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.
University Congregational United Church of Christ (2022)
To deeply integrate worship and other congregational activities so that the church’s engagement of cross-cultural relationships, education, justice, and collaboration weaves seamlessly with worship.
University of Notre Dame Folk Choir
J.J. Wright
J.J. Wright
To teach Christian communities how to see grace and mercy in loss and suffering by enabling young people to contemplate difficult questions as they rehearse and perform the newly composed Passion for the Innocents.
Villanova University
Wonchul Shin
Wonchul Shin
To provide Asian and Asian-American worshiping communities with rich Pan-Asian theological resources for their public worship practice as a form of public witness that will proclaim the dignity of the Asian and Asian-American community and transform the culture of anti-Asian violence and racism.
Visible Church
To enhance our bilingual worship service experience to impact our local church family and the online community, becoming a multicultural church.
Vision Familiar
To involve the children’s ministry and the youth ministry in public worship.
Yale University
Melanie Ross
Melanie Ross
To research the worship music industry, Christian higher education, and congregational ministry, in order to explore the intersection of liturgy and economics, to provide a history of how worship became part of the commercial music and entertainment industry, and to understand the ways that congregations and Christian colleges that train future worship leaders have responded to this shift.
Allen Chapel AME Church (2021)
To enrich worship by engaging the arts in order to promote healing and understanding in the midst of social injustices.
Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS)
Rebecca Slough
Rebecca Slough
To explore how the spatial and visual dimensions of congregational worship shape diverse Anabaptist communities, in order to create resources that facilitate culturally-informed reflection on visual arts in worship and to curate visual art resources for use in Anabaptist worship.
Black Theology and Leadership Institute (BTLI)
To promote and teach social justice-centered worship through proclamation, practice, and protest.
Candler School of Theology
Antonio Alonso
Antonio Alonso
To tell the story of the theological significance of ordinary material objects and the theological convictions they express, in order to encourage deeper attentiveness to the diverse materials through which we worship God.
Cardiphonia, a department of Artists in Christian Testimony Intl.
To curate art and liturgy into an experience of Stations of the Resurrection that will promote a deeper engagement with the season of Eastertide and the grace of Christ's resurrection.
Church Music Ministry of Canada (2021)
To engage in hymn singing in worship that facilitates the participation of worshipers of multiple abilities, generations, and languages.