1855 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4402 USA
On the campus of Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary
© 2024 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.
To discover and express fresh dimensions of God by equipping worshipers to give testimony to experiences of God at work through personal storytelling and visual art.
To study, develop, and implement liturgical practices that equip worshipers for mission, and to discover gifts in the community that can be assets to the church's worship.
To deepen worshipers' experience of the Eucharist by learning together, sharing testimonies, varying practices, and living into the connection of the Eucharist to mission.
To cultivate a common worship language and shared understanding of worship that facilitates a sense of community across generation and technology, and to use that language to connect worship with all of life.
To explore the parables of Jesus in the Gullah translation of the Bible using four art forms, in order to enhance the discipleship, prayer and worship of four congregations.
To pilgrimage together through the Christian Year as spiritual formation in order to more deeply experience Christ, the church, spiritual practices, and the community.
Carla Pezzia and Theodore James Whapham
To survey clergy and congregants regarding the state of homiletics in the Catholic church in order to support Catholic preachers in improving their homilies and leverage liturgical preaching to reconnect with disengaged congregants.
Paul Heintzman
To investigate how Christian worship and leisure influence each other in order to better understand the relationship between them, so that Christian worship may be enhanced, and the leisure of Christians can also be enriched.
Demetrius K. Williams
To explore the cross of Christ in African American Christian experience as motivation for piety, political engagement, and social protest by researching spirituals, narratives, sermons, and other resources that highlight the importance of the cross of Christ for notions of freedom and the unity of humanity in the church's public witness.
To create and implement worship services designed to restore the self-worth of worshipers who have suffered moral injury and to provide spiritual renewal and hope to them and their families.
Karen Johnson
To study Christians who have historically worshipped together across racial lines, using case studies to explore how thinking Christianly and historically about race’s effect on American worship might help churches foster reconciliation in the present.
To strengthen practices of congregational song by introducing a globally diverse diet of hymns and other congregational songs and by strengthening understanding of the contexts in which songs were created.
