checking in a child? A volunteer serving during service?

How long do we realistically have their attention?

Three seconds? Thirty seconds? An entire service?

What is the single most useful thing this screen can do for them?

Not five things.

One.

Once those questions are answered, the design usually gets much simpler—and much better.

Don’t fill screens. Use them.

Having a screen does not mean we need to constantly prove we are using it.

Sometimes a beautiful branded background is enough. Sometimes one sentence is enough. Sometimes the live camera feed is the right answer. Sometimes the screen should be full of lyrics. Sometimes the screen should almost disappear.

The technology exists to serve the environment and the mission, not the other way around.

So I’m trying to stop asking:

What can we put on this screen?

And start asking:

What should this screen accomplish?

I think that question leads to clearer communication, better creative decisions, and ultimately a better experience for the people we’re trying to reach.

Take a look at the screens around your church this week—lobby TVs, LED walls, hallway displays, check-in monitors, whatever you have.

Then ask yourself:

Does this screen have a clear job, or are we just putting things on it because it’s there?

If your church has found a creative way to make digital signage more useful without turning every display into another announcement board, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Carlos Sanchez
Behind Sunday
Behind the work. Elevating the mission.

We already had 11 independent IEM mixes running from our Yamaha TF-RACK.

The problem was that they were all mono.

And technically, they worked.

Everyone could hear what they needed. Everyone had their own mix. The system had been reliable.

But as our band got more comfortable with in-ear monitoring, we started hearing the same request more and more:

Can we go stereo?

At first, that might sound like a luxury.

Once we actually made the change, it became pretty obvious that it wasn’t.

Mono worked. Stereo changed the experience.

With a mono IEM mix, everything is essentially competing for the same space.

Vocals.

Guitars.

Keys.

Tracks.

Click.

Drums.

Bass.

Everything is stacked together in the center of your head.

You can change levels and EQ, but spatially, everything still lives in basically the same place.

That can make a busy worship mix feel dense and crowded, especially when a musician needs a lot of sources in their ears.

Stereo gave us another tool:

space.

Instead of solving every problem with volume, we could start solving some of them with placement.

Keys could spread naturally across the stereo field.

Tracks could retain their stereo image.

Guitars could sit slightly left or right.

Background vocals could be positioned away from the lead vocal.

Click and guide could have their own place.

A musician’s own instrument could stay prominent without every other source having to sit directly underneath it.

The result was a monitor mix that felt wider, clearer, and much less congested.

And our ears noticed the difference

One of the biggest benefits wasn’t simply that stereo sounded better.

It was that the mixes became easier to listen to.

When everything is fighting for the center of a mono mix, the instinct is often to keep turning things up just to distinguish one source from another.

Stereo separation gives you another way to create definition.

That doesn’t automatically make an IEM mix safer—volume still matters—but it can make it easier to build a clear, comfortable mix without relying entirely on level to make things audible.

For our band, moving from mono to stereo was a significant improvement.

Once they experienced it, going back to mono wasn’t really something anyone wanted to do.

Which created the next problem.

Eleven people. Eleven stereo mixes.

Moving from mono to stereo effectively doubled the output requirement.

Eleven mono mixes require:

11 output channels.

Eleven stereo mixes require:

22 output channels.

And suddenly a monitor system that had been handling everybody just fine had a new limitation.

Our Yamaha TF-RACK was still capable of generating 10 stereo monitor mixes, but its 16 local analog outputs could only physically feed eight stereo IEM systems.

And we needed eleven.

So instead of immediately asking:

“What new monitor console should we buy?”

I started asking:

“How far can we push the Yamaha system we already own?”

The answer ended up being:

• 10 stereo mixes from the Yamaha TF-RACK

• 1 stereo mix from our FOH Yamaha TF5

• 16 local outputs from the TF-RACK

• 6 additional outputs from our Yamaha Tio stage box

• 8 Shure PSM300 wireless systems

• 3 Behringer Powerplay P1 wired packs

For a total of:

11 independent stereo IEM mixes.

And we did it without buying another console.

Here’s how the whole thing works.

The system we already had

Our monitor system is built around a few key pieces:

• Yamaha TF-RACK — dedicated monitor console

• Yamaha TF5 — FOH

• Yamaha Tio stage box

• Dante network

• 8 Shure PSM300 wireless IEM systems

• 3 Behringer Powerplay P1 wired packs

The TF-RACK is still the heart of the monitor system.

In fact, 10 of our 11 stereo mixes are generated from the TF-RACK.

Only the final mix comes from the TF5.

That was important to me because I wanted to keep as much of the band’s monitoring as possible on the dedicated monitor console instead of spreading responsibility across multiple desks.

The first eight: Shure PSM300 wireless systems

The first eight mixes are pretty straightforward.

Our eight Shure PSM300 transmitters are located at FOH, right alongside the TF-RACK.

A stereo IEM mix requires two physical outputs, so the TF-RACK’s 16 local outputs work out perfectly:

IEM 1 → Outputs 1–2
IEM 2 → Outputs 3–4
IEM 3 → Outputs 5–6
IEM 4 → Outputs 7–8
IEM 5 → Outputs 9–10
IEM 6 → Outputs 11–12
IEM 7 → Outputs 13–14
IEM 8 → Outputs 15–16

That’s all 16 local outputs used.

So at that point we had:

8 wireless stereo IEM mixes

But the TF-RACK was still generating two more stereo monitor mixes.

We just didn’t have any local outputs left to get them out of the console.

That’s where Dante and the Tio come in.

IEMs 9 and 10: send them back to the stage

The next two musicians use Behringer Powerplay P1 wired packs.

Since those packs are physically on stage, it actually makes more sense for their audio to come out of an output on stage rather than running additional analog lines from FOH.

So we take stereo mixes 9 and 10 from the TF-RACK and send them over Dante to the Yamaha Tio.

The routing looks like this:

TF-RACK IEM 9
→ Dante
→ Tio outputs 1–2
→ Behringer Powerplay P1

TF-RACK IEM 10
→ Dante
→ Tio outputs 3–4
→ Behringer Powerplay P1

Now we have:

8 wireless stereo mixes

plus

2 wired stereo mixes

all being generated from the TF-RACK.

That’s ten.

The eleventh mix

The TF-RACK gets us to ten stereo mixes, but we still have one musician left.

So the final stereo monitor mix comes from our FOH Yamaha TF5.

That mix also travels across Dante to the Tio:

TF5 IEM 11
→ Dante
→ Tio outputs 5–6
→ Behringer Powerplay P1

And that’s how we get to:

11 independent stereo IEM mixes

The final breakdown

8 Shure PSM300 wireless stereo systems
→ mixed from TF-RACK
→ 16 local TF-RACK outputs

2 Behringer Powerplay P1 wired stereo packs
→ mixed from TF-RACK
→ Dante
→ 4 Tio outputs

1 Behringer Powerplay P1 wired stereo pack
→ mixed from TF5
→ Dante
→ 2 Tio outputs

So overall:

10 mixes from the TF-RACK
1 mix from the TF5

8 wireless
3 hardwired

11 stereo IEM mixes total.

Seeing the whole system

This is where the Dante network really earns its keep.

If I looked only at the back of the TF-RACK, I would see 16 outputs and assume:

Eight stereo mixes. That’s all we’ve got.

But the local outputs aren’t the entire audio system.

The Tio gives us additional analog outputs wherever they’re actually useful.

The TF5 gives us another stereo mix when the TF-RACK reaches its limit.

Once we started looking at the entire Yamaha/Dante system instead of one piece of equipment, the solution became much more obvious.

Why the wired packs actually make sense

The three Behringer P1 packs aren’t just a workaround for not having enough wireless systems.

For musicians who don’t need to move around the stage, wired IEMs can make a lot of sense.

There’s no RF coordination.

No transmitter.

No wireless frequency to manage.

And because the musicians are already near the Tio, the cable run is short and simple.

So the physical layout actually lines up pretty naturally:

People who need mobility → Shure PSM300 wireless

People who can remain hardwired → Behringer P1

That also keeps us from buying wireless systems where we don’t really need them.

Was stereo worth all of this?

For our band?

Absolutely.

The difference wasn’t subtle.

Going stereo didn’t magically make every monitor mix perfect, but it gave us a much better canvas to work with.

Instead of:

everything = center

we now have another dimension available when building the mix.

For example, you might have:

Own vocal → center

Other vocals → slightly spread

Electric guitar → left

Acoustic guitar → right

Keys → stereo

Tracks → stereo

Click → slightly off-center

The exact pan positions aren’t the point.

The point is that not everything has to fight for exactly the same space anymore.

That made the mixes feel more natural and less exhausting.

And once the musicians got used to having that space, the request to stay stereo was pretty unanimous.

One thing stereo doesn’t fix

There is an important caveat here.

Stereo IEMs do not automatically mean safer IEMs.

You can still turn a stereo mix up way too loud.

Hearing protection ultimately comes down to the level reaching the musician’s ears and how long they’re exposed to it.

But stereo can help us create definition without solving every problem by turning another source up.

If I can make something easier to distinguish through placement, I may not need as much level to make it heard.

That’s one of the things our musicians noticed almost immediately.

What I like about this setup

Ten mixes stay on the monitor console

This is probably the biggest win operationally.

Ten out of eleven performers are still controlled from the TF-RACK.

We aren’t really running two separate monitor worlds.

We’re running one primary monitor system with one additional mix borrowed from FOH.

We didn’t replace equipment unnecessarily

We already owned:

the TF-RACK.

the TF5.

the Tio.

the Dante infrastructure.

Instead of buying another console immediately, we figured out how those pieces could work together.

We solved two different limitations differently

There were really two problems.

Problem #1: We ran out of physical outputs on the TF-RACK.

Solution:

Use the Tio.

Then:

Problem #2: We reached the number of stereo mixes we could generate from the TF-RACK.

Solution:

Use one mix from the TF5.

Those are two completely different limitations, and they didn’t require the same solution.

I think that’s an important distinction when troubleshooting any production system.

What I don’t love about it

It works, but there are still compromises.

IEM 11 lives on another console

Ten mixes are on the TF-RACK.

One isn’t.

That means everyone on the production team needs to know:

IEM 11 = TF5.

Otherwise it’s very easy for someone to start adjusting the TF-RACK and wonder why nothing is happening.

The Dante routing is now mission-critical

Those last three IEM packs depend on the Dante routing to the Tio.

So the network patch isn’t just an infrastructure detail anymore.

It’s part of the monitor system.

That means it needs to be documented.

We don’t have much room left

Eleven stereo mixes is a lot for this architecture.

We’ve found a way to make the current system meet the requirement, but I don’t consider this an infinitely expandable solution.

If the band continues growing or our monitoring needs change significantly, eventually the right answer may actually be a different monitor platform.

And that’s okay.

The goal isn’t to avoid upgrades forever.

The goal is to upgrade intentionally instead of buying equipment every time we encounter a problem.

Would I build a brand-new system this way?

Probably not.

If I were designing a monitor system from scratch and knew from day one that we needed eleven or more stereo IEM mixes, I would want one dedicated monitor platform that could comfortably handle all of them with room to grow.

But that wasn’t our situation.

Our question was:

How do we take an existing Yamaha TF system that was already running 11 mono monitor mixes and move the entire band to stereo without replacing everything?

For that problem, I’m really happy with where we landed.

The band got the stereo mixes they were asking for.

The improvement was substantial.

Ten of the mixes still live on our dedicated monitor console.

We used the network and stage box we already owned.

And we didn’t have to make an emergency console purchase just to get there.

Use what you have before buying what you don’t

That’s probably the biggest takeaway from this entire project.

Production people love gear.

I’m certainly not immune to that.

But when we encounter a limitation, I think the first question should be:

What is actually limiting us?

Is it the number of buses?

The number of physical outputs?

The network?

The console?

The workflow?

Or are we simply not using the equipment we already have to its full potential?

In our case, moving from mono to stereo looked like it was going to create a much larger equipment problem.

Instead, it forced us to understand our existing system better.

And that system had more to give than we initially thought.

That’s a pretty good outcome.

If you’re trying to move your church from mono to stereo IEMs—or you’re simply running out of monitor mixes—drop your console, number of musicians, and current IEM setup in the comments.

I’d love to hear how you’re approaching it.

Carlos Sanchez
Behind Sunday
Behind the work. Elevating the mission.

The band starts. The lyrics appear. The microphones work. The lights move. The livestream goes live. The message gets heard. The room feels intentional.

At least, that’s the goal.

What most people never see is everything that happened behind Sunday to make those moments possible.

The rehearsal that ran late.

The volunteer who showed up early.

The audio issue that made absolutely no sense until someone found the one routing mistake buried three menus deep.

The camera that worked perfectly yesterday and suddenly decided Sunday morning was a good time to become difficult.

The equipment decisions.

The budgets.

The scheduling.

The planning.

The creative meetings.

The last-minute changes.

The systems that work.

The systems that definitely do not.

That’s the world this publication is about.

Because great Sundays don’t just happen.

Why Behind Sunday exists

Church production can be a strange space.

There is no shortage of information about microphones, consoles, cameras, lighting fixtures, software, computers, and whatever new piece of equipment somebody says will completely change your church.

But gear is only part of the equation.

The bigger questions are usually things like:

How do we make the equipment we already own work better?

How do we build a system our volunteers can actually understand?

When is an upgrade genuinely necessary?

How do we improve the livestream without spending money in the wrong places?

How do we organize production teams without burning people out?

How do audio, video, worship, creative, and communications work together instead of operating like completely separate departments?

And maybe most importantly:

How do we pursue excellence without allowing production to become the mission?

Those are the conversations I want to have here.

This isn’t theory from the sidelines

A lot of what you’ll read on Behind Sunday will come from real problems being worked through in a real church environment.

Sometimes that means figuring out better monitor routing.

Sometimes it means evaluating whether a console upgrade is actually worth the investment.

Sometimes it means rebuilding a broadcast workflow, reorganizing Planning Center, creating a better volunteer structure, troubleshooting Playback, redesigning lobby screens, or trying to figure out how many cameras we really need to record.

And sometimes it means realizing an idea that looked great on paper was not nearly as great once we tried it.

I want to share those parts too.

Not just the polished result.

The process.

The reasoning.

The mistakes.

The compromises.

The budget.

And what I would do differently next time.

Show the work

That is probably the simplest way to describe what I want Behind Sunday to become.

Show the work.

If we build a system, I want to show the diagram.

If we make a gear decision, I want to explain why.

If we create a budget, I want to show the numbers.

If we change a workflow, I want to explain what problem we were trying to solve.

If something fails, I want to talk about that too.

Because the most useful production conversations usually aren’t:

“Here’s the best console.”

They’re more like:

“Here was our church, our team, our budget, our problem, and here’s why this solution made sense for us.”

That context matters.

What we’ll talk about

Behind Sunday will cover a pretty wide range of church production and creative work, including:

• Audio, consoles, Dante, IEMs, Waves, Playback, and broadcast mixing

• Cameras, live streaming, switching, recording, and video systems

• ProPresenter, LED walls, lobby displays, graphics, and creative direction

• Worship technology and Sunday workflows

• Planning Center, volunteer structures, scheduling, and training

• Equipment purchases, upgrade plans, budgets, and system design

• Things that worked

• Things that didn’t

• Things I would absolutely never do again

Some posts will be technical.

Some will be creative.

Some will be about leadership and systems.

Some may simply be the story of what went wrong on Sunday morning and what we learned from it.

But they’ll all come back to the same goal:

better systems, stronger teams, and better Sundays — while keeping the mission bigger than the technology.

Who this is for

Behind Sunday is for the production director with a real budget.

It’s for the creative pastor trying to connect several different departments.

It’s for the worship leader who somehow also became responsible for Playback.

It’s for the volunteer who touched the sound console once and is now apparently “the audio guy.”

It’s for the church trying to improve its online experience.

It’s for the team that wants to get better but doesn’t have a megachurch staff or an unlimited equipment budget.

If some part of your week is spent figuring out how to make Sunday work, this is for you.

We’re just getting started

I have a long list of things I want to break down here.

Real system designs.

Real budgets.

Routing diagrams.

Gear decisions.

Broadcast workflows.

Creative systems.

Volunteer structures.

And plenty of lessons learned the hard way.

For now, Behind Sunday is completely free while we build the community and figure out what is most useful to the people reading it.

So if you work in church production, worship, creative ministry, broadcast, or communications, I’d love for you to subscribe.

And even better, reply or leave a comment and tell me:

What part of church production or creative ministry are you responsible for, and what problem are you trying to solve right now?

There’s a good chance your answer becomes something we dig into here.

Thanks for being here at the beginning.

Carlos Sanchez

Behind Sunday

Behind the work. Elevating the mission.