Christ Wesleyan Church (CWC) celebrated its centennial last year, a 100-year-old church community that has maintained its beliefs and traditions even as it grew into one of the largest megachurches in the Milton, Pennsylvania area. But there’s an entire other side to this church, one that’s as familiar with Broadway as with “The Way.” Each summer and fall season, CWC puts on remarkably sophisticated theatrical plays and musicals—last year saw The Sound of Music performed in its 1,100-seat auditorium, where Titanic The Musical and The Diary of Anne Frank were performed the year before, and where the church’s affiliated high school also puts on some rather technically sophisticated productions of its own.
“These are not your typical church productions,” agrees CWC Communication/Broadcast Creative Director Brent Mestach. “But it’s why we needed to up our audio game as the productions became more complex and the number of wireless microphones began to exceed fifty. And that’s why there’s now a DiGiCo Quantum338 console in use here. We needed more I/O, and we needed more power. We got it.”
The Quantum338 was acquired in late 2020, the same year it was introduced, through locally owned Divine Sound and Technologies. Subsequently, CWC also added a DiGiCo 4REA4 processor, purchased through nearby Clair Global. The Quantum338 serves as the church’s FOH console, for both theatrical productions and Sunday services, and is on an Optocore network with an SD-Rack used a stage box. In addition, the 4REA4 processor and a DiGiCo A168 Stage expander unit are located in the converted bathroom of an upstairs space formerly used as a cry room that was renovated into a broadcast-audio control room during Covid, used to mix the church’s remote Sunday services. It currently interfaces with a DiGiCo DMI-WAVES SoundGrid card over Cat-6 and a Gigabit switch, though Mestach says the plan for the near future is to connect the 4REA4 with the Quantum338 on the Optocore network, allowing all of the mix positions to access all of the inputs from the stage.
“What the Quantum338 and 4REA4 have given us is a tremendous amount of flexibility to route audio throughout the auditorium and to be able to share resources for any application, from broadcast to theatrical shows,” says Mestach. “They’ve been a huge reason we’ve been able to upgrade our audio capabilities.”
For more information on Christ Wesleyan Church, visit www.cwc.life. Divine Sound and Technologies and Clair Global can be found online at www.divinesound.net and www.clairglobal.com, respectively.
