Every other module in this curriculum has covered a piece of the church A/V/L stack — consoles, fixtures, signal routing, cameras, streaming. This module covers the question that sits above all of those pieces: how do they fit together as one system? A church A/V/L stack is not a list of products bought at different times for different reasons. It is an integrated system designed to a specification, deployed in phases, commissioned to a documented standard, and handed over to operators who know how to run it. The discipline that separates a working install from a perpetually-broken collection of gear is requirements thinking — stating what the system must do before deciding what to buy. This first lesson covers how to write requirements properly: defining scope across every role the room must play, sizing for the congregation that will actually be in the room, listing every service the system must support, and planning a two-to-three-year growth runway so the install does not need redesigning the day a second campus opens.

What "stating the requirements" actually means

A requirements document is the contract between the church leadership and the install. It is written in plain English, agreed before any equipment is specified, and reviewed by every stakeholder who has a say in the outcome. The document answers four questions: what does the room need to do, who is using it, when is it being used, and what does success look like? Skip the requirements stage and the install proceeds on assumptions held in different heads — the worship pastor assumes one thing, the AV lead assumes another, the senior pastor assumes a third — and the gap between those assumptions only surfaces when the system arrives and disappoints somebody. The cost of writing requirements properly is roughly two afternoons. The cost of skipping them is roughly the entire install budget if it has to be redone.

Scope: every role the room plays

A modern church auditorium is rarely single-purpose. Before sizing any system, list every role the room is expected to play across a typical year. The standard list:

Sunday morning service. The headline use case. Worship band, sermon, congregational singing, communion, occasional baptism, occasional dedication. Drives the bulk of the design.
Midweek prayer or Bible study. Lower fixture count, lower audio channel count, simpler video. The system must scale down gracefully — not require a full crew to support a fifteen-person prayer meeting.
Baptism services. Often Sunday-integrated but with specific lighting and camera needs at the baptistry. Water reflections, microphone placement, and the safety question of any electrical fixture near a water-filled tank.
Funerals and weddings. Often run on weekday afternoons and evenings. Frequently include live-streaming for remote family. The system must be operable by a smaller crew (sometimes a single volunteer) on a different day of the week from the Sunday team.
Concerts and special events. Touring artists, Christmas productions, youth events, community concerts. Higher production values, more fixtures used, occasionally hired-in gear. The system must accept hired-in racks and route them cleanly without requiring a permanent infrastructure rebuild.
Conferences and externally-hired events. Some churches rent the auditorium midweek to outside groups. Presentations, panel discussions, corporate events. The system must support PowerPoint over HDMI, wireless lavalier microphones, and a podium with a simple "press button to start the day" workflow.
Daytime children and youth programmes. A simplified version of the rig that does not require a full crew. Sound on, lights on, lyrics on the wall, run.
Outreach and overflow services. Easter, Christmas Eve, and special outreach services where attendance spikes. The system must handle peak load — every microphone live, every camera streaming, every monitor active — without degrading.

The requirements document lists every role on this list that applies to the church and writes one sentence of detail per role. The detail captures the things that are different about that role from the Sunday baseline: what microphones are different, what camera angles are needed, what lighting modes apply, what operator skill level is available.

Congregation size and the room sizing question

Congregation size drives almost every downstream technical decision. The standard sizing brackets that have stabilised across UK and US church work:

Under 100 (house church or small chapel). Powered speaker pair, two-channel mic console or simple digital mixer, single camera or no camera, basic LED PAR rig, ProPresenter on a single laptop. Single operator workflow. Budget: £5,000 to £15,000 for the whole stack.
100 to 300 (small church). Active line array or pair of mid-size full-range cabinets, 16 to 24-channel digital console, two cameras with ATEM Mini switching, basic LED wash rig with moving heads optional, ProPresenter plus simple streaming. Two to three volunteer operators. Budget: £20,000 to £60,000.
300 to 800 (mid-size church). Compact line array per side plus subs, 32 to 64-channel digital console with stagebox, three to four cameras with ATEM Constellation or Television Studio HD, full lighting rig with moving heads and named zones, ProPresenter with confidence monitors, dedicated streaming PC with vMix. Crew of five to seven operators. Budget: £80,000 to £250,000.
800 to 2000 (large church). Full line array hang per side plus subs and frontfills, 96-channel digital console with multiple stageboxes over Dante, five to eight cameras including PTZs and a director-cut, full theatrical lighting with timecode automation, redundant streaming chains, dedicated production crew. Budget: £300,000 to £1,500,000.
2000 plus (megachurch and multisite). Custom-engineered audio, multiple consoles for FOH and broadcast splits, ten plus cameras with full broadcast workflow, simulcast to satellite campuses, dedicated paid production staff. Budget: £1,500,000 upwards. Treated as a broadcast facility rather than a church AV install.

Pick the bracket honestly. The single most common requirements failure is overbuying — a 250-person church specifying a system designed for an 800-person church because the leadership expects to grow. The system arrives, the crew cannot operate it, the budget is exhausted, and the room ends up running at twenty percent of capacity. The honest approach is to size to current attendance plus a documented two-to-three-year growth runway, not to size to an aspirational peak.

Capture, playback, and distribution requirements per role

For every role the room plays, the requirements document captures three things:

Capture. What audio and video sources does the role create that the system must capture? Sunday service captures the band (16 to 32 audio channels), the preacher (one or two wireless lavaliers), the congregation (ambient mics for the streaming mix), and three to five camera angles. A funeral captures one or two lavaliers and two cameras. A youth event captures a band, a host, and one camera.
Playback. What does the role play back into the room? Sunday service plays back backing tracks (stereo to FOH), sermon video clips (HDMI to the screens), worship lyrics (ProPresenter to confidence and main feeds), and timecode (LTC to lighting and video). A funeral plays back a video tribute and a music bed.
Distribution. Where does the captured content go? Sunday service distributes to FOH speakers, in-ear monitors for band, confidence monitors for the worship leader and preacher, a streaming PC for the livestream, a recording archive for the sermon library, and (in multisite contexts) a satellite-campus video feed.

This three-way breakdown — capture, playback, distribution — is the working table that drives every downstream design decision. A microphone count comes from the capture side. A speaker count comes from the distribution side. A media server spec comes from the playback side. The requirements table is the input to every cabling diagram, every patch plan, and every console size decision in the rest of the project.

The two-to-three-year growth runway

Churches grow. Or they shrink. Or they re-plant. The honest planning horizon for a church A/V/L install is two to three years, not the ten-year horizon that vendors will sometimes pitch. The two reasons for the shorter horizon: first, the underlying technology refreshes faster than that (Dante audio, Ethernet network speeds, LED fixture generations, codec standards), and second, congregation trajectory is genuinely hard to predict beyond three years. The growth-runway discipline:

Headroom on every load-bearing component. Audio console with twice the channels currently used. DMX with twenty percent of channels reserved. Network bandwidth at ten percent utilisation under normal load. Power distribution at sixty to seventy percent of breaker rating. Speaker SPL with ten dB of headroom above expected programme level. Every load-bearing piece runs with room to grow.
Modular expandability. The audio system is a console plus stageboxes connected by Dante. Adding a stagebox at the platform extension does not require recabling the building. The lighting rig is a console plus DMX nodes connected by sACN. Adding a moving head in the back corner does not require pulling a new DMX cable from FOH. The expansion path is documented in the design.
A "phase 2 ready" plan written into the requirements. Every project should have an explicit phase 2 list: the gear that is NOT being bought now but is part of the documented future. Example phase 2 entries: third stagebox at the new platform extension, two more PTZ cameras for the youth room, second sub for the rear of the auditorium. Writing the list now means the cable conduits are pulled now and the console capacity is sized now, even though the gear arrives later.
Do not design backwards from existing gear. The single biggest requirements failure in church A/V work is designing the new system around the old gear that the church already owns. The two consoles bought five years ago, the speakers given as a donation, the lighting rig inherited from the previous building — all of these create gravitational pull toward a design that the church does not actually need. The discipline is to write requirements as if the church owned nothing, identify the system the requirements imply, then decide separately which existing pieces happen to fit into that system. Existing gear is an input to the procurement budget; it is not an input to the design.

The requirements sign-off

The requirements document is signed off by named people before procurement begins. The standard sign-off list: senior pastor (or operations director), worship pastor (or worship lead), AV team lead, building or facilities lead, and the project manager driving the install. Five named people. Each signature confirms that the document captures their understanding of what the system must do. Sign-off catches the worship pastor's "wait, I assumed we would have monitors at the drum riser" and the operations director's "where is the assisted listening loop in this budget?" before the gear is bought rather than after.

Working principle: requirements before procurement. Name every role the room plays, size honestly to current attendance plus a two-to-three-year runway, capture-playback-distribute for every role, plan modular expansion explicitly, and never design backwards from existing gear. Five signatures on the requirements document before any purchase order is raised.

System requirements gathering