Elevation Church has grown from a congregation of 121 attending a portable service in the atrium at Providence High School (PHS) in Charlotte, North Carolina, to a congregation of over 5,000 attending services at a former Ashley Furniture Warehouse, a portable setup in the McGlohon Theatre, and the very same portable PHS location that started it all, only now in the 800-seat auditorium.
Outreach magazine has proclaimed it the fourth-fastest growing church in the U.S., and the technology that delivers the sermons Pastor Steven Furtick has kept pace with the growth.
Recently, Elevation donated a permanent sound system to PHS, with the understanding that the church would use it every Sunday.
Headquartered in Charlotte, Audio Ethics designed and installed the system, relying on an Ashly Audio ne4400 DSP to elegantly and inexpensively interface the school’s analog outputs and the church’s EtherSound outputs with the new d&b amplifier’s AES/EBU inputs.
There were three principle goals for the permanent system at PHS. First, the church wanted to expedite the setup and tear-down for its series of Sunday services, which had previously been a laborious, multi-hour process involving several dedicated volunteers.
Second, it wanted to “level the playing field” across its multiple campuses so that attendees at one site experienced the same engaging multi-media presentation as attendees at the other sites. The old PHS system was, in the words of Audio Ethics project manager and frequent Elevation PHS house mixer Trey Blair, was “OK, but far from great.”
Third, Elevation wanted to build a system that would benefit the school, which uses the auditorium for both performances and meetings.