The Meeting House Church is all about options. Based out of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the church not only features different types of sermons to satisfy a diverse group of congregants, but services multiple locations as well.
It all started when the church moved into its current flagship Carlisle location in 1985. Ever since, the church has been growing—and outgrowing its venue. To accommodate everyone, the church started streaming live sermons from the sanctuary to a multi-purpose auditorium on the lower level in the early 2000s. This allowed the church to include more congregants every Sunday.
“Initially people weren’t too open to the idea. They thought, ‘There’s no way that I’m going to be able to go to church and sit and watch a video and get anything out of it,’” said Scott Hallman, executive pastor at The Meeting House. “It didn’t take too long for some people to actually get to the point where they were saying, ‘You know what? I like the video better. I can see better, and I actually prefer it.’”
In fact, people loved it so much, the church continued to grow even more. In 2007, both rooms were bursting at the seams, so they added a 650-seat auditorium. Then in 2015, a second campus was opened in Dillsburg, about 10 miles away.
Spire AVL set up cameras to capture the action in the Carlisle location, as well as a brand-new projector. Digital Projection’s HIGHlite Laser Projector was brought in to be paired with the biggest of three screens in the Carlisle auditorium. “The previous projector was a 14,000-lumen projector and we replaced it with an 11,000-lumen projector,” said Tyler Hoffman, owner and design principal at Spire AVL. “Because there is no light projected to represent black, the contrast is very high, therefore allowing the human eye to focus on whatever is being projected and not on kind of that black light that surrounds people in a video frame. So it allowed us to go down to 11,000-lumens, yet perceivably gain intensity. So it looks far brighter than the 14k ever did.”
Despite different projectors and different locations, the two campuses are both part of The Meeting House Church. They are connected in name—as well as via technology.
To make that connection, Spire AVL installed cameras that can capture the Thursday night sermon, which is then broadcast to congregants in Dillsburg on Sunday mornings. The church calls that Thursday program a “Dialogue,” since it doesn’t have any music and includes a Q&A. Dillsburg congregants enjoy the recorded presentation on Sunday, which is broadcast to a large screen via DPI’s E-Vision 7500 projector. Two side screens show additional content using a pair of E-Vision 6500s.
We would like to thank Spire AVL for the use of images used in this case study.
