trey taylor

mobile campus update

// October 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // church, creative, multi-site, video

We aren’t sure yet what we will call our 3rd location, but so far we’ve been simply calling it our Mobile Campus. Eventually, once we’ve locked in the area that it’ll be, we’ll give it a little more specific name. So far it sounds like its a mobile campus (especially for you out-of-towners), but I assure you its not. Its our Mobile (as in Alabama) Campus, and it will be somewhat mobile because for the first 6 months it will be a portable campus. Sounds like fun uh. We can’t wait. We are aggressively working on a location and I hope that we’ll be able to let the deets out of the bag soon.

Also, we’ve brought on (technically he comes on next week) our Campus Pastor for the Mobile Campus, I’m extremely proud to introduce Tim Gautreaux, who will be coming on staff to take the DNA of Bay across the pond to do something amazing, something different in the Mobile area. Tim’s a rad dude, we are so excited about him joining our team. Check the video below to get to know him.

Props to @benragsdale & @wharing on the video. It looks amazing!

the evolution to multi-site

// July 1st, 2008 // No Comments » // church, multi-site

This is sort of a part 2 to yesterdays post about One Prayer. I wanted to share one other way that this series has been so great for us. One Prayer has been an awesome way to get our peeps ready for video sermons. We’ve been talking about going multi-site for a while now (read more here), so this has been a great way to introduce them to video pastor. And the response has been so much better than I expected. They reacted no different than if the speaker were live, they laughed out loud (especially with Perry), the would say their typical ‘amens,’ and they bowed their heads when the speakers prayed. Which is exactly what we were hoping would happen.

Our next step in evolving into a multi-site church is to start one video service at our current location. Our plan as of now will be to record Saturday nights message and then roll it during any one of our Sunday morning services, and the fun thing is that we are going to keep it random. We’re doing this for a few reasons:

• 1. Our auditorium only seats 500, and every seat is within 75 ft of the stage, so iMag has never been needed, it may would even be more of a distraction (and that totally misses the point of iMag). So our people aren’t used to watching the screens as they are in so many other churches, so rolling it on Sundays gets them used to it and hopefully makes it a little easier to transition them to a video campus (our goal is have 200 or so commit to helping us launch our first off-site campus).
   
• 2. We’re keeping it random so we can introduce it to everyone, not just one service or group of folks. We’re sharing the love man! And hopefully it will kill the negative preconceived notions that a lot of people may have, you know the ones that have never experienced it but will still complain and point out every reason why it won’t work. Those people are so much fun.
   
• 3. The last reason is to give our Pastor a break. He’s been preaching 4 services a weekend for over a year now. To keep him from burnout, we feel its a necessity to introduce a video message in one service a weekend.

For the most part these are initial ideas, we’ve still got a lot of planning and learning to do before we truly get a lock on whats gonna be going down. 

I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially you guys out there that may be in a multi-site church or planning to go multi-site… give me yo wisdom!

goin’ multi-site

// June 18th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // church, creative, multi-site, technology, video

For the last year we’ve been feeling that multi-site was the direction God was taking us. I had the opportunity to go check out LifeChurch.tv and see how they roll… which is a sight to be seen if you’ve never been out there.  Go. Thats all I’ve got to say. Anyway, all you guys in the blogosphere that I read have taught me tons on the subject as well, and I’m sure we’ve got a long way to go, especially when it comes to fine tuning ‘our way’ of doing multi-site. Everybody is doing it so differently, and its working for you guys where you are. So right now, we are in the phase are studying, researching, praying, and trying to figure out what ‘our way’ looks like. 

Over the last 2 days, I’ve been meeting with the guys from Fowler Design Group about wiping our existing video system and taking us to HD from lens to screen, as well as designing the delivery system for each of our future campuses. Which is our first step in the journey of going to a second site. On top of that, we are in the process of extending our existing building to accomodate more room for youth and kids, as well as a second venue on site, which will technically be our first venture into multi-site. 

So, to step back and look at this, we are doing a lot all at once. A full video overhaul, including lighting, in the main worship space, and then full production (audio, video, & lighting) in the new youth room, the new kids room, and the second on-site venue, all while making plans for our first off-site campus launch some time early to mid 2009. 

So my last 2 days have been working through this, dreaming a little about what is possible. And of course filling my head with more acronyms than I thought existed in the entire world. Can you think of another industry with more acronyms than the video/production industry?

So needless to say my head is hurting right now just thinking about it all. But at the same time, its really exciting. I love technology, especially when its used to advance the kingdom. 

I’ll be posting a lot more details in the future. We are still in the infant stages of this, but as we build this system and our plan for multi-site I’ll be posting as much info as I can.