1855 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4402 USA
On the campus of Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary
© 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.
To deepen understandings of racial justice and reconciliation in the church by using theater, visual art, and literature to guide conversations on this topic.
To employ liturgical worship, singing, music, and other learning activities such as book and movie discussion to promote racial healing and community.
Jennifer Ackerman
To study the impact arts-based training encouraging curiosity, creativity, and courage has on pastoral leadership to increase pastors' capacity to lead vibrant, justice-oriented communities of worship.
Harold Dean Trulear
To explore and disseminate best practices for shaping and sustaining a Christian social justice witness through corporate worship.
Rolanda L. Ward
To encourage social witness within public worship through a study of congregational prayer and corporate confession.
To decolonize worship life by auditing the liturgy, music, preaching, and sacred spaces of the church in order to fully live into the church’s commitment to antiracism and its mission of “Sharing Love, Doing Justice, and Building Community.”
Courtney O’Grady
To invite Catholic school practitioners (PK–12) to engage in self-study and group discussion as a means of reckoning with racism, ableism, and other injustices in American Catholic school practices, and then to reimagine Catholic schools as inclusive and justice-oriented worshiping communities.
To become a more hospitable and anti-racist church through training and reflection to deconstruct white-centered worship norms and by expanding the multiplicity of non-Eurocentric ways that we engage in worship.
To equip emerging BIPOC worship artist activists to shape their local ministries to develop a prophetic imagination that celebrates the goodness and beauty of the justice God seeks for our world.
To equip local church leaders to worship by letting “justice roll down” in their lives, by training cohort members to address structural racial disparities, and by developing a theological framework that highlights God’s desire for shalom and the advocacy for the oppressed found in scripture.
Amy Whisenand
To explore the relationship between singing and reconciliation in the church through hosting workshops for scriptural study, practice sharing, and collaboration.
Susan Bigelow Reynolds
To study public, lay-led Way of the Cross (Via Crucis) rituals that engage contemporary social injustices in light of the cross, exploring how communities on the margins of church and society use public ritual to practice theological agency.
