Mobile Church Quandry

About a month ago I began to furiously pursue places to have our Christmas eve services. We normally hold one service at our usual location, the Florida Hospital Seventh Day Adventist Church, right after they finish their service. This year however, we expect more people than can fit into one service there, and they're still planning to do their service at 7:00 as usual. So we had to go find another place. Most of our ideas revolved around other churches, until we were able to work through someone in our church to get the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre.

We've got our spot reserved, our deposit is in. We will probably have some sort of background on stage from whatever play is being performed in the theatre the day before. We have to bring in our whole sound system, all props, and and all video and projection equipment. ($$$$$$) We also have to figure out a way to legally and excellently do a candle lighting ceremony. I initially received a tentative no to having candles at the service at all, so I'm working this morning to gather some ammo to bring a proposal to them again. I'm looking at all our options.

We can have the typical emkay candles with the paper drip stop, but we'd have to do the whole candle lighting element outside...we'd have to get 325 people outside quickly and efficently and pray its not raining (remember, this is Orlando). Any candles indoors have to be protected in some sort of "vase" as the fire marshall put it when I spoke to her this morning. But she was very helpful to me this morning, said she would be looking around to see what she could find today. I'm going to try and come up with two or three options for doing it inside, and hope the people at the theatre will buy it.

One viable option is those LED fake candles, if I can find the right ones, but it's just not the same, you know? If any mega-church administrators or people who have experience with LED candles are reading this, can you comment and post some websites or leads that I might follow on candle protectors or good-looking handheld LED candles?