Now, SILO plays for both Saturday night sinners and Sunday morning saints.
DALLAS — The sun has barely risen on Sunday morning, and the crew is racing toward salvation.
Bleary-eyed workers, dressed all in black, set chair after chair in row after row. For them, the end is in sight.
They’ve worked two back-to-back nights, shepherding thousands of clubgoers into and out of a cavernous venue in the Design District of Dallas — all as lights flashed and music bumped from one of the most powerful sound systems in the city.
The shifts have not been easy. One man had to be thrown out after he fell down the (well-illuminated) two steps to the bar, then got belligerent with a bouncer.
One woman with a glittered band in her hair needed a bottle of water and some comfort (in that order) after likely taking a little too much of whatever was in the dime bag later swept up from the parking lot.
And someone had to keep a close eye on the bathroom because a sign proclaiming “one person per stall” only stops so much.
But now, the crew at SILO is nearly done erasing the evidence, and if everything goes according to plan, no one who is about to arrive will know the hedonistic happenings here.
Probably best they don’t, because what’s playing next at one of the hottest new clubs in the country is … church.
Match made in Heaven
The search began for Pastor Richard Ellis when his Reunion Church heard it was going to get kicked out of its sanctuary at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center to make way for renovations.
Ellis was in the neighborhood one day when he did what any good pastor would do: he snuck into the nightclub.
Inside, he found the owners, longtime EDM music promoter “Disco” Donnie Estopinal and the Dallas entertainment entrepreneur Patrick Tetrick.
“We met and boom! Immediately hit it off,” Ellis said.
They worked out a five-year lease, and Reunion Church moved in this spring. The congregation went along — half of them already think Ellis is nuts, he admitted with a laugh.
But even he had some doubts that first weekend.
“I wasn’t sure what it was going to be like, actually,” Ellis said. “If there’s some crazy event the night before, and then you come in here, would it be weird?”
It wasn’t that weird, he found out.
There were some signs of the night before; any high school caught throwing a house party when their parents are away knows a slightly sticky floor is hard to hide.
Ellis did ask for SILO staff to cover up the bottles of booze on the 20-foot-long bars that line the room, but not before using an expensive empty bottle as a sermon prop.
“It’s not about the bottle, it’s what’s in it,” he said. “It’s not about the building, it’s what’s in it.”
One of the best clubs in the country
The line outside of SILO doesn’t really get going until 11 p.m., but ask pretty much anyone waiting in it and they’ll tell you the club is one of their favorites.
“The visuals here are the state of the art, it’s above and beyond everything else,” Dustin told us on the night that Tiësto — one of the biggest DJs in the world — was playing the club Memorial Day weekend.
Tiësto was the first DJ to play SILO when it opened in September 2024. It didn’t take long for accolades to pour in: DJ Mag named SILO top 10 in the U.S. in its 2025 “Top 100 Clubs in the World.”
The space features a 100,000-watt D&B sound system and an immersive 2mm video wall, which for clubgoers translates to an “absolutely electric” atmosphere, as one told us.
The club already has expansion plans underway and intends to add a new wraparound mezzanine and second performance room, which will expand its capacity from 3,140 to 5,000.
“You can go release, you can take it all in, it’s awesome,” said one clubgoer named Gretchen. “It’s my church. It’s where I go worship.”
Music crosses creeds
The two sides of SILO may be more similar than they seem.
Clubgoers come here to celebrate together and feel a part of something bigger than themselves. Worshippers do too.
On a Sunday morning, people dance to music and sing along. The dance moves look a little different and the words a little dirtier on a Saturday night, but the sentiment is the same.
Believe it or not, Pastor Ellis will make an appearance at the club, too, every now and then. We spotted him in Tiësto’s crowd.
“I come down here all the time. I can’t get my family to stay as late as I would,” he said. “Dude, it’s thumping, the graphics are insane. Everybody’s dancing, having a good time.”
Ellis said he has hopes he’ll pick up a few church members from the club crowd. He thinks returning to a space that only hours before hosted the biggest party in the city may be easier for someone looking to return to the flock.
“I tell people I’m in the sheep business, not the barn business.”
After all, salvation doesn’t need a steeple. Sometimes, it just needs a really good sound system.
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