The Process
Last night was our first meeting and our site visit with our contact from Church on Wheels (CoW). For those who don’t know what Church on Wheels is, they are a company that specializes in mobile church setups. This is really ideal for church plants or really any ministry that has to completely setup and tear down all of their equipment anytime they use it. The end product that CoW provides is a trailer with carts that house all of our equipment and supplies.
The process last night went a little something like this. First, a couple of us (my wife, myself, and our pastor) met at our pastor’s house with our CoW representative so he could begin to understand what some of our equipment needs are (what our band looks like, what sort of setup we are looking at, etc). We talked for about an hour and a half just getting to know each other and bringing him up to speed on what LCC is going to look like. One note, we did not discuss our demographics with him as after our first phone conversation with CoW they did all of that research on their own so they could come up here already knowing the area
After that, we spent about 3.5 hours at Patterson Elementary with our entire leadership team and our CoW rep. This time was spent walking through what a visitor would experience on a typical Sunday, including where greeters will be, signage, hospitality, worship center, children’s areas, etc. We primarily split the time between the worship center and children’s areas. In each of those areas our CoW representative spent a lot of time measuring room sizes, stage sizes, and pretty much any other dimension that could be measured in the rooms. We talked more about the equipment we will need and how it will be setup as we walked through the school. We concluded the evening with a time of prayer.
My Reflections
This experience was very cool and the CoW representative was very prepared and professional. I was very impressed by how thorough he was in all of the measurements he took so CoW can give us equipment that will fit in the space we have with no issues. The measurement that impressed me the most was the electrical measurements. The CoW rep took about 5 minutes measuring Line Voltage, Frequency, Voltage Drop when a load is applied, etc. on each of the outlets in the Worship Center. This will allow CoW to have a complete understanding of where we should plug certain items in (e.g. lighting, sound eqipment, etc) so we can both protect the equipment from damage due to low voltages/frequencies and so we can ensure we don’t trip one of the schools breakers. Overall, using CoW for this will save us time and money in obtaining all of our equipment because we wont have to pay shipping charges for each individual item.
Next Steps
- Our CoW rep will complete space layout including all tables, carts, stage, and children’s areas (~1 week)
- Once we approve the layout, our CoW rep will create an equipment proposal to meet our needs (~1 week)
- We will go over the equipment proposal, cutting out equipment where we can to keep our costs down and place our order
- CoW will build all of our carts (specialized for our equipment) and stock them with all of the equipment we ordered
- CoW will drive our trailer up with all of our carts and equipment and train us on how to set up and tear down the equipment in an efficient manner, the goal for setup time is 45 minutes (June 21st, 2008)
- We will use our new equipment in our first public preview service (June 22nd, 2008)
We are very excited to see this process through to the end. We know God has blessed us with a truly great location at Patterson Elementary School and also by showing us Church on Wheels. God has really been moving in LCC and we are very excited about what he is going to do.
