Church donates sound equipment to high school
'It's really great to see the theatre, the band and the church coming together to give the kids what they deserve'
A local church leader is donating $10,000-worth of new speaker equipment to the high school in exchange for temporary use of the auditorium on Sundays.
Lyddale Akins, pastor of the Triumphant Life Church on Asbury Avenue, attended the Jan. 22 board of education [BOE] meeting to talk about the donation and his organization’s use of the school’s facilities.
The church will purchase four speakers, two floor monitors and a snake to connect the equipment. They’ll use the equipment when they hold church services on Sundays from March until June, and the equipment will remain in the auditorium after they’re done.
“Our ministry is growing,” Akins [pictured above, right] said at the meeting. “We’re in the process of purchasing a building. We’ve outgrown out facility and we can’t handle the amount of kids coming to our church on Sunday.”
The church has been in existence for 18 years, Akins said, and he has served as pastor for the past seven years. Their current facility holds 200 people and there are two Sunday services, at 8 a.m. and 11 a.m.
The ministry is currently looking for a larger location. In the meantime, their 11 a.m. service has grown too big to fit in the Asbury Avenue headquarters, so it will take place in the school auditorium.
“We’re a little different from the rest of the churches,” Akins, a Neptune resident, said. “We’re a little progressive. Our music style appeals to a younger generation. It’s a more youthful sound and it’s drawing a younger crowd.”
The school’s drama and theatre department head, Gary Kilmer [pictured above, left], has said in the past that he’d like to see new sound equipment in the auditorium to accommodate the rapidly expanding theatre department.
“We keep growing in leaps and bounds,” he said. “We just had 32 students audition for the musical, which is more than I can physically fit on stage. We’ve reached a point where student interest is going beyond our physical capacity, so as a district, we need to start updating our facilities.”
Kilmer thought it would take a while to obtain the amount of equipment Triumphant Life Church is donating.
“Over time, we’ve been trying to be smart about buying one piece at a time,” he said. “This is a major step forward for us.”
Instrumental director Karen Lee Schwarz [pictured above, center] is also happy to see the new equipment.
“It’s really great to see the theatre, the band and the church coming together to give the kids what they deserve,” she said. “We have so much talent here at this school. It’s phenomenal.”
