HARMAN’s Martin Professional Helps Foster Immersive Experience for Thousands at Eagle Brook Church

CENTERVILLE, Minnesota – When a person enters a service at Eagle Brook Church, the congregation’s goal is for them to be welcomed by real people, challenged by biblical messages that address everyday problems and inspired by excellent music. With 18,000 attendees worshiping at 6 locations throughout the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, the scale of Eagle Brook Church makes providing a personalized, immersive experience a challenge. Making the music even more inspiring, however, became a little less daunting of a task with the installation of HARMAN’s Martin Professional lighting fixtures.

Deployed to compliment the message and the music at the Lino Lakes campus are 16 Mac Viper Air FX fixtures and eight Martin 250 Washes. For Easter and other special occasions, the church supplements its installed fixtures by renting other Martin Fixtures. The church’s Blaine campus boasts 10 Mac 700 Profiles and four Mac 250 Entours. At Spring Lake Park, six Mac 250 Entours and six Mac 250 washes are used, and eight washes and six Mac 250 Entours are used at the White Bear Lake campus.

Eagle Brook Church has come a long way since 1948, when it was founded as a Sunday school initially attended by only 19. Today, for weekend services, the teaching pastor’s message is delivered live at the Lino Lakes location and broadcast via simulcast technology to the Blaine, Coon Rapids, Spring Lake Park, White Bear Lake and Woodbury locations.

While the pastor’s message is simulcast, each Eagle Brook campus has its own music. Nate Nohling, Lead Lighting Director, oversees lighting and scenic design across the organization and works closely with Tom Clark and Travis Leatherman who help to design and program across the 6 campuses. “My goal is to create an immersive environment that enhances the worship experience,” he said. “We don’t want the lights to become the focal point or draw attention away from the experience. Instead, we want the lighting to match the energy of the music. To attain that, I work closely with the music pastors to make sure my design is cohesive with their vision.”

To help meet that challenge and many others, Nohling said that Eagle Brook Church was a Martin house before he joined the organization more than two years ago and that it will remain one for the foreseeable future. “We’re very particular about the brand of our campuses,” he said. “A part of that brand is making sure we have the same quality of fixtures to achieve the same type of environment across our campuses. Sticking with Martin fixtures helps us by having consistency when it comes to color palettes and overall output quality of our lighting.”

In the end, though, what’s important to Nohling and other members of Eagle Brook Church’s leadership team is making sure that everyone who attends a service has a deeply personal and immersive worship experience. “Lighting plays an important role in how people experience our brand,” he said. “And when you have different spaces, lit by different fixtures, creating the same lighting experience with different rigs is a challenge. That’s why maintaining a consistent design throughout our sites is a key part of my role. We need to have one design sensibility that we can draw on to create and deliver a consistent look and feel across campuses. Utilizing Martin fixtures helps us to be confident that when you walk into any one of our campuses, it is going to look and feel like Eagle Brook Church.”

Photo Credit: Tom Clark

As a world leader in the creation of dynamic lighting solutions for the entertainment, architectural, and commercial sectors, Martin lighting and video systems are renowned the world over. Martin also offers a range of advanced lighting controllers and media servers, as well as a complete line of smoke machines as a complement to intelligent lighting. Martin operates the industry’s most complete and capable distributor network with local partners in nearly 100 countries. Founded in 1987 and based in Aarhus, Denmark, Martin is the lighting division of global infotainment and audio company HARMAN International Industries. For more information please visit: http://www.martin.com.

HARMAN (www.harman.com) designs, manufactures and markets premier audio, visual, infotainment and integrated control solutions for the automotive, consumer and professional markets. With leading brands including AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL®, Lexicon® and Mark Levinson ®, the Company is admired by audiophiles, musicians and the entertainment venues where they perform. More than 25 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and infotainment systems. HARMAN has a workforce of approximately 16,000 people across the Americas, Europe, and Asia and reported sales of $5.3 billion for the twelve months ended June 30, 2014.
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