I agree that operations are extremely important and most churches work off volunteers.  But that's why I still recommend digital, especially for the price point.
 
1.) you set the board the way you want, and then you create a backup.  If someone messes something up you load the backup.  You are up and running in minutes.
 
2.) ability to change individual setting on the fly.  Say you have a rotation of 5 guitarists all with different gear, different pickups.  You can save all of those EQ settings to presets and recall them on the fly.
 
3.)  Ability to have compression, EQ, gating and reverb on every channel, built into the mixer.
 
4.) iPad control for when you want to run sound on your own rehearsals or if the sound guy is sick that day.
 
5.) Digital snake makes setup a breeze.  My church is a multi purpose facility we literally have to tear down everything after a rehearsal.  Setup and teardown can be done in under 20 min, it would probably be an hour with having to deal with analog gear.
 
On a side note, yeah be very careful of fly by night companies who will do sound setup.  Do research in your area to see which ones to work with.  Get a list of clients they have helped and talk to them if they were satisfied or not.
 
Sounds like the company you dealt with just wanted to sell some A&H gear.  The more reputable sound system companies will work with anyone, will work with the churches budget and know where to get the most bang for your buck.  They should also do a total sound system analysis for free.  They should be able to tell you if you have adequate power for your speakers, adequate speaker coverage, they should do an audio analysis of the room and make sure the speaker placement is correct, in addition to just being able to sell you a board.   If you just want to buy a board you can go to Guitar Center for that.
 
 
 

DD I hear you on the digital for dummies :)...first though, we need people that know how to tell it the things that it needs to remember lol. 
 
I pushed hard for the Presonus or something like it but it was too little too late. The people who made the decision now realize that it wasn't the best choice.They even stated that they should have included us in the choice (darned straight they should have). We might be able to get something else in the near future but for now we are stuck with what we have. We aren't one of those churches that has three or four different teams playing at different times who all have different needs, so our needs don't change much in terms of PA audio. We just need someone to move a slider or two.
 
I have been in a weekly portable setup situation before for a number of years. I don't miss any of that. Nothing beats having a permanant venue and a permanant setup with predicted outcomes. You gotta do what you gotta do sometimes though.Digital would have given us a lot of advantages. Since our sound booth is located in a little room, the mixer could have sat in the main area with an ipad and had a better idea of the mix.
 
The outfit we used was someone we had used before. They set us up with a Behringer PA splitter unit. They aligned and adjusted the frequencies for us which was one good thing they did. In terms of value for work recieved I should probably with hold my comments on that one. The fact that we traded a mixer with phantom power and more sends for one that doesn't have those things was just not smart. At the very least we should have retained that Mackie IMO, but MOP's are usually only are heard after the fact.
 
If you are considering buying a mixing board for your church and are reading this, then you know those folks who play every week? The ones using the equipment? A few of which might have some technical knowledge? Try to include them in discussions on a purchase.

mixmkr
Hey Jim...since I've (Chris H) been talking to you about the Pro studio computer, via email... this would be a good "public" question as well... Would the X32 make a decent audio interface, versus something more "conventional"
 
I'm under the impression it's a 32x32 interface...however firewire I believe.

Hi Chris,
 
I picked up a X32 Compact (came with the X-UF Firewire/USB-2 audio interface card).
 
Connected to a fast socket 2011 DAW (4930k at 4.5GHz) via Firewire, the unit needs to run at 8+ms round-trip latency (to avoid dropped samples).  Note that the driver is extremely flexible in that you have tremendous control over the buffer sizes.  I wish all audio interface drivers allowed complete control over both the ASIO and "Safety" buffers.  You can set the round-trip latency considerable lower... but performance isn't consistent (under heavy loads).  When connected via USB, the smallest round-trip latency is 10ms.
At 8+ms round-trip latency, audio playback is solid.
 
If you need super low round-trip latency:
The X32 has two AES-50 ports (An AES-50 port can be used to transfer 32-channels of audio two/from the DAW via a single Cat-5 cable).  Lynx makes the AES16e-50 audio interface which provides an AES-50 port ($900).
Not an inexpensive solution, but it makes a great setup for a Project Studio.
The X32 has round-trip latency of 0.8ms
You can run heavy loads with the AES16e-50 set to 3ms round-trip latency.  
All together, you've got 3.8ms end-to-end latency.
 
Measured the average noise-floor (from the channel A/D converters) at ~-114dB.
That's on par with higher-end audio interfaces.