Consider price, logistics and design when choosing essential equipment for your portable church.
Choosing equipment for a portable church is significantly different than choosing equipment for a permanent church building.
There are many factors to take into account when choosing equipment specific to a rented space. And if a church doesn’t take into account the unique challenges related to equipping these kinds of spaces, it will be difficult on both the leaders and volunteers. What might seem like a savings up front will actually cost more in the long run.
What’s so unique about portable spaces? What are the competing values that impact your portable church equipment selection?
Here are three factors that make portable equipment different from permanent.
3 Essential Equipment Considerations For Your Portable Church
1. System Design & Integration
In a typical portable church, the venue and setup stay the same each week. This site consistency allows for some innovative opportunities in the design, selection and storage of the overall system.
INNOVATIVE EXAMPLES
For instance, in a large church that meets in a school, we were able to capitalize on the existing layout. The children’s ministry gathers in one large area with its own entrance, and we designed a kid-friendly archway to welcome the kids, custom-fitted to the facility. In addition, we printed a custom scuba wall for the children’s ministry area.
Another church conducts weekly worship in a rented auditorium. You almost have to see it to believe it, but the church is able to set up trusses, programmable lights, multiple screens, live video streaming, in-house Wi-Fi, and a sophisticated sound system – all done with volunteers in just over an hour!
When you work with professional designers to create equipment solutions for your portable church, you’ll end up with the best equipment to turn a rented venue into an excellent worship experience.
More solutions: 5 Ways Flexible Space Will Solve Your Space Issues
2. Logistics
Although some venues allow churches to permanently install audio/video/lighting (AVL) equipment in the auditorium or allow the church to store its equipment on site, that is the exception. Typically, portable church plant equipment has to be taken in and out of the facility each week.
Moving gear in and out of the venue means that logistics are a critical component to your church plant. To explain, let’s take the universal example of choosing the right chairs for your portable church.
CHAIR SOLUTIONS
We’ve seen a church dedicate an entire trailer to their seating solution. These chairs, which happened to stack and store inefficiently, still had to be transported and carried in every week by volunteers.
If the team had been willing to invest in a slightly more expensive seating solution, the logistics would have been very different. In that case, the chairs could have been stored with other equipment on another trailer, which would have saved the church thousands of dollars – not to mention the volunteer manpower it would have saved.
Read more: Principles of Portability – #2 Measure Cubic Volume
3. Economics
Choosing gear based on a balanced solution can save thousands of dollars a year in rental costs.
Unfortunately, one of the largest errors in essential equipment selection is overlooking the importance of safe, proper storage of the equipment.
Whether you purchase one of our solutions or any other, we can’t emphasize enough the importance of a balanced solution. We’ve seen it all:
- A church buys high-quality equipment but doesn’t invest in durable cases
- Teams go the DIY route and find that week after week, year after year, the color and quality of the gear doesn’t hold up
- A portable church has to replace electronics after a short time because the equipment was stored loose and without the proper protection
While purchasing essential equipment can be a large upfront investment, steward your investment well by also acquiring the proper cases and storage solutions.
When choosing gear for a portable church, the most important consideration is a balanced solution. Are you investing in gear that will be easy to store, load, and transport? We can help you weigh all of the essential factors. Click To Tweet
LEARN FROM OTHERS
There you have it. Our designers and engineers have worked with thousands of church plants and multi-site churches over the years, and we see these three areas as the most important considerations when choosing the essential equipment for your portable church: system design, logistics and economics.
Here’s the good news: you don’t have to be an expert. We’re here to help. Engaging portability experts early in the process can lower total costs while maximizing the overall worship and volunteer experience. In the meantime, you might find some solutions on our store or in our innovation solutions section on our website.
Book a call with us and we can share more about essential solutions and portability best practices.
What considerations were important to you when you went portable? Share with us your experience!
