Grace Community Church: Extending Worship Beyond Four Walls

Grace Community Church of Northwest Ohio is a vibrant and expanding worship community in Northwest Ohio. With more than 170 volunteers supporting three Sunday services, the Tiffin campus was consistently reaching capacity. As attendance continued to grow, the church needed a way to welcome more people now, not years ahead when their new auditorium is completed.

Instead of waiting for their future building expansion, they launched a full worship service inside a nearby movie theater. This approach let them widen capacity immediately while keeping their pastor teaching live throughout the morning, traveling between locations as each teaching segment began.

Moving a full multitrack mix into a new acoustic environment demanded absolute precision on mornings with no margin for error.

Launching a second service in a theater meant moving program video and more than 20 Dante audio channels without drift and delivering a mix tailored to a very different acoustic environment. Early attempts to send audio and video separately resulted in three to six seconds of drift, making the worship portion unusable for a room that required a fresh mix.

Grace Community Church existing setup: Tiffin campus

• Dante-based audio network across campus
• Yamaha and Behringer digital mixing consoles
• OBS and ProPresenter for video playback and recording

Grace Community Church needed a solution that could reliably transport the recorded worship from the 8:30 a.m. service and remix it for the theater, while keeping timing predictable as their pastor moved between venues.

One platform brought their entire multi-campus workflow under control without changing a single piece of existing hardware.

Lama Connect provided a single IP-based path to move both video and multichannel audio between campuses. Because the pastor teaches onsite at each location, the AV system focuses on transporting and remixing the worship portion. This element needed to be delivered to the theater cleanly while he traveled between rooms.

Using the Lama NDI Merger, the team combined a program video with 25 Dante audio channels into a single unified NDI stream. Lama Connect’s buffering and delay compensation ensured tight, reliable sync and consistent behavior each Sunday. Xavier Blanchet, Solutions Architect at Ross Video, explains that “the audio was arriving too early, so we used Lama Connect and the NDI Merger to bring everything back into alignment.”

With Lama Connect at the center of their workflow, Grace Community Church launched their theater service without expanding technical staff or increasing operational complexity. The room now functions as a fully developed worship environment, complete with its own tailored audio mix, live host moments, and in-person teaching as the pastor moves between locations. The synchronized worship playback provides the travel window he needs to arrive on time for each message, keeping both venues aligned.

“The workflow integrates smoothly into their existing environment, avoiding hardware replacement and maintaining a repeatable process for their team — ‘once you create your session you can just reload it again,’ says Xavier Blanchet, Solutions Architect at Ross Video. ‘When everything is patched, a volunteer just opens the software and the audio goes where it should go.’”

The production team benefits from a dependable workflow that maintains sync, supports predictable timing, and mirrors their existing Sunday rhythm. The consistency of the AV link also gives the church a scalable foundation, enabling future venues, new service formats, or special events without redesigning its system.