Good, reliable, professional equipment costs money. There’s no way around that. It’s expensive for several reasons. It’s been around for years and gone through the hands of a lot of pros. While there is a certain amount of brand name overhead involved, there’s a reason that these brands have been around and can get top dollar.
Note that this doesn’t mean that there’s only one “right” piece of equipment. but it does mean that you need to look at equipment purchases from a value proposition instead of a cost basis.
For example, you can buy a 24-channel audio mixer for about $500 on the low end and go up to $4,000 on high end. That’s for an analog mixer. If you don’t know what you’re looking for and just took a cursory glance at the specs, chances are that they’d look similar and you’d be justifiably right to question why a church should spend more than $500.
What you wouldn’t know is that the reason that the $500 mixer costs that little is because it’s cheaply made, it’s a rip-off of other designs, it only sounds good in a very narrow range of parameters, and it will (not may) break down in a quarter of the time in comparison to other (better) mixers.
At the other end of the scale, the $4,000 mixer is probably going to be way too much for a church unless there is: A) a worship team that’s as good as Hillsong, and/or, B) the rest of the system complements and does justice to the fine signal that the big-bucks mixer is feeding into the rest of the signal chain.
A similar situation exists with churches that are planning a building expansion project. I’ve seen churches that have a multi-million dollar budget for a new building not plan for an acoustical consultant to come in at the planning stages to help analyze and adjust the dimensions and properties of the proposed building. If this isn’t done, odds are quite good that the acoustics of the new building will be disappointing to say the least, and it will have to be mitigated with a costly retrofit of acoustical material (and other measures).
An acoustical consultant isn’t cheap. Figure on about $2,000 – $5,000 (or more) for a qualified one to accurately model the building and present recommendations. These recommendations can range from building dimensions redesign to material changes to acoustical treatment.
On the face of it, that amount of money seems high. And it is. But in the scale of a million dollar project, it is not it. Particularly if a costly retrofit is needed after the fact.
Proper stewardship means building a realistic budget for the most expensive area of the church outside of the building itself. The technical ministry, by its very nature, is expensive and complex. Don’t put people in charge of it that don’t know anything about the ministry or the equipment. You wouldn’t pick someone out of the congregation and give them the responsibility to pastor the church every week, would you? You certainly wouldn’t want someone in the pulpit who didn’t have the right training and experience.
Invest in the people. Invest in creating a budget that includes training and includes replacement costs. Know the acceptable lifespan of equipment. Budget for repairs or preventative maintenance.
This also means budgeting for downtime for the equipment while it gets maintained. I can’t tell you how many churches I’ve visited that have mixers that haven’t been cleaned in years and aren’t covered. Do you know how much dust is in that mixer? Enough to inhibit proper functionality.
A proper yearly maintenance cleaning of a mixer takes about two days of a qualified repair tech’s time. It will cost about $150 to $200 for the cleaning. Expensive? Not from the big picture viewpoint that a new, decent mixer will cost at least $1,000.
Money and funds will always be a concern for the church, especially smaller ones. But by creating a yearly budget and putting small amounts toward that budget every week, you can build up to a working budget without having to have crisis moments.
This will also allow you to involve the congregation. They need to know that there are fixed costs with the equipment and equipment wears out. Involve them in the success or failure of the ministry. We are all in this together. Let’s promote proper and responsible stewardship!
Brian Gowing has helped dozens of churches meet their technology requirements. He works towards shepherding the church, analyzing their technical requirements, sourcing the equipment, installing the equipment and training the volunteer personnel. As he likes to say, “equipping the saints with technology to help spread the Good News.”