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 increase understanding of Christian worship in diverse settings, improve worship planning and leadership skills, strengthen spiritual life leadership, and help sustain worship practices across cycles of leadership transition through an interdisciplinary process of reflection and learning, skills training, and resource gathering that will result in a compilation of songs, prayers, readings, and testimonies contributed by the faculty, staff and students of King’s University.
To develop a training program that will prepare people to teach the Leadership Program for Musicians, a series of classes on music in worship, to ecumenical groups throughout the United States.
To offer worship services and discussion of scripture led by clergy, congregation members and seminary students for homeless men and women, many of whom have substance abuse problems or are chronically mentally ill.
To train youth and children in planning, leading, and facilitating intergenerational worship services that integrate art, dance, drama, scripture, story, and song.
To train congregants to tell both the biblical stories and their own faith story in fresh and lively ways through drama, images, movement, and storytelling in corporate worship.
To collaborate with congregations of all denominations through a series of workshops focusing on music in worship, biblical storytelling, liturgical art, and contemplative methods that allow all congregations to share their talents and best worship practices.
To design a process of catechism for those seeking baptism or confirmation in six diverse United Methodist congregations such that both the catechumenate and the congregations are renewed through the Easter Vigil celebration.
To learn about how the design of a worship space teaches, invites, inspires, and connects in order to foster versatile, multigenerational, mission-focused, biblical worship in a growing rural church.
To explore biblical themes of justice and peacemaking through education, fellowship, and theological reflection and to express these themes in corporate worship such that they lead to community service.
To gather information and establish a common set of expectations and values for worship services, to identify planning models that work within the framework of shared responsibility, and to implement these guidelines and models in the long-range planning of a year of worship services.
To introduce African Church to Western liturgical concepts and to introduce Western religious communities to the African concept of community worship and daily life through a five week series that focuses on five basic elements of worship, including planning and creating music, dance, sermons, testimonies, dramas, oral story telling, and artwork by various ages in the congregation that echo African cultural traditions, and also through intercessory prayer for Africa, the national leadership of Africa, victims of HIV-AIDS, the economic development of Africa, and the Christian church in Africa.
To explore worship renewal through a collaboration of seminary students, pastors, lay persons, and other ministry professionals from various racial, ethnic, and cultural communities during a pastoral leadership conference.
