years ago we did a wind up box with an elevator that comes down to the floor and out comes the ballerina and the box folds down … It ’ s just huge and massive and all of the things , and we take that and we do that at every campus . So , it ’ s not just one campus that ’ s doing that show , its twenty-three campuses that are doing that presentation for Christmas , and we typically do around 115-120 services per year , so every campus is going to do seven to fifteen services depending on the size . So that ’ s our Christmas tradition , it ’ s a big thing and lots of people come and really enjoy it .
This year , via the metrics on a typical Sunday , on average fifty percent of our congregants were going in person on a Sunday and fifty percent were going online . So , we knew back in September that if that trend continued that a lot of people would not be able to come to our Christmas services because of COVID . So at that point we decided to do both . We wanted to make an in person experience that was just as great and grand as previous years , but we also wanted to create a streaming service that pulled out all the stops and that was all of the things that we would never get to do in a traditional year .
In addition , our senior pastor wanted to partner with the community , and one of his ideas was too bring in the state symphony to play and participate in the service with us . We went through a lot of negotiating with them , and they had a lot of internal things going on and were not able to participate . So we decided to create our own fifty-person orchestra for this event . So , we created the orchestra with people from four different states , we arranged the parts , we created all of the songs , and then we went and put this together at a massive conference center location to make sure we were COVID distancing . The technology that went into it was insane and the experience was just wonderful . Once we wrapped that experience ( that happened in very early December ) we went and had it mixed by Sam Gibson of Hillsong - who is the very best . We had the very best video , we had all the best things . You can watch it online , it ’ s a fantastic experience . Then we did a separate day where it was just orchestra , no band or singers , and we capture that a different way . Then we took that capture of the orchestra and we put it onto the LED screens and made sure it was on each of the walls of our twentythree campuses and we timed that up via MIDI and time code .