The Acts Christian Church in South Africa has completed an extensive upgrade to its technical facilities, including Strand lighting for live streaming studio and video material – which has attracted thousands of viewers and Showtec lighting for the main stage at its Midrand Campus. On the audio side, a Waves Soundgrid System comprising a Waves SuperRack and Waves SoundGrid Server One-C complement the exiting Midas mixing console.
The past seven months have seen DWR Distribution hard at work making this happen…
Pastor Peter de Fin was a guitarist and sound engineer who travelled the globe for six years with Vinesong, a team of international missionaries who share the gospel through worship, before meeting his wife Tammy, an evangelist whose ministry was to go into nightclubs and preach the gospel. The pair were married started Acts Church in 1999, taking over what was previously a small mission church.
‘My parents and grandparents were missionaries and started churches in places like Lesotho, Mozambique and Swaziland,’ de Fin says. ‘But we had the heart to train the local people and over the past 20 years have built four campuses. We also realised that the modern church has become very technical. It’s not about producing a show, but it is about using equipment to create atmosphere and to welcome the next generation to the service.’
The church’s approach has been to upgrade technology little-by-little each year. ‘DWR Distribution has played a vital part of our upgrade plans,’ de Fin says. ‘Robert Izzett and the guys just get things done and are willing to do the hard work.’
Pastor Sam Wuytack, a worship leader and part of the technical team agrees: ‘DWR has gone beyond just giving us service – they have come out to our homes to see how they can help us set up our virtual studios; they have even come up with design work and solutions from the manufacturing department
‘With people watching movies and videos, they see where concerts are going,’ he continues. ‘Young people want to engage with churches that are progressive,’ said Peter. ‘At Acts Church we don’t want the lighting to be over the top, but we do want to keep growing and modernising with tasteful lighting that creates the right mood to worship and pray. I know the die-hards will tell us that you should be able to praise God on a cactus, but it does help to have some atmosphere.’
During the Covid-19 lockdown, Acts Church created a virtual studio and did a vast amount of greenscreen work. ‘We purchased the Strand Softlights for backlight at our studio and for some of the smaller satellite studios created at a few homes. The Strand fixtures give you an incredible flat light so that the camera doesn’t fight with your green screen. We previously used LED lighting fixtures but the colour temperature was wrong. You think white is white, but the Strand Softlight units were able to give us the colour tone we needed and just worked.’
The studio facility has helped change the way The Acts Church communicate with the world and has also exposed the great talent among the church team. ‘For the children’s ministry, as an example, we have puppet shows (puppets are made by people in the church, with virtual bees flying around them). We have incredible people, including the media teams, who have done a fantastic job. We have also managed to rent out the green studio space to an artist who made his music video here, and we have a few other people interested in using the facility.’
The church has campuses in Midrand (North and South Campus), a branch in Westdene Johannesburg, and also a group who meet in Blandford, England. The church is involved with various Acts of Love projects. Every Saturday they offer educational tuition on various core subjects like Maths and English, they run a soup kitchen and provide various meals and groceries to people in need, donate sanitary pads to girls from impoverish backgrounds (many girls don’t attend school during menstruation and miss a week of school each week which affects their education), and collect and distribute new and pre-loved shoes to children in need.
