Visual Liturgy Live / Latest News / Visual Liturgy Live

Proclaiming the Passion

Alicja Chapman — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:53:16 GMT

It’s Lent, and many clergy are already looking ahead and planning services for Holy Week. One question that’s often asked on the VL forum is ‘Where can I find the dramatized versions of the Passion narratives in all four Gospels?’

Those of you with long liturgical memories will recall that Lent, Holy Week, Easter contained the dramatized Passion narratives, from the RSV, and that they were included in early versions of Visual Liturgy. But with the publication of Common Worship, the dramatized Passion narratives disappeared for a while. In 2007, Church House Publishing published Proclaiming the Passion, a booklet containing all four Passion narratives in dramatized form, from the NRSV. Immediately the cry went up from VL users, ‘Where can I find this in VL?’ For some time, it wasn't available, but last year the VL versions were finally released.

So – assuming that you have a current VL Live subscription and have downloaded all the available updates – where can you find the dramatized Passion narratives within VL?

On the Home screen, click on the Create service tab.
As you scroll down the list of folders, you will come to one headed Proclaiming the Passion. Click on this and you will see a service template also headed Proclaiming the Passion.
Double click on this template and the new service options dialogue box will appear. You will see that the service is defined as an undated service, so all you need to do is click on OK and the service template will open.
Within the template you will find everything that is contained in the printed booklet, including the introduction and notes on using the dramatized narratives.
You can then extract a passion narrative into a separate service, or cut and paste the text into a WP document.

We hope this helps you to use this resource. If you have questions or comments about these dramatized narratives, please feel free to use the Visual Liturgy Live forum at www.visualliturgylive.net/Forum/default.aspx

Help Desk facility for users with active subscriptions

Alicja Chapman — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:56:04 GMT

A dedicated Help Desk facility exists to help Visual Liturgy Live subscribers with installation, registration, and technical support questions. Customers with an up-to-date Visual Liturgy Live subscription can contact our Help Desk facility between 09:00 and 17:00 Mondays to Fridays other than Bank Holidays. The Help Desk can be reached by dialing 020 7898 1451 and selecting the option “For help with Visual Liturgy….” Please have your Visual Liturgy Live serial number available. Please note that you can renew your subscription at any time online at www.visualliturgylive.net .

We would like to remind customers that this service was established for the benefit of those with an active subscription. From 1 February 2010, customers who do not have an active subscription will no longer be able to call on assistance from the Help Desk. Those without active subscriptions will be able to use the support area of the Visual Liturgy web site and the discussion forums in order to seek help.

If you have a Visual Liturgy Live content query please contact us via e-mail: visualliturgy@hymnsam.co.uk

For information about how to renew your subscription, upgrade from an earlier version of Visual Liturgy, team licensing and many other helpful tips including help with registration please visit our web site at www.visualliturgylive.net .

Thank you for using Visual Liturgy Live.

The Visual Liturgy Team

New update: CW Times and Seasons

Alicja Chapman — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:27:46 GMT

We are pleased to announce that all of the remaining liturgical content of CW Times and Seasons is now available in Visual Liturgy Live. Users with an active subscription can download this material by using the Online Update feature of Visual Liturgy Live. You can renew your subscription at any time online at www.visualliturgylive.net.

Thank you for using Visual Liturgy Live.

We wish all our users a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The Visual Liturgy Team

Times and Seasons - Agricultural Year and Embertide

timanderson — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:05:40 GMT

We would like to announce that The Agricultural Year and Embertide material printed in Common Worship Times and Seasons (CHP2006) has now been added to Visual Liturgy Live. The templates are available within the Times and Seasons folder. All the texts have been added and the full resources for each occasion are gathered together in templates. More seasonal material will be added soon.

Visual Liturgy users with an active subscription can download this material by using the Online Update feature of Visual Liturgy Live.

New content module for VL Live

Andrew Sweeney — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:46:13 GMT

We have just published a new "content module" for VL Live, which contains lots of new liturgical material from Times and Seasons, together with corrections and enhancements to previously-published material.

You can access the new content by using VL's Online Update feature. You'll find "Online update..." on two of the VL Live menus - Help, and Edit. On either menu, click on "Online update..." and VL will ask you to wait briefly, then to verify your user-name and password before downloading the new module. These are your VL Live credentials, and VL will have remembered them from your registration. Press OK if you've asked VL to save your password, or if not, enter your password and then press OK.

VL will then offer you the new content module; you should tick the box for any content modules you don't yet have installed, and follow the prompts to download and install the software.

I'll post more over the weekend and into next week about what we've published, how to find it, and what we're going to do next.

New update: New service guidelines for Marriage, Thanksgiving for the Gift of a Child and Holy Baptism

timanderson — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:16:30 GMT

In July, the Church of England issued two new service guidelines which merge the Marriage Service with a Thanksgiving for the Gift of a Child or with Baptism, designed to help churches show their welcome for engaged couples with children:
Marriage and Thanksgiving for the Gift of a Child
and
Marriage and Holy Baptism
New templates based on these guidelines – making it easier and quicker to plan such ‘merged’ services – are now available to Visual Liturgy Live users with an active subscription, via the Online Update feature of Visual Liturgy Live.
For more details on the guidelines, which have been welcomed by the Chair of the Liturgical Commission, The Rt Revd Stephen Platten, please click here.

New update: Common Worship Festivals (CHP, 2008)

timanderson — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:49:20 GMT

Church House Publishing announces a significant addition to the content of Visual Liturgy Live. Common Worship Festivals is the latest Common worship title to be published and includes resources for the celebration of saints’ days throughout the Christian Year. This material includes resources for the observance of the 232 Festivals and Lesser Festivals which make up the Calendar, as well as for certain Special Occasions, such as when the Church prays for the Guidance of the Holy Spirit or the Peace of the World. There is a plethora of provision for individual saints – all the liturgical material from the published volume, apart from the music – to give both clergy and laity extra breadth and depth in their worship.

Visual Liturgy users with an active subscription can download this material by using the Online Update feature of Visual Liturgy Live. There are lots of helpful hints on how to use this and other seasonal material in the VL Live forums.

Many of the new options will appear automatically when, for instance, Holy Communion Order One is selected for a particular event, while alternative options can be selected in the normal ways in the browser. The full provision for each event is helpfully available for perusal in individual resource folders.

Note: If there is a software update available in online update, we recommend that you install this as well as Common Worship Festivals.

Help with registrations

Andrew Sweeney — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:26:42 GMT

We have created a new section on the VL Live website for Help with Visual Liturgy Live, and posted our first help document - a guide to the regsitration procedures for VL Live.

Over the next few weeks, we will be adding to the Help section with more notes on frequently asked questions.

If you would like to see more help on any topic that isn't already covered on this website or in the forums, then please let us know by email to electronic.publishing@c-of-e.org.uk

The VL Team

Team Registration

swmhartley — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 12:12:41 GMT

Questions about Receipts, and problems registering teams.....

I have bought a Team Licence. Can I please have a receipt for reimbursement!
Thanks,
Stephen

Easter material available on the VL Live website

Andrew Sweeney — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:21:49 GMT

At the end of March 2009 we've decided to publish some Easter Material in "beta" or draft form. The material can be found in the Downloads and Updates section of the Visual Liturgy Live website, and it's in rich text format (.rtf files). This format can be opened in most word-processors; we've tested it in Microsoft Word 2003, and Open Office Writer 3.0.

This is effectively how you might export your VL services to a word processor after you've finshed planning your worship. We always recommend using a word processor to finish the service to your own requirements, anyway, as VL Live was never designed to replace your word-processor or desktop publishing package. What you can't do with this material is use it like a fully-functional VL Live template.

Last year as soon as we'd finished publishing all the liturgical elements from Common Worship:Times and Seasons, we commissioned the work on all the service templates in Times and Seasons, so that you could all start to use the material as quickly and as effectively as possible. Unfortunately we haven't been able to finish the Easter templates, so we've taken the Times and Seasons material and quickly formatted it for you so that you can use it for your Easter services.

We'll still continue to work on the templates, but in future we'll take this approach again, I think - publishing a minimally-functional but fully-formatted version of the material first, then getting the full templates working. I hope you find this material helpful in the meantime.

Proclaiming the Passion is now available

Andrew Sweeney — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:11:19 GMT

Church House Publishing has just released a new content update for Visual Liturgy Live, featuring the dramatised passion narratives which were published in print as Proclaiming the Passion (CHP, 2007).

This is an official Common Worship publication, and includes dramatisations of the passion narratives from all four gospels. The texts used are designed to supplement the liturgical material published in Common Worship: Times and Seasons, and they follow the anglicised version of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

The versions from the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke are featured in the lectionary provision for Palm Sunday in years A, B and C respectively. The dramatisation of John’s passion narrative is set for Good Friday. Our electronic publication of this material as resources for Visual Liturgy users offers all four dramatisations as individual liturgical items, together with a gospel acclamation and a useful introduction to making effective use of them in liturgy.

Year 1 subscriptions extended

Andrew Sweeney — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:37:43 GMT

Earlier this week, we extended a number of VL Live Year-1 subscriptions to December 13th 2008. If your subscription to VL Live had expired before today, or was due to expire between today and December 13th, it will have been extended to December 13th.

This is the second time we’ve extended some VL Live subscriptions, and we’ve done it because it’s taken us a long time to get to the end of “Year 1” of VL Live. The delay has caused a lot of frustration to many of you, and we thank you again for your patience. I’ve already said enough about the difficulties of balancing priorities, working as we do with limited numbers of people and resources.

A significant update of content for VL Live is now available for you to download, and because of the way we’ve extended those subscriptions, it is available for every VL user to download free-of-charge, as part of the price you paid for your Year 1 subscription.

If your subscription is due to expire after December 13th, it will expire in the normal way, one year after you registered VL Live.

If you have any questions about how to renew your subscription, please see the topic Visual Liturgy Live subscription management in our forums.

How to manage your VL Live subscription

Andrew Sweeney — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:33:42 GMT

Here are some tips about how to manage your Visual Liturgy Live subscription. Remember that your 1st-year subscription is included in the purchase price, and it's the subscription that enables you to download new content published by CHP.

The VL Live software, content on the CD-ROM, and content downloaded by you through subscription, are all yours to keep and use forever; a number of people have asked us to confirm that the software is not dependent on a subscription; it is not.

Subscription management is done at the Visual Liturgy Live website. You need to sign in using the Site Login at the bottom-left of the home-page, using your VL Live user-name and password. Once logged-in, you'll see a couple of new links. Click on Subscription Management and you'll then be able to view your subscription details, and renew your VL Live subscription up to three months before it next expires. This is also where you can convert your single VL Licence to a Team Licence, should you ever need to do so.

Once you're logged-in to the VL Live website, remember that you've also got access to the Edit Details screen, which allows you to edit your account details.

Can you help influence the future of VL Live?

development — Wed, 28 May 2008 15:50:15 GMT

Church House Publishing (CHP) has a continuing programme of development for Visual Liturgy Live and we need your help. We're looking for people with a wide range of experience and expertise to assist with content development during 2008 and 2009. Our aim is to significantly improve and augment the content in Visual Liturgy, to enhance its role in planning and preparing worship for all occasions.

We're planning a significant amount of editorial work for 2008-09 so that we can provide the following content for Visual Liturgy Live:

* The entire Common Worship library
* The entire Book of Common Prayer
* The complete set of daily lections for the annual lectionaries
* New and improved service templates
Amongst the areas of Visual Liturgy in need of development are:
* Liturgical texts;
* Service Templates which need enhancing
* New Service Templates which need to be designed
* The lectionary
* The Psalter
* Themes
* Reading Plans

Some subject areas, such as Daily Prayer, will benefit from long-term maintenance as the service templates evolve and the daily lectionary is compiled year-on-year, so we would like to hear from you if you were interested in taking responsibility for subjects such as Daily Prayer, or lectionaries.

What skills are we looking for?

Some related editorial work is also planned for other CHP publishing platforms such as websites, and Visual Liturgy has a future on the internet in some form, too. The skills required therefore range from

* traditional editorial skills such as
o data-entry and proof-reading, to
* technical skills such as
o the use of markup languages and
o web-presentation tools.

Above all we need enthusiasm for and knowledge of liturgy, as Visual Liturgy is designed to bring liturgy to life in the service of the Church; training and technical support can always be provided if necessary.

Applicants should ideally have experience of worship-planning using Visual Liturgy (VL) or similar products, or be willing to learn Visual Liturgy skills. Training and support will be provided for all participants to improve their knowledge and skills relating to Visual Liturgy. Participation is encouraged from people with experience of and interest in a diversity of worship styles.

The Rewards

Your expenses will be fully reimbursed, and your work will be rewarded in various ways, ranging from participation in early-release programmes and a discount scheme operating in CHP's online shop, to professional rates of pay for editorial and technical work where appropriate.

What to do next

If you are interested in participating or assisting CHP in this programme of work, and you have something to offer no matter how much or how little, please email Church House Publishing's New Media Manager andrew.sweeney@c-of-e.org.uk giving the following details:

* The skills you can offer
* Your experience of worship-planning using VL or equivalent
applications
* The approximate amount of time you can offer and the basis on
which you would like to be engaged (for example:
o 20 hours per week on a professional basis
o A few hours per month on a volunteer basis
o Etc.)
* the preferred area of VL or content preparation in which you
would like to participate (for example VL template improvement, or markup of new liturgical texts).

We plan for Visual Liturgy Live to have a long and successful life, so this announcement is not date-sensitive; whenever you see this announcement, please get in touch with CHP. We look forward to hearing from you.

CHURCH HOUSE PUBLISHING ANNOUNCES FUTURE PLANS FOR VISUAL LITURGY

development — Wed, 28 May 2008 15:48:00 GMT

CHP has now announced its outline publishing programme for VL Live for 2008 and 2009, with the following key features:

* Year 1 subscriptions will all run until at least All Saints' Day (Saturday 1st November) 2008.

o All VL Live users who bought and installed their copies of VL Live before 1st November 2007 will therefore have their subscriptions extended free-of-charge until 1st November 2008

o All VL Live users who bought and installed their copies of VL Live after 1st November will have their Year 1 subscriptions until 1 year after the date they registered their software.

* The publishing programme for Common Worship: Times and Seasons will be completed during Year 1, before 1st November 2008.

* The Year 1 publishing programme will also include

o Some improvements and additions to Daily Prayer content and smart templates

o Some new seasonal and occasional templates

* The future publishing programme, beginning with Year 2in November 2008, will include

o Further improvements and additions to Daily Prayer content and smart templates

o Common Worship: Festivals

o The Book of Common Prayer

o Common Worship: Ordination Services

o Proclaiming the Passion

o Continuing improvements to service templates

o Continuing provision of content to support daily prayer

o New service templates

Visual Liturgy Live subscriptions will be held at £52.00 per annum for year 2 and that price will be held until 2009.

Visual Liturgy update for Epiphany 2008

development — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 15:00:35 GMT

New update

When the Visual Liturgy lectionary was first assembled, it used a set of rules for Epiphany that were later changed by General Synod. The details are here:

http://www.transformingworship.org.uk/TransformingWorship/?page_id=108

This means that Visual Liturgy needs an update to correct the lectionary entries for January 20th and 27th next year. We have made this available for both Visual Liturgy Live and Visual Liturgy 4.0.

To get the update, use the online update facility in Visual Liturgy.

If online update does not work for you, it is also possible to download and install the update separately. I'll post instructions in due course.

If you have Visual Liturgy 4.0, make sure you get the latest software update *before* the lectionary update. Otherwise, the lectionary update will not succeed and you will need to download and install it again.

Checking both updates at once should work OK, because the software will be updated first.

You can check for a successful update by looking at the Calendar for January 20th and 27th 2008. The 3rd Sunday of Epiphany uses the 2nd Sunday of Epiphany's readings, etc.

If you have already planned services for these dates, and need to follow the lectionary, you will need either to discard the planned services, or change the readings manually.

Tim

Generating Team Licences - a walk-through of the process

Andrew Sweeney — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 10:54:02 GMT

Once you have registered your copy of Visual Liturgy Live, you may want to upgrade to a team licence.

Here are the instructions for setting up your team on the new Visual Liturgy Live website:

1.Register your copy of Visual Liturgy Live using the form to be found on VL Live's File menu (select Registration).

2.Go to the VL Live website www.visualliturgylive.net and log in using the username and password with which you registered.

3.Click on the link for ‘Subscription Management’ in the left-hand navigation. You will then see the ‘My subscriptions’ page.

4.Click on the link ‘View Upgrade Options’ and the available options will appear.
Select the appropriate licenses for your Average Weekly Attendence and click on the ‘Upgrade’ link.

5.Fill out the payment details and click ‘Purchase Upgrade’.

6.You will see the ‘Payment Complete’ screen and a thank-you message together with your order reference number. Please make a note of this number and click to return to the ‘Subscription Management’ page where you will now see a link to ‘View Team Licences’.

7.Click this link to generate new licenses for your team. You will see any existing team licences that you may already have generated. To generate your first or additional team licences click on ‘generate new team licence code’.

8.You will now create a user profile for the new licence. Please note that you are now entering details for your new team members profile.

9.Enter your original VL Live licence code in the first line, followed by the details for your new team member. Each team member must have a unique login name and password. When you are finished click ‘add new user’.

10.Once you have successfully created a licence for a new team member you can return to the ‘Subscription Mangement’ page to view your licences and generate more if required.

VL Live update due for release 12th June

Andrew Sweeney — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 17:35:16 GMT

The first major update for Visual Liturgy Live will be released tomorrow, 12th June. This update will include:

A new stylesheet which gives you control over the display of psalm prayers;
Fixes to the Registration form-printing;
An improvement to the problem whereby some users are prompted to connect to the internet even though an internet connection is present;
Some improvements to the browser, including the display of the full search results list when items have been short-listed;
Improvements to the display of daily prayer lectionary items in the lectionary planner;
Changes to the prioritisation of items selected in the custom lectionary planner, so that your choices take precedence on a more intuitive basis;
The Gill Sans font will be re-installed if it is not already present;
Access to Help, although we recognise that there are still some broken links within Help, and a further content update will follow shortly to fix this.

A content module will also be released tomorrow (including the Help files) which will give you more seasonal material and which will re-order your Times and Seasons material more logically.

Apologies to those of you who have been waiting for this update since last week, but you will no doubt have worked out that we found some last-minute issues that we needed to fix and re-test, and which held us back from making an announcement until today.

In order to receive the update, you must have registered your copy of Visual Liturgy Live, which you can do online by selecting File / Registration from the VL menus. VL Live is normally configured to receive updates automatically, but you can force it to check for updates by using Help / Online Update. You will see an announcement on this forum, and in your Visual Liturgy Live News window, when the update is actually available for you to download.

Andrew Sweeney

Church House Publishing