Established in Randburg, South Africa, in 1979, the Rhema Bible Church is now among the largest church organisations in the Southern Hemisphere, and one of the first to defy Apartheid laws, offering non-segregated services as a precursor of what was to come.

In 2022, founder Pastor Ray McCauley handed the reigns of the organisation over to his son, Pastor Joshua McCauley and wife Pastor Tara McCauley, and it is under this new leadership that the church has updated the flagship venue A/V system with the assistance of A/V distributor, Audiosure.

‘This is one of the largest churches in the world, so it needed an audio solution to match,’ explains Audiosure Digital Mixer Specialist, Lesedi Maponya. ‘The church was already running FOH, monitors and broadcast systems, but having grown a sizable online congregation, it desperately needed an update to provide the best possible audio across all platforms. Additionally, the system needs to be easy to use for both technical and non-technical operators.’

To replace ageing FOH, monitor and broadcast systems, Maponya and the Audiosure team looked Allen & Heath’s dLive platform for all three roles ‘As soon as the church’s engineers road-tested a dLive, it was a no-brainer to go ahead and integrate it,’ Maponya reports.

At FOH, a 28-fader dLive S5000 Surface is deployed alongside a DM64 MixRack for audio processing and analogue I/O, with a Dante card for multitrack playback and recording. A second DM64 is used for monitors, partnered with a 24-fader C3500 Surface while, for broadcast, a C3500 is employed with a DM0 providing the processing. In addition to the MixRacks, a DX012 audio expander provides switchable analogue and AES outputs.

Audio is passed between the three systems via dLive’s tie-line feature, allowing signals to be patched to digital outputs via installed gigaAce cards without taking up any of dLive’s 128 input processing channels or incurring additional latency. ‘The tie-line features on the console are one of the most useful, and powerful, features in the system,’ notes Maponya.

For mixing, the engineers rely on dLive’s integrated tools including the comprehensive suite of zero-latency Deep Processing compressors and preamp emulations, 16 RackExtra FX slots, plus dynamic processors. ‘With four bands of dynamic EQ and multiband compression, the Dyn8 is a game changer,’ Maponya says. ‘It gets constant use, in fact, it’s now hard to think of a time where dynamic EQ was not an option.’

On the stage, Allen & Heath’s ME Personal Mixing System gives musicians control of their monitor mixes via ten ME-1 personal mixers, all connected to an ME-U hub which handles PoE and audio transport.

‘The aim here was longevity and flexibility,’ Maponya concludes. ‘The access to support and training for a church is important because everyone on the team should be able to operate the system. This is the beginning of a relationship that can grow from strength to strength.’

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