Megachurches and meeting needs

That's a photo of the Ramsa SX1 mixing console. David Jorm and I went to Brisbane's biggest megachurch tonight, and that's the console that they use for mixing the on-stage foldback. It can do ten separate monitor mixes. There is another mixing console to do front-of-house. The monitor engineer stage-side and FOH engineer on front communicate via radio headsets.

On stage they had 13 vocalists, four guitarists, two keyboardists, a bass player, and a drummer. Each of them had a foldback wedge or an in-ear monitor. The sound was great. The space was designed acoustically, and the sound system line array [wikipedia] was computer engineered for tight frequency dispersion.

Aside from the technology to "Amplify His Name" (a slogan written on the wall in the youth centre that we saw in a brief tour before the service), this megachurch, and in fact any successful spiritual service centre meets a number of needs of the congregation, which leads to increased popularity.

Here are the needs that need to be met, to be successful:

• Help me find a mate
• Help me maintain my marriage
• Help me raise my kids
• Entertain me
• Engage me
• Give me a spiritual perspective on my life (meaning, context, purpose, bigger picture)
• Give me community with like-minded people