News and reviews

The following review is reprinted with permission from the Winter 2000 Church Computer, the magazine of the Church Computer Users Group.

Visual Liturgy

Reviewed by the Revd Martin Adams.

For some of us Visual Liturgy 3.0 is the long awaited update that brings us the full texts of the Church of England’s new Common Worship services to our computers. It includes all the material from the Common Worship Main and Pastoral volumes, together with the Calendar and Lectionary for Sundays and Holy Days up to the year 2010. The bible readings, where the full text is included, are available in both NIV and NRSV translations. In addition to the texts, the notes that accompany each service are also available as part of the Help system, as is the complete text of the CHP publication A Brief Guide to Liturgical Copyright.

However, for others this may be the first version of Visual Liturgy that you have seen or considered buying, so talk of an upgrade is unhelpful. I don’t want to repeat all that has been said before about Visual Liturgy – I refer you to the relevant articles on previous versions, including the Methodist version, in past issues of Church Computer – but I will begin with a summary of what Visual Liturgy does and is. If you know all this already, skip on to the section titled “Version 3”.

What is Visual Liturgy?

Visual Liturgy is designed to help you plan and compile services, including choosing hymns. It is also useful for looking up collects, readings and other 'propers' for any given Sunday or Saints day (perhaps, for insertion into a weekly pew sheet) with just a couple of mouse clicks, and also for searching for material that you know is in the book somewhere, but you just can't remember where!

Visual Liturgy 3 (from now on VL3) contains the full text of Common Worship, as described above. The ASB texts are also available on the CD, but are only installed if you want or need them (which you do if you also have the optional Seasonal Module containing the texts of Promise of His Glory, Lent, Holy Week and Easter and parts of Michael Perham's Enriching the Christian Year). VL3 also contains a cross-referenced index of around 2000 hymns and songs, with the full text where copyright allows. Using the built in search facilities everything in VL3 can be found by searching for its title, author, first line, biblical reference, theme, or a word or phrase contained in it.

The real power of VL3, however, is its service preparation abilities. Around 190 templates for services, parts of services, and selections of resources, are provided based on the outlines and services in the Common Worship volumes. These are grouped under a variety of headings that make them easy to manage and find. Various other service templates and texts are available (for example by downloading from the VL web site), and you can create your own or customize those provided. This allows you to set up templates to suit you own particular situation (for example, you always use this bit but skip that, you have two readings not three, etc. etc.) and then you can use those templates to produce services for any given occasion quickly and easily. Changing texts according to the season or occasion is for the most part automatic, and where it isn’t it is easy to change with just a few clicks of the mouse buttons.

When a service has been created, you can produce a summary outline (e.g. for intercession leaders or musicians who need an order of events) or the full text, with or without Bible readings in full. As stated above, readings - where included - are present in both NIV and NRSV translations, but only those for principle services on Sundays and Holy Days are present in full. Others give only the reference. However you can add these yourself - and once there they remain in your VL3 database for next time. Alternatively, if you have compatible Bible software installed on your system (which at the moment means Logos or Quickverse only) VL3 can automatically retrieve the full text through the chosen bible software, either for all readings or only when it is not present in the VL3 database. This not only plugs the gap of the missing second and third service readings, but also allows you to use your own preferred translation.

To produce a printed order of service, you would normally copy the entire text from VL3 into your word processor or DTP package. Some of the formatting is already done for you in VL3, the rest you can apply yourself according to local custom. You can also generate overheads with VL3, either for printing or directly to a video projector – VL3 has a built in slide projection manager.

So that's what it is, and for more information on its basic functions I recommend you read the earlier reviews as stated above. Now to the specifics of the new version.

What's new in Version 3?

Installing it

In terms of today's computers VL3’s needs are small. It needs a Windows 95 or higher PC with at least 8MB of memory and 30 MB of hard disk space (excluding additional modules). In previous releases there was also a Windows 3.x version, however not any more: VL3 is Windows 9x only.

If you install over an existing VL installation (including the Methodist Worship Book version), there is an option to delete existing data and do a clean install, or you can leave it intact. If you leave it, you can even switch between lectionaries using the option in Edit | Preferences supplied to do so. If you are using the Seasonal Module then you must have the ASB material present - because the seasonal module uses it - but you can also do a clean install and then add it back afterwards.

Alternatively, you can install VL3 into a new directory, leaving a previous installation untouched, and then use the option File | Change Database that lets you switch between different databases of texts and services. Using this you could, for example, use Methodist VL and Common Worship VL3, but keep them entirely separate from each other. You could also make your own experimental databases, changing templates, calendars and texts to suit, without putting the original at risk.

In short, there are a number of different scenarios and options. VL3 comes with a sheet, separate from the manual, which described them and gives you the specific instructions needed to get from where you are to where you want to be.

One caveat: some people have been caught out because they had modified standard texts which VL3 then puts back to standard texts when it installs. The most obvious examples are second and third service readings and hymn texts being deleted, but it affects all modified texts. The solution is either to install VL3 into a new directory, or to start again.

Creating a new service

In addition to the previous categories of services, there are now also nested sub-categories. For example, in the Service of the Word category there are now two sub-categories: one called Thanksgivings and the other Resources (see figure 2). This should allow both developers and users to organise the services in a more helpful way.

Within categories, services are no longer listed in alphabetical order. Rather, the order is determined by the user: that is, you can re-order the list of services by dragging-and-dropping items up and down the list. Thus you could put the ones you use most frequently at the top. A single alphabetically-ordered list is still available from the 'All Services' category.

One of my previous complaints has been fixed in a very helpful way. In earlier versions of VL, if you wanted to create a service for a particular occasion, you ticked the ‘show all church year dates’ box and a long list appeared – long being the operative word! It could take a lot of scrolling to find the one occasion you wanted in a list that didn’t seem to me to be in any logical order. Now there is now a built in search facility: when you have enabled the list, you right-click over it and choose Search. If you then type in a word such as ‘ Harvest’ the list is filtered to show only the three matching events: Harvest in years A, B and C (see figure 3).

Inside a service template

There are some cosmetic changes to the way in which services are presented. The most obvious is that the new services are presented with a wide left margin (in keeping with the book). However, because the margin is produced by a combination of tabs and paragraph indent settings, this is fiddly to amend if you then copy the text to your word processor and want to change the appearance. Fortunately there are two ways to over come this: there is an option in Edit | Preferences that causes the wide left margin to be removed whenever text is copied to the clipboard, and one in Service properties | options that removes the wide margin altogether in that particular service.

An interesting and useful new feature is 'grouping'. Items in a service can be grouped together so that they can be moved and changed as a complete unit. This is how, for example, VL3 copes with the complex set of options that are the Common Worship Eucharistic Prayers. You can change the whole prayer in one go, and then decide whether an individual element, such as an optional response, is to be used or not. Groups are expanded (so that individual elements can be changed) or contracted (so that it becomes a single entity) with a single click, just like expanding and contracting folders in Windows Explorer.

Working with groups is easy: to create one you simply select the first item you want to be a sub-item, and demote to sub-item from the right-click pop-up menu. If you drag an item into the middle of a group, it becomes part of that group. If you drag an item out of the group to somewhere else in the service list, it is removed from the group. If you promote an item in the middle of a group, it becomes the top item of a new group, and items below it become part of the new group. And so on.

Creative use of groups will allow you to put together sections of a service and then design a template that offers a choice between sections rather than individual texts. For example, you could offer the choice between several different word or penitential sections in a service, each with a different structure as well as content.

You can also build relationships between items that are not grouped. For example, you can specify that the same text should not be used more than once, or that if a certain text is used, then another text must also be used elsewhere in the service, and so on. As you can guess, VL3 uses such rule based selection to enforce (or rather, attempt to enforce) the rubrics of Common Worship.

Sometimes, when you have finished playing (!) you might want to go back to the default text for an item. This used to be a bit of a chore (you had to know what the original was, and find it), but now there is an item on the right-click pop-up menu to Restore Default Text. Other chores in previous versions included marking all items for inclusion on a projection sequence (for those lucky enough to have projectors): now there is an option Edit | Mark all for projection that does it with one click. A new useful short cut is the CTRL+L key combination which moves you from the service text window (the right hand one) to the service list (the left hand one); previously you had to resort to the mouse to do this. Strangely, though, it is not a toggle - you have to use the TAB key to go the other way.

The lectionary report

The are two changes to be seen on the tool bar: the search icon has changed from a magnifying glass to a pair of binoculars, and there is a new icon that looks like an open book. This open the Lectionary Report generator, a new and major feature of VL3 which lets you view, save and print a lectionary for any given period and selection of services. Compare this with the calendar option which shows only one day in the church year at a time.

To create a lectionary report you set a start date and an end date, and select which type of days to include (see figure 4). There are five options: Sundays and Principal Holy Days (including Principal Feasts), Festivals, Lesser Festivals, Commemorations, Eves and there is also a single option to select them all. You may notice that I have omitted reference to Weekdays, which are shown in figure 4. This is because although listed, the weekday lectionary is not included with VL3. (That is, the provision is there but the references and texts are not - yet.)

Underneath these date and day options is a scrolling section where you set what you want to see in the report, choosing from the readings and other propers for the various services during the day. You can choose a lectionary and a track (related or continuous) and finally click Show lectionary to see it. The resulting report can be saved or printed or exported as a text file for use in another application. Notice that the collects, prefaces and other propers are only shown as a heading. You can use the Text button at the bottom of the screen to get the full text, but only the reference is printed in the report.

Final remarks

One thing I have not mentioned yet is the manual, titled: A Guide. It is a significant improvement on previous versions. It is larger and much easier to use. It reads well, and used in conjunction with the supplied tutorial files should get new users into action very quickly. It is definitely aimed at new users though: although it has a section called 'reference' this is extremely small, consisting just nine pages of one line explanations of each menu item and icon. However, the help files are fairly thorough - and where they are not the manual invites you to join the VL mailing list or contact the helpline at Church House.

Given this is an update, I have probably said enough. I have described all the major new features of version 3, but I guess that most folk will not buy VL3 on the strength of these alone (although they are certainly worth having). At the end of the day what will make up your mind is whether you need the powerful searching and service preparation features that are the hall mark of Visual Liturgy.

As a new purchase it is £100 (some discounts are available). That is a hefty price and may not be economical if you are only going to produce a set of service cards and then hardly ever use it again. Perhaps the Common Worship text disk at £20 is all you need, or even the downloadable HTML or PDF files available from the Church of England's Common Worship web site.

On the other hand if you already have a previous version, £35 for the upgrade is not at all bad – the Pastoral volume alone costs £25 in printed form! And if you are going to make use of the its excellent features, I’m sure you won’t need any persuasion from me.

Martin Adams is the editor of Church Computer, published by the Church Computer Users Group. This article first appeared in Church Computer, Issue 57, Winter 2000 and is copyright © Church Computer Users Group. Reproduced by permission.