Challenges and Opportunities of Livestreaming & Recording Liturgies

The Pandemic has brought livestreaming and recording of Masses to many of our parishes. Over the course of the pandemic, I have noted improvements in the quality of video and audio from these efforts. The future of livestreaming for parish life remains to be seen. 

The Challenges and Opportunities of Livestreaming/Recoded Liturgies

1. My hunch is some parishes will take up these challenges and opportunities and become models and magnet parishes for outreach and evangelization.

2. These parishes will make livestream access to all parish liturgies a priority, i.e., all weekend liturgies, plus all baptisms, weddings and funerals, unless there is a good reason for keeping them low keyed and private.  Like with sports, emphasis on livestreaming not simply recording will be the key to engaging people.  

3. These parishes, like progressive Anglican communities today, will include the video audience in their greetings, make worship leaflets available for their participation, and design their websites as much for their virtual congregation as for their physical congregation. 

4. These parishes will prioritize video outreach to parish members that do not regularly attend services, encouraging them to attend through livestreaming. These will include not only the homebound for health and disability reasons, but also people with heavy work schedules, those who need to take care of others, etc. The parish will work with parents with young children to provide a variety of ways both at church and in the home to facilitate the participation in liturgical worship

5. Communion to those at home will become a normal part of worship, e.g., ministers to the homebound will be dismissed after communion to people who are watching by livestream. Or in some cases these ministers may join people at home for the entire Mass bringing the reserved Eucharist with them so that all would communicate during the livestreamed communion.

6. Worship would the most prominent aspect of a parish website with videos of current hymns playing on the homepage. The choir would be a support for the entire parish, including the virtual parish, by livestreaming and recording choir practices. Typically, our choir warms up by doing the responsorial psalms plus hymns for next weekend before working on new songs.  In one of our local parishes where the choir practices these before Mass, there was a parish outcry when the music director proposed the choir practice elsewhere. People liked to hear these as preparation for Mass

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For many years NPM had an interesting article by Bishop Untener of Saginaw on their website.  He died in 2004; the article has disappeared.  In his article he described videotaping live Masses and studying them with his fellow priests. His pioneering work is very relevant now that many parishes are livestreaming and recording Masses.  I have a copy of the article and have shortened it to focus upon the videotaping.

Ritual and Community: What I've Learned in the Parishes

By Bishop Kenneth E. Untener. 

"I began a program about four years ago, in which I asked five priests each month to videotape a live weekend liturgy and send the video to me. I videotaped a live liturgy that I do, and copies of each of the tapes are sent to all six of the participants.

After each of us has reviewed all the tapes, we meet for two hours to talk about what we have seen, and we try to help each other do it better--not only the act of presiding, of course, but we also try to find ways to improve the music, the use of the liturgical space, and so on. We have wonderful conversations about all of this, then we all go home and do it again, the same six people, making a new video, sharing copies of all six videos, meeting once more to talk about it. In these past four years I have watched a lot of videos! And I have watched myself presiding and preaching at liturgy a lot!

One of the chief reasons for the lack of interest shown by many members of our assemblies has to be the lack of direct involvement they have in the basic elements that make up our ritual. 

Four Major Ritual Languages "spoken" at Mass:

Silence, Movement and Gesture, the Spoken Word, and the Musical Word. 

How much of each of those languages do the members of the congregation get to "speak" in an hour-long Mass?

There is very little silence at Mass. After a reading, or after communion, or after the invitation to pray, when the ritual books call for shared silence, there is very little of such sharing. In fact, reviewing the videos with a stopwatch, I have counted at most sixty seconds of such silence at a Mass. 

There are many movements and many gestures during the course of a Mass, but the congregation gets to move very little. 

We seem to think that, because more people are involved in doing the liturgy, "the people" have more to do. But that does not follow; it is an illusion. As one member of a congregation once told me, "All we get to do is stand, sit, say 'Amen,' and go to the bathroom." 

The two biggest gestures in which all (or most) of the members of the assembly are involved at Mass come close together—the exchange of the peace, and processing to communion. By my calculations, from joining in the Our Father through the exchange of the peace and processing to communion, the members of the congregation normally get to join in about three-and-a-half minutes of movement.

As concerns the congregation's direct involvement in the spoken word (which I have timed with a stopwatch): If there is a creed, the congregation gets to speak for a total of ninety seconds. If there is no creed, fifty-eight seconds. That includes every "Amen," every "Lord, have mercy," every spoken word assigned to the congregation.

Congregational participation in the sung word varies quite a bit from parish to parish and from liturgy to liturgy. But, generally, if there is a sung Gloria, most members of the assembly get to sing for eight to nine minutes. By far, then, the biggest ritual entrée that most of the assembly has to what is going on is the music. This fact is of significant importance to pastoral musicians. 

In sum, then, the total amount of time for direct participation by the congregation--actually "doing" any kind of ritual "language"--in a whole hour- long Mass is about thirteen or fourteen minutes.

Gathering Rite of the Mass

The gathering rite at Mass ranks second (behind the communion rite) in opportunities for congregational involvement in the four ritual languages, because there is a lot of ritual involvement in getting ready to come to church, parking, entering the building, greeting other people, finding a place to sit, talking to people in neighboring seats--all those actions, unfortunately, that are not normally considered part of the gathering rite. If, after all of this has taken place, followed by the entrance procession and opening hymn, any presider says, "Let us begin in the name of the Father . . .," there is a clear lack of understanding about what has been going on for the past twenty minutes!

Liturgy of the Word

The liturgy of the word usually takes about twenty to thirty minutes, during which time the congregation gets to do hardly anything. They sit from the first reading; they stand for the Alleluia and the Gospel; they sit for the homily; they stand for the creed and the general intercessions. There is very little for them to do in terms of speaking and singing: the responses to the readings, the refrain of the responsorial psalm, the text of the creed, the response to the petitions of the general intercessions. There are few opportunities for silence, usually, though it is called for after each of the readings and after the homily.(2) 

How well the readings themselves are proclaimed depends on the place and the reader. When asked about acting, the late Frank Sinatra once commented: "There's no trick to acting. All you have to do is know the lines like you know your own name." Similarly, there's no trick to being a good lector; all you have to do is know those texts like you know your name. Of course, to do that, you'll have to spend a few hours in preparation—not learning where to pause, but learning what the text means

The Preparation of the Gifts

In terms of congregational movement, for instance, the majority of the assembly gets to sit for the preparation of gifts from beginning to end, while four people bring the gifts forward and ushers take up the collection. This is not community ritual. During the Eucharistic prayer, they stand for the preface and kneel for the rest of the prayer, with no additional movements or changes of posture--no sign of the cross, no bow, no beating of the breast.(6) That is not ritual.

In other words, there is very little for the congregation to do during this whole stretch from the preparation of the gifts through the end of the Eucharistic prayer. They move very little; they have no assigned gestures; they have little to say or sing; there is little, if any, communal silence. 

What else might be done? During Lent of 1998 in our diocese, we emphasized the notion of almsgiving. One way of focusing on this theme was to invite people to come forward at preparation time with specific gifts, for which they had been prepared the previous week: food one week; then dry goods for the poor that are not covered by food stamps; then a card on which they wrote a nice letter to any legislator in the country (or the world), asking them to be more careful of the poor; and so on. (Parishes also provided baskets in which they could place their money offering as they came forward.) For most people, this was a whole new experience of this part of the Mass.

The Eucharistic Prayer

Just a few people bring forward the gifts; the Eucharistic prayer seems to follow the same trajectory as the liturgy of the word (God talks to them in the word, and the priest talks to them--and to the bread and cup--in the Eucharistic prayer). It doesn't look or sound as if the priest is talking to God); if it is perceived as prayer of any kind, it is the "priest's prayer." In my rating system, this highest part of the Mass comes in dead last, lower than the gathering rite and the dismissal rite.

The Communion Rite

Based on my three criteria for participation, the communion rite comes in first. This is when we have all that movement of the Lord's Prayer (if they join hands or raise their hands in prayer), the sign of peace, and the communion procession. There is a lot of congregational speaking and singing, and there is occasionally shared silence. The rite is cluttered and fragmented, but people generally understand what is taking place. They love the Our Father, and they know what it means. They may not know exactly what the sign of peace is, thinking of it more as a friendly greeting than as a mutual exchange of the peace of Christ, but most of them love it. They know what sacramental communion is about. They may not understand the prayer after communion very well; in fact, even some priests tend to think of it as part of the dismissal rite than as part of communion, though the text always speaks about what we just did. Often there is not enough shared silence, but we can work on that. 

The biggest thing that is lacking is reverence, not only on the part of the congregation who come forward to receive communion, but also on the part of those who handle and minister the consecrated elements. People don't seem to understand, when they hold the consecrated bread or drink from the cup, that they are holding and sharing the mystery of the Holy Trinity, the Triune God with a human being at the center, because they are sharing the full mystery of Jesus, died and risen. They don't understand that the Amen they speak is an acceptance of what Jesus accepted at Gethsemani and at Easter, an acceptance of the Lord into their lives right now, no matter what that might mean in fidelity to God's will.

Dismissal

 And we still have to figure out what to do with the congregation after the communion procession is over. 

Although this rite is very brief, it comes in third for congregational participation, behind the communion rite and the gathering rite. It's pretty obvious what's supposed to be happening, but I'm not sure that people have a sense that they are being "sent" by this rite; that awareness could certainly be enhanced. 

In sum, then, we have a ritual that is wonderful, but we have to find ways to let the people do more. There are a hundred ways we can do that (legally), if we are willing to make the Mass something other than a Prussian close-order drill. There are ways to help people understand what is going on. They love the Mass, and they want to know about it, and they are grateful to find out. There are certainly ways to do the ritual better, and I am proud of all those who are working to find those ways

My Conclusion 

Study of recorded liturgies not only by the liturgical ministers but also by various sectors of the parish, including those who do not regularly attend liturgies, should slowly with a lot of consultation and experimentation make our liturgies more attractive not only to those who actively participate physically but also to those who become an active part of the parish virtual community.  Untener is correct: “There are a hundred ways we can do that (legally), if we are willing to make the Mass something other than a Prussian close-order drill.”