Back in 2006 at Calvary Chapel Melbourne in Melbourne Florida, our Senior Pastor Mark Balmer began speaking about a church without walls. The vision came to leadership about bringing the teachings out to the people that can’t drive to our Melbourne campus. This led us to our “One Church in many Locations” motto.

A remote church is a second (or third, or fourth…) campus under the guidelines of the original church in which the services are a mixture of live worship music and a video fed sermon. The remote campus serves another part of the community but maintains the same name, character, and senior pastor of the main campus.  

In addition to the main campus in Melbourne, the church now holds services at two video campuses: one in Viera 15 miles North and in Sebastian 30 miles South.  An onsite live worship team at each campus leads the music portion of the service prior to the Bible teaching.  Then a live, giant screen, video feed provides the congregation with the same teaching as those at the main campus.  Like the main campus, the two video campuses have grown rapidly.  The Viera campus, just three years old, has outgrown the high school auditorium they are meeting in and are in the process of building a brand new facility.

CC Melbourne is committed to keeping up with technology to further expand the teaching of God’s Word.  Our main campus has a full broadcast studio with a 3 ME Ecolab switcher and multiple Hitachi cameras.  We stream live to both remote campuses via a Streambox based distribution system.  When worship is finished a universal master clock informs the pastor at each campus how long they will have before the signal is switched to the live feed of Pastor Mark Balmer’s teaching from CC Melbourne. The high quality standard definition video is displayed on 18' by 24' center screens and 8' by 14' side screens at the Viera campus, and on a 15' by 20' center screen and 8' by 14' side screens in Sebastian.

Our north campus in Viera also has a full broadcast system.  The Streambox encoder delivers the video and audio signals over IP to the remote campus.  The delay between what is live at the source and what is seen at the remote campuses is only seconds. We have three cameras at the Viera campus, which send back a live feed to the main campus.  This serves multiple purposes.   It allows the congregations to see each other.  It also allows Pastor Mark to see the Viera congregation as he teaches.  This helps solidify our motto of “one church in many locations”.

The Sebastian campus is our newest site, which posed a new challenge for technology.  At our Viera campus, we were able to have an enterprise grade fiber backbone integrated, providing us with 30Mbps of IP bandwidth to send the video stream with.  Sebastian proved to be a challenge because there was no feasible way of getting that kind of bandwidth.  The problem was solved in the form of Business Class Cable from Comcast.  For a fraction of the cost of the fiber network, Comcast provided us a 15x2Mbps connection on their Business Cable network. We are now able to stream near DVD quality in just 3Mbps of bandwidth.  The system has been reliable and Streambox’s engineers were more than helpful in the configuration of this network.

We feel that that the remote campus solution for churches is now a proven, innovative and cost effective way to reach more people and communicate the gospel of Jesus Christ. Evidenced by the growing trend of over 1,500 satellite video campuses nationwide.