Phil Cooke is a PhD, author, speaker, and longtime production director in Hollywood, broadcast television and the local church. He's passionate about church production leaders figuring out the message they're trying to tell. And in this Church Production Podcast episode, he talks with Joseph Cottle about all of that, alongside some great advice for young and veteran production leaders alike.

Cooke has just returned from Athens, Greece where he was speaking to around 500 pastors and business leaders from 52 countries. He was invited to talk about his book, Church on Trial, and how to protect your congregation, mission and reputation during a crisis.

“I had people coming up to me for hours just saying, ‘Wow, my pastor opened up for the first time about this crisis situation in our church,’” Cooke says. “And it's not just sexual stuff, it's embezzlement, it's financial, it could be legal issues. The city encroaching and some of the countries these pastors came from, the government is trying to pressure the church into shutting down their message. And so it's a lot of issues. It's very complex. So, I was thrilled. It was a great opportunity.”

Cooke says you never know when you're going to find yourself in between a team and a bad situation and how you communicate to your team in that time is super important because you might be the one person they trust, the person that keeps them in their church community.

“27% of the people that leave the church leave because of a crisis at their church or how poorly the church handled it. Now, that's not 27% of people going to another church. That's 27% of people that are walking away from God completely. So, it's how we handle ourselves during a crisis is absolutely important for a leader, whether you're a media leader, a communications director at your church, whatever you do, it's really important that you know how to step up and communicate clearly during something like that.”

To hear more about Phil Cooke’s book, Church on Trial, and learn all about his production background and how he broke into film and television - both Christian and secular, listen to this podcast!

20 years ago, Will Chapman says the Lord asked him to start the media ministry at Cottonwood Creek Church in Allen, Texas. He did so with an intern and five committed volunteers. Over two decades, he grew that ministry exponentially and has moved on to the title of online minister there – but this new role is more like an executive producer or station manager, getting the church’s content out to different broadcasting outlets. Cottonwood Creek was the 2025 site of Church Production’s Capture Conference, the video production, streaming, and digital communications summit for churches. Chapman is a speaker at many such events and says the hot-button topic now is AV over IP.

“Something that people need to realize, and I talk about this in the conferences and the workshops and things that I do regarding AV over IP technologies, and I recently talked about this at the SALT conference and some people looked at me differently when I said this, is that I believe every church technical leader needs to know about it, but it's not for every single location or every single church,” Chapman explains. “And the reason that I say that is that there are some specific things about the intersection of an AVL and the IP or internet protocol or things over ethernet or fiber that you have to understand if you're going to get into it. And so, one is to just let people know that there's still always going to be copper around and you're going to be able to have that some way somehow. But if you are looking at things and problems and needing some solutions that an IP-type protocol can help, it's important to really know the basics of network structure and how to be able to set up that network before you even put any kind of AVL on it.”

So where do you start? Something that surprised Chapman when talking to friends who are integrators and dealers working on large installs like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, they suggest that anyone new to AV over IP start with Dante and get level one certified right away - since so much gear is being made now at all price points is Dante enabled.

They've got right now I think three different levels of certification that you can go through and it is meant to be something that builds one on top of the other and it's an easily accessible certification,” Chapman explains. “It teaches you some basics of IP protocol with AVL stuff about the importance of having a proper network set up. And then it begins to get further in on how to set up complex networks, VLANs and sub LANs and different things like that. But really everybody can go and get that level one.”

While the integrators he knows are now requiring all their new hires to have the Dante level one certification, ironically, Chapman has yet to get his own certificate because he hasn’t needed it…yet.

“No, we don't use video with Dante here at Cottonwood Creek. We use Dante audio and then we use the lighting control over IP,” he says. “And then we are using ST2110 natively here and ST2110 is basically the uncompressed video standard that the SMPTE organization said this is going to be the IP protocol for video where bandwidth and network management is not going to be something we're concerned with. We're going to be more concerned with quality and how good does the video look. How does it sound when all the audio and video are combined into that? And so that's where we are in ST2110 for video and we have switchers and things that all use ST2110 and we still do some native SDI stuff that we're capturing and putting into our video server, and that's just because we couldn't afford going ST2110 all in the first round.”

Chapman says the great thing about having a switcher or router that will do ST2110 is it’s like going back to old school in professional video, where you had huge rack-mounted devices and cards to fit in with eight channels of coaxial video to get it into a digital video switcher and then it comes back out analog coaxial on an output card.

“And so now instead of those cards being analog or SDI and converting it to a different protocol and be able to come out, now it's coming in ST2110 natively and then it allows you to be able to have the networking features of the IP protocol and be able to manage video that way without it being in this very simple SDI box video over IP and especially ST2110 has literally put a stick of dynamite on my nice little perfect little SDI box and blown it to bits.”

Chapman says while he’s having to re-learn some forgotten skills, he says it’s exciting because churches and ministries of all different sizes can now have so many price-point options to choose from and that’s something the church market hasn’t had before.

Is your church thinking about or already moving from a portable location to permanent facility?

Recently, Radiant Church in Kansas City, Kansas switched from a mobile setup. They were a church plant that was meeting in a rented space every week until the recent move. David Jeong, the AVL Lead at Radiant Church grew up a preacher’s kid in South Korea and says he had no plan to work in ministry, “I said, ‘Dad, I'll do anything in my life except for being a pastor or being in full-time ministry, stuff like that.’ And the Lord said, ‘Jokes on you!’”

Jeong’s family moved to the United States in 2015 and he went to a small Christian school where he joined the worship tech team to try and make friends and because the technology looked fun. There he developed a passion to learn about AVL and from that point he got involved at his church.

Now he’s the AVL Lead at Radiant and just last year they went through the process of developing out a new and permanent facility. “It's in the greater Kansas City area. It's a pretty busy street. It was a sports recreation center beforehand,” and he says it still is. “They're actually right behind our main auditorium. So sometimes I see volleyball in our main auditorium underneath chairs and what not.”

After they bought the building and did minimal renovations, Jeong says they decided to use their portable AV systems to worship in the new building while they renovated. It was a smart move because they didn’t have to pay rent at the old location while they renovated the new facility. Jeong’s first piece of advice? “I would actually suggest utilizing professionals,” he explains. “Whether it be system design and especially, especially, especially if you're rigging anything above people's heads. Do not ever do it by yourself. It's dangerous. It could fall. It's a liability.”

Listen to this podcast to hear Joseph Cottle talk with Jeong at length about the entire process and the pros and cons of how they did it.