A church in Oklahoma bought a sports arena and took the opportunity to take in-person and online services to a whole new level. Paul Milligan talks to the integrator responsible for an award-winning end result.
This story begins in August 2019 when Transformation Church purchased the Spirit Bank Center, a 4,500-seat arena and convention centre with 50,000 square feet of space in Tulsa, Oklahoma for $10.5 million (€8.9m) to turn it into a church. But what happened next was to change everything for the Transformation Church. Just a few months later the Covid pandemic hit and with in-person gatherings forbidden, many worshippers turned to online channels, and the engaging and unconventional teachings of senior pastor Michael Todd on YouTube went viral, giving the church a global reach it had never had before.
The church decided to seize this newfound fame to renovate and upgrade the Spirit Bank Center during its closure to the public. What the Transformation Church ended up with would now outshine many (much larger) corporate and broadcast organisations.
Global integration group Diversified was first brought into the project when it was invited to come to Tulsa to see the church, to advise on making the audio work for the needs of the church, rather than for a sports arena. Tim Coulter, vice president of faith and performance for Diversified, takes up the story; “We spent the day together and learned that we really had strong DNA alliance between our respective teams. A few weeks later we were engaged on this project and it happened in a couple of stages. They had another loudspeaker system they were unhappy with.”
Diversified helped them to finalise an L-Acoustics L-ISA system design and arranged a demo. “Not long after that the conversation expanded to video. Again, they had already started down a path towards a 1080p very standard video system using a very well-known camera in the market that had been in the market for 10 years at that point. As we got to know each other, they learned we don't do copy and paste projects, every project is very unique because every client we work with is unique. And that started a dreaming process where they really opened the door to us to say we want to do things in the industry that have never been done before and that was really being driven by a couple of variables,” adds Coulter.
The first being their primary broadcast distribution mechanism was YouTube. “How do we make our YouTube presentation absolutely the most engaging? How do we make it stand out from thousands of other churches broadcasting on YouTube? There are lots of major players in the faith market who have invested for many years in broadcast and had their messages on TVs all around the world,” says Coulter.
“Something Pastor Mike noticed about those particular ministries was that their content looked timeless. You could look at content from eight or ten years ago and it still looked current, whereas most churches have a very short lifespan to their content because technology is advancing so fast. There was a handful of ministries that Pastor Mike pointed to and said A church in Oklahoma bought a sports arena and took the opportunity to take in-person and online services to a whole new level. Paul Milligan talks to the integrator in charge of an award-winning end result. ‘I would like, five to ten years from now, the content we've created to still hold up and still look every bit as relevant and current.’”
To do this Diversified created something very special, and it rightfully won the House of Worship Project of the Year at the 2025 Inavation Awards. What started as a job to upgrade the audio eventually turned into 16 sub-projects for Diversified throughout the entire building, from the parking lot to the lobby, to large and small meeting rooms, green rooms, the main arena and another performance space called the ballroom.
This project represents the first UHD HDR broadcast video system to be implemented in a church in the world. Sony F5500, HDC-3500 (both 4K) and Venice (6K) cameras were chosen for this project, alongside Fujinon Cabrio and Zeiss lenses. The video generated operates at 2160p 23.98fps, a tough to implement but fantastic to watch frame rate which ensures the cinematic feel the client wanted. This project also features the first L-Acoustics L2 L-ISA immersive loudspeaker system to be installed in a church in the world, to make sure every seat in the arena could hear everything perfectly. L-Acoustics loudspeakers are also strategically placed throughout the primary production spaces.
Yamaha Rivage audio consoles serve as the foundation for FoH and monitor systems, and a massive fibre backbone infrastructure is installed throughout the facility for high bandwidth uncompressed signal transport, along with a large Netgear production network with 10G backbone. Q-SYS handles the video distribution, with Dante handling audio distribution.
A Lawo broadcast audio platform ensures every detail experienced in the room is translated to a worldwide audience, as well as maximising future expansion capabilities for additional venues potentially on- and off-site via a Ravenna audio protocol backbone. A Riedel 1024 matrix intercom system with Bolero wireless belt packs was chosen throughout all of the production environments to provide high quality comms among the production team and talent. LG’s 88-in 32x9 stretch signage displays are used in a number of different portrait and landscape configurations throughout the facility for signage and wayfinding. In addition to the arena, other full production environments include the Ballroom, a 400-seat secondary broadcast venue, and local presentation systems in each classroom environment.
Another signifier that this isn’t your everyday house of worship, is that the lobby, which features a 13m wide ROE Jasper HDR LED videowall and L-Acoustics A15 loudspeaker system, has already been used to film a music video. The main stage features a giant LED videowall, with two support screens either side, and 94 speakers in the arena, all discretely amplified.
The challenges on this project were many says Coulter, and at times needed miracles to complete. “When we were engaged on the project there was not a structural engineer in Tulsa that would certify being able to suspend load off the existing structure in the building. So how are we supposed to execute our audio system? You could go on Google and search this facility because it existed for many years and you could see pictures of concerts having happened in this room. You could see pictures of a big central LED scoreboard. All of these things that weren't there anymore.”
The eventual solution was to bring in an entertainment-centric structural engineering company to review the pre-engineered drawings "to help us determine where the truth was" adds Coulter. Thankfully no significant structural modifications were required, but “we learned what the limitations were, for example we have a massive LED wall comprised of 800+ panels of ROE Visual Graphite LED. That LED wall was not able to be suspended from the roof deck, it had to be ground supported, there are limitations, but the entire lighting rig is flown, and the entire PA rig is flown.”
Another major challenge was filming and broadcasting in UHD HDR, something never done before in a house of worship. The client’s goal was to look cinematic explains Coulter, “they wanted it to look like a Netflix special every week. With that in mind they wanted to embrace a cinematic frame rate (23.98). At the time finding equipment, finding video servers, finding switchers, finding sources that could all natively work in 2160p 23.98 was tremendously challenging, and so building that entire architecture around the HDR and the frame rate was certainly the most complicated part of this entire project. That's why we're so insanely proud of the end results. You've never seen a church look like this before.”
To help do this Diversified was able to draw on its colleagues who had experience of working on HDR in American sports stadia for some time. Diversified also called on outside help in the form of AbelCine, an integrator specialising in cinema and broadcast. Coulter explains its role here: “The church was live on their video system for about a year and was struggling with shading for HDR, and making the product look the way they wanted it to. We brought in AbelCine to work on the colour pipeline, it changed the workflow and introduced a streamlined workflow around colour grading, and all of a sudden overnight, when we implemented this, the product looked like Netflix. AbelCine was the magic sauce that really pushed this project over the finish line.”
The last major problem was something common to all houses of worship, they are reliant on lots of enthusiastic, non-skilled personnel to work cameras and sound. So how do you do that with brand new, complex, cutting-edge kit? There are two sides to it says Coulter. “We have to build systems that are robust and have a more common sense approach that might even have a little different terminology to it than typical broadcast lingo because your teacher, realtor, architect during the week who's coming in and serving at their church on Sunday doesn't know every bit of broadcasting lingo. There's an art to designing a system that is volunteer friendly.”
The other element was another service AbelCine provided. “We provide excellent tools, but the tools are only as good as the operators. If the camera operators can't maintain focus, it doesn't matter how great the Sony kit is. AbelCine was able to provide additional training and guidance to the churches’ leadership team to ultimately give them more ideas of how to effectively train their team, how to effectively get the most out of the tools that they have.”
Diversified’s job was to train the trainers in how to use the kit, with AbelCine helping to assist with the artistic side of live production. “Our job is to make sure that the church’s staff knows their systems inside and out, because they're here for the long game, week after week after week. That's what makes this all the more remarkable to have accomplished the level of content you see on the YouTube broadcasts, to realise there are 45 people executing that broadcast and less than 5 of those are paid staff. It's remarkable. I'm not sure of any other market in the industry that has that kind of dynamic to it.”
KIT LIST
Brightsign digital signage players
Brompton LEDprocessing
Chauvet lighting fixtures
Christie Spyder X80 screen controller
Disguise media servers
Grand MA lighting console
JBL 70V loudspeakers
L-Acoustics L2 L-ISA immersive loudspeaker system
Lawo Broadcast audio console
LG 88-in 32x9 flat panel displays
Martin lighting fixtures
Multidyne UHD fibre transport
Netgear 4200, 4300 10G network switches
Peplink routers
QSC amplifiers, Q-SYS control cores, touchpanels
Renewed Vision ProPresenter GFX software
Riedel Artist 1024 intercoms, 1200 Series touchscreens,
Bolero wireless intercoms
ROE Graphite and Jasper LED walls
Resi IP encoders, decoders
Robe lighting fixtures
Ross Video Acuity switchers, Ultrix routers, Xpression graphics system
Shure wireless mics Sony F5500, Venice, HDC-3500 cameras
Unilumin U-SLIM LED panels
Yamaha Rivage audio consoles