Tucker Missionary Baptist Church Steps Up To The Challenges of The COVID-19 Pandemic

Tucker Missionary Baptist Church is located on the eastern edge of Syracuse’s South Side. Both the congregation and its pastor, the Rev. Decarto Draper, are committed to their mission of enriching lives and supporting the local community.

Together with weekly services to the local community, much of Rev. Draper and the other ministers’ work involves communication, speaking, meeting, and interfacing with people in the community as well as with other members of the clergy to provide support for their various ministries and initiatives.

The Challenge

In 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, New York State declared a state of emergency, prohibiting public gatherings. Officials also implemented physical distancing mandates, including orders to stay at home, restricting travel, and closing nonessential businesses to mitigate the spread of the virus.

Like so many churches nationwide, Tucker Missionary Baptist Church stepped forward during this crisis to support not only its own congregation’s spiritual health, but to also reach out to everyone in the local community affected by the Pandemic as both the health crisis and the closures were having significant social and economic consequences.

The church needed a way to continue to broadcast its message to parishioners despite being shutdown. That is when Tucker Missionary Baptist Church reached out to Critical Path Integrators (CPI) for a much needed digital transformation of their AV and streaming capabilities.

The facility’s streaming capabilities were next to none. In order to meet the growing and urgent spiritual needs caused by the pandemic, the church needed to upgrade their existing systems quickly.

Our design team got to work immediately, recognizing that the obvious solution was social media streaming capabilities from production cameras and microphones installed in the sanctuary.

The historic church building presented additional challenges to our team. We had to first understand and define the current audio system and network which used antiquated microphones with no signal flow. The mixer was blown out and none of the channels were properly labeled. Even the internet connections were in a compromised state. The existing projectors and screen would be kept, but the church wanted to add an overflow monitor and audio to the entry area.

Adding to our challenges, we could only work during the week, making it possible for the church to hold services every weekend.

Our Solution

We decided to consult, design, and engineer this project 100% pro bono. In the end, the church only paid for hardware and labor for installation. Our team also successfully rose to all of these challenges working within the limited budget and time restrictions. 

Using a combination of Crestron video processing and Heath & Allen DSP mixing technologies, we combined the audio and video signals, sending the data to a streaming computer, which gave the church the capability to send their content to platforms like Facebook and Youtube. We also upgraded the existing network infrastructure to separate LANs to networks for the office workers and to feed the AV system. 

Finally, we ran ethernet cables to everything, updating the facility to Cat 6 cables. We installed all new access points establishing a much stronger WIFI network, creating a separate VLANS for the AV network.

We are happy to sat that Tucker Missionary Baptist Church was able to be a reliable support during this crisis in the Syracuse community, and they are still streaming services to this day, and though they are grateful for the ability to meet again in person, their AV system is much better off today than it was before the Pandemic.

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