Automating orders of service with OpenOffice.org

One of the most frustrating, time-consuming tasks I had when I was in parish ministry was getting the order of service printed right. Not written, but printed. Either I did it myself or with an assistant with rounds of edits. And still there’d be typos or skewed margins. I’m working up a robust solution and working out the process in this blog. Why show the messy details? So you can adapt the results when I’m done and not passively use what would work for me, but perhaps not you. (Indy Catholics and other full-text-in-hand traditions: press me for details that pertain to your needs.)

Because this is a bit involved, I’m releasing it in chunks. Which is fine: so many of my readers are either at General Assembly or at the beach. (It’ll be done by the time you’re back.)

For this, you will need your church’s liturgy or an assortment of recent orders of service and a computer with OpenOffice.org 2.4, the most recent update of a popular free and open-source office productivity suite. It’s available for Windows and Linux, and a less-than-glorious version for the Mac. (All should be well by September when a 3.0 version is released for all these operating systems.)

Here’s what I’m doing to automate a liturgy for variant uses as an order of service. I think this could be useful for a church at many different size levels, though not all churches would use all options. While this is based on the Universalist 1894 morning prayer service, the process could be adapted to any number of services, including those which (from the outside) seem much “freer.”

1. If you have a rite, cut and paste, or type out, the liturgy into OpenOffice.org Writer, the word processor; clean up any gremlins that appear.
2. If you have orders of service with headings dominating, insert these. Add names for liturgical elements, as suggested in the rite like Prelude, Hymn and Sermon, where missing but logical. Include all options, each in their own line in the case of directions or customs like “After that shall be sung the following Psalm, or a Hymn, unannounced.”
3. Mark headings with tags: Heading 1 for the name of the service, Heading 2 for elements, Heading 3 for parts of an element, where applicable. Say, names of particular prayers in a sequence.

You can see all your options for headings and other style features by pressing the F11 key.

Save and name your work, and we’ll start adding sections next time.