Software demo

New content

This demonstration is taken from Visual Liturgy 4.0 for Common Worship. The emphasis in version 4.0 is undoubtedly on changes to the technical, graphical interface and 'usability' aspects of the software, but a new edition of Visual Liturgy wouldn't be complete without new content!

New Patterns for Worship

Joining the entire contents of the Common Worship Main Volume, Pastoral Services and Presidents Edition, New Patterns for Worship is included in version 4.0.

Published in November 2002, New Patterns is the Common Worship compatible successor to Patterns for Worship. As well as the resources themselves, New Patterns contains many useful tools for planning services. There is substantial commentary on the resources as well as twenty-two sample services. Within Visual Liturgy, the resources will be available to drop into services as individual items of content, with the sample services becoming service templates and the commentary material made available in the help files and notes.

It would be unfair, however, to label New Patterns for Worship merely as just an update to suit Common Worship. All three of the sections have been improved and expanded to make the material even more useful than ever before. The commentary provides help in understanding the nature of worship, the use of music, using space and colour and more. The resource section contains the best material from the first version but it also includes brand new resources and new themes to help organize it all. There are also more sample services than before, covering a wider range of situations.

Sunday by Sunday from the RSCM

Visual Liturgy has always provided hymns and worship songs for insertion into services to help create the best possible service sheets. Full texts have been provided where possible for hymns and songs that were out of copyright and some even had MIDI files attached so that users could listen and check the tunes. In Visual Liturgy 4.0 for Common Worship, things have been taken a step further thanks to a new partnership with the Royal School of Church Music.

The hymn database remains firmly in place and has been updated so that it now contains details of over 2,600 hymns and songs, with more than 800 now having full texts available. However, the major enhancement is the inclusion of the RSCM's hymn indexes from their publication Sunday by Sunday.

Sunday by Sunday provides lectionary-based hymn suggestions for each Sunday of the year. In Visual Liturgy 4.0 for Common Worship, those suggestions are now indexed and accessible so that when users are creating services and want to choose a hymn for a Sunday service, they will be instantly presented with some options from which to make their selection.

The hymn indexes are just part of a much more detailed publication and, as before, that information is available only to RSCM members via the printed version. Details concerning Sunday by Sunday and RSCM membership are available on the RSCM web site.

More of the Bible

In Visual Liturgy 3.0 for Common Worship, the entire Common Worship lectionary was provided as a reference, but full texts were only provided for the Principal services in both the NIV and NRSV translations. In version 4.0, the second and third service lectionaries now have full Bible texts as well. With the entire lectionary in place with full texts, Visual Liturgy now includes more of the Bible than ever before.

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