1855 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4402 USA
On the campus of Calvin University
© 2025 Calvin Institute of Christian Worship
CICW has awarded Vital Worship, Vital Preaching Grants for over 20 years to teacher-scholars and worshiping communities in 45+ states and provinces and across 40+ denominations and traditions—including Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, non-denominational, and other Protestant communities.
While worship styles and practices vary greatly across these traditions, the grant projects typically explore at least one of CICW’s ten core convictions related to worship. Explore the hundreds of projects we’ve funded across both streams of the program.
Jennifer Schroeder
To equip ministry leaders and parents with tools to create sustainable, inclusive worship practices that value children’s voices in singing, praying, preaching, scripture reading, and communion by exploring their participation with members of ministry leadership teams, both in and outside of children’s ministry.
Brad East
To help Christians, especially evangelical Protestants, develop a renewed appreciation for and love of baptism by exploring how it can be integrated into a full-orbed vision of the Christian life and the church’s public worship.
To support worshipers with mental health challenges by promoting mental health awareness, training congregants to offer peer support, and encouraging mental well-being through music ministry.
To engage children, youth, young adults, and seniors in planning and leading worship in order to promote intergenerational faith formation, leadership development, and a renewed sense of unity.
To create new baptismal resources that educate and encourage new believers in ways that respond to the needs of diverse twenty-first-century Christian families.
Neal A. Lester
To document how Black American spiritual worship practices support healing, justice, and community care through a community-partnered ethnographic research and teaching project.
Amy Davis Abdallah
To explore how Christians think about, experience, and mark death, both physical and metaphorical, in order to help Christians acknowledge death more meaningfully in their personal, small-group, and corporate worship.
Jennifer Lord
To renew Protestant worshiping communities in keeping the church year, through study of and teaching about how an Orthodox parish understands and is spiritually grounded in the church year.
To foster a dynamic, participatory, and creative worship community where young adults can engage with God through visual arts, music, and worship leadership training.
To provide training in the theology and practice of leading worship in order to help people grow in faith and leadership and find belonging and purpose.
To reimagine the practice of the Lord’s Supper—including designing table installations, creating contextualized liturgies, and hosting culturally specific "love feasts"—to represent the diversity of Christ's body and enrich the spirit of celebration surrounding communion.
To create liturgical and educational resources that equip Moravian clergy and lay leaders to guide worshipers in connecting their faith with social justice.
