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.
Eastern Christian School Association
To expand students’ imagination and understanding of God and the people of God by implementing diverse worship expressions.
Immanuel Congregational Church
To create a welcoming, multi-racial worship experience that explores God's liberation and justice through singing gospel music.
New Hope Covenant Church
To form a hospitable communal worship space that welcomes worshipers’ whole selves and celebrates all of the Body of Christ in its diversity by engaging in music, arts, and storytelling.
Seattle Pacific University
To engage multicultural worship as a means of reconciliation through immersion experiences that expand students’ awareness of God and will inform their leadership of multicultural worship on campus and at local churches.
Window Rock Christian Reformed Church
To contextualize worship practices in a Navajo church by engaging Scripture in ways reflective of Navajo cultural practices.
Asbury United Methodist Church
To foster intergenerational and multicultural engagement in worship in order to deepen worshipers’ connections to Scripture, one another, their community, and their history.
Belmont University (2018)
To develop a chapel worship ministry that reflects the ethnic and ecclesial diversity of the campus and community by welcoming diverse theologians and practitioners and cultivating relationships with local churches.
Church Music Ministry of Canada
To facilitate intergenerational faith formation in worship by creating spaces for learning and collaboration between pastors and lay leaders in ethnically and denominationally diverse congregations.
DurhamCares
To unify churches who share a common neighborhood by implementing ecumenical and contextual worship that meets the needs of the community.
First Presbyterian Church of Holt and Lansing Church of God in Christ
To facilitate relationships between Anglo- and African-American churches by fully engaging in one another’s worship experiences and by creating liturgical art together.
Grace and Peace Community Church
To reflect on Scripture and culture in order to compose songs and worship expressions that are fitting to a multicultural urban congregational context.
Knox Presbyterian Church (2018)
To identify, disciple, equip, and encourage a group of diverse worship leaders who can implement multicultural worship that reflects the diversity present in the congregation and community.