Faith Lutheran Church, with campuses in the Oakville, Missouri, area and the nearby suburb of Columbia, Illinois, has served congregations for six decades. Recently the church moved its Columbia campus to a new facility and upgraded the A/V infrastructure in both facilities.
An existing Roland M-400 48-Channel Live Digital Mixing Console, which had been used for years at the Oakville campus, was moved to the new Columbia campus, which left room for the Roland M-5000 OHRCA Live Mixing Console.
“At the Oakville campus, we usually have a drummer, one or two electric guitarists, an acoustic guitarists, keyboards and a handful of singers each week, plus the volunteers that control the audio, video and lighting,” notes Andy Weiss, Worship & Media Coordinator for Faith Lutheran Church. “Our audio needs have been growing here at Faith, especially with the move to a new facility for our Columbia location. We had been using the M-400 in our Oakville worship center, as well as in our student facility, and our volunteers were very familiar with the Roland format and how everything works. In expanding, the M-5000 was a natural upgrade for us to meet the needs of our ministries. This allowed us to increase our channel count at Oakville and move one of our existing M-400 consoles to the Columbia campus. The flexibility of the Roland M-5000’s architecture allows us configure the channel count, AUX’s, and monitor buses as needed, plus we can add more REAC system components as we continue to grow.”
The sanctuary of Faith Lutheran Church in the Oakville area of St. Louis.
Photo: Courtesy of Faith Lutheran Church
Weiss brought in Phil Mahder, who leads house of worship A/V consultant firm Film Otter Inc., to source and install the new M-5000 and peripherals. “I’ve had a long relationship with Faith Lutheran,” notes Mahder. “I was a consultant in 2007 or 2008 when we put a Roland M-400 in their youth center, and it’s served them extremely well. We wanted the M-5000 right away, and we got one of the first ones that shipped. It was a relatively seamless changeover. Much of our existing infrastructure, including the existing Roland digital snakes, worked great with the new console. The existing snakes provided a seamless install of the M-5000, plus allowed the church higher sound quality at 24-bit/96 kHz. The Roland way of doing things is consistent enough that it wasn’t a big learning curve for the church’s people to acclimate themselves to the 5000.”
“We’re using the M-5000 for everything, all of our services, in our main worship center at Oakville—full praise team, preaching, a live stream between campuses, and more,” Weiss adds. “We also occasionally send a feed to a facility down the road that we have some ties with. Response from the congregation, and our A/V volunteers, has been stellar. Everything sounds very clean to my ears, and the volunteers say the M-5000 is even more intuitive to operate than the M-400. Plus, when Phil made us aware, after signing off on our budget for the M-5000, that Roland had a loyalty rebate program in effect, the started to sound even sweeter!”
For more information, visit proav.roland.com/ohrca.
