So here’s a bit of what I’m up to lately, or, rather, what the Actuary family has been doing.
Regular readers will know that I gripe about my parish regularly – that too many parishioners are passive and figure that “nothing can be done,” or avail themselves of the greater level of involvement at the neighboring “competitor” parish. And the same appeared to be proving true when it came to outreach and ministries as a result of the shut-down: other churches were livestreaming mass; we were being informed of the opportunities to watch livestreams elsewhere.
So after griping to my husband, I sent an e-mail over to my Parish Pastoral Council contacts from coffee & donuts recruiting, essentially saying, “I feel strongly that we need to do this.” As a bonus, my husband offered to help with the tech side, and I offered this in the e-mail, too.
The first replies were not encouraging — more along the lines of “we’ll see which commission has responsibility and see what they think,” and I figured that they might start to discuss this at the first post-shutdown committee meeting. Blargh. But then enough people were copied in who recognized the importance of taking action. A meeting was scheduled — and that meeting took the form of my husband, the priest, the music director, and half a dozen others, getting their hands dirty, figuratively-speaking, by working out the logistics. They figured out how to connect up the sound board to the computer, how to get mikes set up to connect up to the sound board, how to position the computer’s webcam for best streaming, and the like, and, using my own laptop, got ready to livestream mass via Facebook, which happened for the first time on the Wednesday before Palm Sunday.
By the time Palm Sunday — or the day before, actually — came around, everything seemed in place. There were no webcams to be bought for love or money, but my husband had cobbled together a three-camera set-up with the built-in webcam, his DSLR camera, and an old, old low-resolution webcam that had otherwise been decommissioned back when webcams began to be built into laptops, and a collection of cords from the cord box in the basement. He also found a program to manage switching between cameras, and controlling streaming and recording, vMix, and taught himself how to use it. And Palm Sunday vigil went off without a hitch. Palm Sunday-Sunday, however, everything went wrong – the hotspot didn’t work, the stream crashed, and he eventually posted a note on Facebook: “sorry for the technical difficulties – please view yesterday’s recording instead.”
Which generated more unhappiness, as various folks worried that it made the parish look bad. We moved to recording daily mass in advance – which generated unhappiness from other quarters (“that makes the mass into a theater production”) and for the Triduum liturgies, in order to keep the liturgies at the “right” times, they adjusted the “advertised” times to when the recorded versions would be available to view — in other words, the Holy Thursday liturgy was promised for 9:30 pm, Good Friday at 5:00, Easter Vigil at 10:00, and Easter Sunday at 11:30, in each case, two hours after the “live” version actually took place. And in the meantime, my husband kept experimenting with settings, and tested by livestreaming to an alternate Facebook page. When this appeared to work, he adopted the approach, for the Easter Vigil and for Easter Sunday, of “unofficially” livestreaming, so that those who happened upon it would see it “live” but we minimized the risk of unhappiness if the stream cut out by not promoting it — we were particularly concerned that Facebook livestreaming would be overtaxed on Easter Sunday. But it worked, after all, and, with one subsequent hiccup, we seem to have a decent method going forward.
There are still issues to resolve — in particular, we’re using my personal laptop rather than a parish laptop, so we’re tied into the Actuary family attending daily mass, and we need to figure out how to bring in more volunteers. And we will eventually need to figure out how to manage the livestreaming without the tangle of cords and cameras in front of the altar — that is, I am of the opinion that it’s quite likely that churches will be permitted to open but that anyone in a higher-risk group will be advised to stay away, so that we’ll want to keep broadcasting even with people in the pews. Maybe by then the supply of webcams will be replenished and we can do more, or set something up, say from the choir loft; I don’t know.
But in the meantime, well, I’m pleased that things have worked out as well has they have so far. There have been a number of “that’s why I married him” moments: my husband is the sort of person who dives into problems to solve them, who teaches himself new skills, and in this way can accomplish a great many things that aren’t in his ordinary field of expertise; he is not by profession a “tech guy.” And as a bonus, people are grateful and we’re acquiring as a family a lot of Social Capital within the parish.
We’re also thinking about other ways we can build on this initial success. My husband has added to the Facebook page a video with drone footage of the church’s bell tower. He’s talking about adding livestreamed concerts if the music director or others would be on board.
But when I sent out that initial e-mail, and a somewhat chiding follow-up e-mail when I feared it would get trapped in petty bureaucracy, I figured there was a good chance that just the opposite would happen, and those same people might react with: “Doesn’t she know this isn’t possible? She has no business complaining!”
So that’s where we are right now. Sometimes, things actually do work out.
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