News and reviews

The following review is reprinted with permission from the Spring 1998 Church Computer, the magazine of the Church Computer Users Group.

Visual Liturgy

The Revd Martin Adams describes some of his experiences of using the software over the past few months.

I set out with the intention of doing an in-depth review, but I know that if I tried to present in one article everything there is to say about Visual Liturgy (which I shall from now on abbreviate to VL), it would be too long and too tedious to read. The way to get to grips with VL is to use it, so I hope of even more use than a complete feature review is an account of using it for some real tasks.

VL is, of course, published by and for the Church of England. That is not to say that others won’t find it useful, but as supplied (at the moment, anyway) it contains only C of E material. For this reason, I make no mention of other denominations or their liturgical needs, and assume the position of a C of E Minister - which is what I am, so it wasn’t that difficult!

I suspect that I am not that untypical in that I do not want or need a new full order of service every Sunday. Most weeks the ordinary ASB/Rite A books are quite sufficient. It is only for special occasions and one-offs that I want a complete order of service. But I still find VL useful, as I hope you will see.

The Calendar

Like many parishes, every week we generate a congregational service/notice sheet. This contains, amongst other things, the collect of the day and the readings for the services. The collect is printed in full, the readings are not because we use pew bibles. So, every week I use VL to supply me with the text of the collect and the biblical references for the readings. To do this I use VL’s Calendar facility. Clicking on the Sunday date brings up a list of the collects and readings (see figure 1). Selecting the first line of the collect, then clicking on Show Text, brings up the full text of the collect, which I then copy and paste into my weekly sheet. I usually copy the bible references by hand, but if I want to copy and paste I would have to Show Text then choose Details, from where the reference for each reading can be copied.

Although I haven’t tested every option of every week, it seems that if you use the ASB lectionary then the full texts of all the collects, psalms and readings are available. If, however, like me you use the new three year (CLC) lectionary, the full texts of the collects and psalms are included, but readings for the principle service only . This means that I have to use another program (or a printed text) to look up the these other readings. You can rectify this by adding in the other texts yourself, cutting and pasting from your bible software, but it is a pity that they are not included.

I have also discovered that the lectionaries (ASB and CLC) only run to the end of the year 2000. Having asked Church House Publishing what happens then, I have been told that an update to the calendar will be made available soon, giving another three year’s life to the system. However, they have not yet worked out the best way to deliver this update to users. It may well be made available on the web initially, and then put on "for free" in the next service module (i.e. you get it the next time you buy an update for some of the new services.)

It is also worth remembering that, for copyright reasons, the psalms in VL are in the Celebrating Common Prayer version, not ASB.

A Real Service

Recently, I wanted to produce a service sheet for Communion Rite A with Baptism for the Sunday before Lent (CLC lectionary). What better excuse to use VL?

So I selected New Service, Baptism, Rite A - shorter, with Baptism.

The first problem was that there were no templates for this service if I chose the three-year lectionary. This may be because the authors were waiting for the new Initiation Services material (available now as an add-on) to accompany the new lectionary, but for those using the ASB with the new lectionary this is a not so good. I chose the ASB service template with the ASB readings for the day. The manual says or implies (on page 67) that you can change the lectionary for the service by changing the Service Properties (which I did, and the ASB heading to the service disappeared), then, quote, "you have to re-select the lectionary category in the Topic Links tab in the Properties dialogue for each affected item. Then it will work as you expect." I couldn’t make sense of this or make it work, so I tried another method that seemed to me quite straight forward as you will see in a moment. First I got to work on the basic service.

The outline of the service created by VL was as defined on page 250 of the ASB; it included the confession, no Gloria, the Kyrie was "greyed out" (meaning no text was chosen for this item), the Collect was greyed out with a red and white exclamation mark next to it (meaning not chosen, but required), and so on. OK so far.

Instead of the full ASB Confession, and drawing on the provision authorised in "A Service of the Word" (also not coded into VL), I wanted to use a penitential Kyrie. To do this I highlighted and deleted the reference to the Confession in the left hand "Service List" window (see figure 2). When I did this I was told that it was a required item (which under the ASB rubrics is true, but I was operating "A Service of the Word" rules), but having warned me it didn’t stop me, and the confession text in the right hand "Full Text" window duly disappeared.

Next I moved the Absolution after the Kyrie, since this is where it now needed to be, then I turned my attention to the Kyrie itself. I right-clicked on Kyrie in the Service List and selected Choose a text from the pop-up menu. I chose the Kyrie from Rite A paragraph 9 (the list calls it "RCA 9 Kyrie Eleison (short)"). This worked fine, but I decided that I also wanted to print in the service the full text of the appropriate Penitential Kyrie from Enriching the Christian Year, not just the responses. I quickly realised that you cannot edit items in the Full Text window. Or rather you can edit them, but the changes are not retained; items are reloaded in their original form each time you reload the service. You can edit these standard texts, but this will of course affect every service you create from then on which uses them.

So what I needed to do was create a new item, which I called: "Penitential Kyrie - Baptism". To do this I used Add item from the Edit menu, and typed in the text from Enriching the Christian Year. I could then include this new item in my service in place of the ASB Kyrie; and I can use it in any other service from now on.

Collects and Readings

Now I needed to change the readings and collect from the ASB ones, inserted by VL, to the CLC ones I wanted to use.

I called up the Calendar, and because my default setting is for the three year calendar, it was ready to provide me with the right set of collects and readings once I had chosen the date. To put these into the service is very easy. You drag each one that you want from the Calendar List over to the Service List, and drop them on top of the respective item. For example, I highlighted the first line of the collect, then dragged it onto the word Collect in the Service List. The Full Text window immediately updated itself with the full text of the right collect in the right place - wonderful. The readings were treated in a similar way; although since I wanted only the Bible reference to appear, and not the full text, I had to right click the reading in the Service List, choose Properties, and under Display remove the tick beside "Display the full text".

This may not be how the manual says you change the lectionary, but it was easy to understand, easy to do, and it worked!

The Blessing

There were a number of other changes and selections I made to the text in a similar manner, so I won’t go into details. I will, however, describe just one more change involving another useful feature of VL.

I wanted to use one of the forms of Blessing given for Baptism in Enriching the Christian Year (the one which begins "The God of all grace, who called you…"). I knew it was also in the ASB somewhere (and so it should be in VL too); the question was, where? To find it I used the used the search facility.

I right clicked on Blessing in the Service List, chose Choose a Text, and then entered the first few words of the Blessing into the search line. Then I selected Search by word or phrase, and in the drop down list underneath chose Prayers and liturgy (see figure 3). I clicked on Search and after a few moments the title of the text I wanted appeared. I clicked OK and the service was update with the new text replacing the ASB standard Blessing.

Hymns

When I had the service text as I wanted, I decided to choose the hymns with VL’s help.

First I inserted an item in the place where I wanted a hymn, and named it appropriately (something imaginative like "Hymn1"). Right clicking on this new item, and selecting Choose a Text, I then chose Hymns and songs from the drop down list, and Baptism from the Theme list. A range of hymns appeared (chosen from the Hymn Books I had already specified under the general Preferences when I first installed and set up VL). From these I chose a hymn and clicked OK. What happens next depends on the hymn chosen. Where copyright allows, the full text of the hymn is stored in VL and so the full hymn is pasted into the service. Where copyright doesn’t allow, only the first line is stored and pasted in; if you want the full text, and of course assuming you have the necessary copyright permission, you have to get the rest of the text elsewhere.

All Done?

My service was now as complete as I could get it in VL. What next - apart from saving it, of course?

You can print from VL, but the result is not ideal for service sheets. Much better (and recommended) is to use Copy whole text from the Edit menu, and paste the result into your word-processor or desk top publisher. There you can format the pages and the page breaks, edit any words that need changing (for example, I changed the general ASB rubric "may be used" to "is used" in a number of places), and so on. I also found that I needed to remove 32 redundant end-of-paragraph marks, 26 redundant end-of lines, and replace 63 pairs of end-of-lines with single end-of-paragraphs. That may sound long and complicated, but it was in reality just three replace operations taking a few seconds. In truth, to get the text exactly as I wanted it to appear, I did a fair bit of jiggling round, but it was all cut and paste; all the text was in place thanks to VL.

Finally it was a case of proof reading and checking. So far, I have found only one typo in the VL texts: a missing space in the third Eucharistic Prayer of Rite A. There were a few other known errors in the original release of VL which have been corrected in the update available from the web site or as part of the Initiation Services add-on module.

Conclusions

I should also mention that VL has other features. For example, it can be used for producing service outlines and for tracking hymn usage. I hope to explore these soon.

The more I use Visual Liturgy, the easier things become. When I started to use it I could never remember where to find a particular option or action. I usually knew that it could do something, but couldn’t find it and it wasn’t always obvious where to find it. Now I feel a lot more confident and get things compiled a lot quicker.

For me, Visual Liturgy will really come into its own as the new service material is added. However, already I am very glad I’ve got it and my use of it can only grow and improve!

Martin Adams is the editor of Church Computer, published by the Church Computer Users Group. This article first appeared in Church Computer, Issue 49, Spring 1998 and is copyright © Church Computer Users Group. Reproduced by permission.