Tim Anderson writes about a new feature in Visual Liturgy Live called ‘meta-templates’: The essence of Visual Liturgy is that you select a type of service, and the software populates it with the correct readings along with other material such as the proper preface in the Eucharistic Prayer, or a seasonal introduction to the peace.
Technically, we call the service you select a “template”, because it contains the structure and unchanging texts of a service, ready to be customized for a specific occasion.
When the Methodist Church created a version of Visual Liturgy with its own services and texts, it exposed a shortcoming in the service template concept. The Methodist Worship Book has variations on the Holy Communion service to be used in different seasons, thus, Holy Communion for Lent and Passiontide, Holy Communion for Christmas and Epiphany, and so on.
It was important that users did not accidentally use one of these services in the “wrong” season, so we introduced a way of marking services for specific seasons. If you choose a service out of season, you get a warning.
This was really only a workaround, and with the release of Visual Liturgy Live we are adopting a better solution. This better solution is a smart template that in reality represents a number of service templates and will automatically select the correct one for you.
This is important for our inclusion of Common Worship: Daily Prayer. It means you can select Prayer during the Day for example, specify the date, and Visual Liturgy will determine which of several Daily Prayer templates is the correct one to use.
The image below shows how a Smart Service is created. It defines a list of templates and the rules by which they are selected. Visual Liturgy will choose the first matching template.
For the user, it is just as easy as selecting a standard service template. The only difference is that a further selection takes place behind the scenes.
