/// Stories

Willow Creek Community Church
Wheaton Campus

Wheaton, il

Willow Creek’s Wheaton campus is the oldest satellite campus and the first video venue of Willow Creek Community Church. Willow Wheaton has transitioned from meeting in the Academy’s theater, where it has met since its beginning, to the student union on the Wheaton Academy campus. Willow Creek is known for their arts-centric ministry style and values replicating experiences from venue to venue. Willow Creek had plans to renovate the theater systems and realized that there could be an added benefit for Wheaton Academy and the church if they were to relocate to the Academy’s student union space.

Willow engaged Avenue Systems to shift gears from exploring the revamping of the theater to the repurposing of the student union space. An initial consultation provided options for the room setup, outlined the seating arrangement, and explored how to utilize some of the existing technology. For the church, one key concern was reducing setup and teardown time each Sunday through a partially installed solution that would also benefit the school during the week.

Meeting in the Wheaton Academy Theater was a labor-intensive endeavor every Sunday. Willow Wheaton required a large amount of equipment that was disjointed and complicated to set up and operate. Lighting and audio control positions required multiple people and were located on different levels of the theater. Avenue’s solution created a highly automated workflow that requires less equipment and only three technicians on a Sunday. This workflow created an error-free service environment from opening day.

To reduce setup and teardown time, Avenue Systems proposed permanently installing a sound system, theatrical lighting, and strategic infrastructure. A new 16 ft x 9 ft LED display replaced a multi-panel 16 ft x 9 ft display wall, creating a backdrop for the worship environment, a beautiful canvas for video playback, and digital signage for the Academy. Two displays were kept and used as confidence screens during the worship service. Infrastructure and wall boxes were added for easy connectivity of portable front-of-house setups for the church, as well as inputs that the school could utilize during the week, with their own equipment and needs in mind. The school’s portable staging was used, and casters were added to some of the existing staging to make it easy for the church to wheel in and out their drum set, further reducing time and labor required on Sunday.

As a multi-campus video venue, Willow leveraged its long-standing relationship with Resi to provide bi-directional streaming for playback within the campus and a point-of-view stream to the outside viewership. The solution added a single fixed camera to live stream from the campus. Avenue’s design and planning enabled the school to access the camera via its network, allowing it to control the PTZ camera and live stream small events in the space, adding benefits to both use cases.

Acoustic treatment played a critical role in the design. Fabric-wrapped wall panels along the sides and upstage wall were matched to existing panels in the school, and blackout curtains help control the ambient light. Together, these elements transformed the room into an acoustically balanced environment where the message and music are conveyed clearly, and where lighting can be dynamic and impactful.

A high priority was placed on the solution’s ability to help the school with everyday functions. The control system was designed and coordinated with the school to ensure a seamless integration and added purpose-built presets for use during school functions. The presents allow for control of all the different lights in that space from an architectural perspective, in addition to the camera controls. Avenue Systems planned from the start of the project, coordinating between the church and academy IT teams, the Avenue engineers, and the school's production personnel to ensure that all systems functioned well for everyone.

The faith placed in Avenue Systems as a strategic partner in this project stems from the confidence gained from previous projects completed for Willow Creek Community Church. Avenue's solutions have helped ministries throughout the country that meet in schools, typically benefiting both the school and the church. The Avenue Experience, with its proven track record of transparency and effective communication, continues to create partnership opportunities that help Willow Creek achieve its mission to love God, love people, and change the world.