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 create visual art for worship that communicates the core values of the church by training and equipping artists in the congregation through lectures, study and devotional resources.
To engage adults and children in exploring music and liturgical art in worship through an intergenerational, multi-sensory all-church retreat and monthly workshops.
To study and practice ways technology and movement can be integrated in worship while maintaining its historical identity and connecting with postmodern culture.
To encourage interaction with scripture and the preached word through journals, lectio divina, prayer, inductive Bible studies, and Asian art with particular attention to unity across ages and cultures in a traditional Japanese American congregation.
To design multi-sensory, interactive, communal worship experiences that bridge the church community with the diverse, emerging, post modern culture.
To train youth in a low income and refugee community in Bible study, worship leadership, and musical skills and to develop a youth band and gospel choir that will lead intergenerational worship services.
To study the theology of worship and incorporate the wisdom and practices of the Northern European, Latino, African American, Haitian, Korean, and Liberian cultures from the community into worship planning to empower the leadership and unite the congregation.
To create new resources for worship which reflect the diversity of the congregation, including the chronically mentally ill and immigrants from numerous countries, in order to unite the worshiping community.
To provide ongoing training for musicians, choirs, worship leaders, and the congregation through developing a bilingual liturgy, hymn book, and other printed resources as well as creating multicultural art and symbols for the multicultural worship environment.
To explore and nurture contextualized worship in an urban church with multi-racial and multi-class membership through consulting with urban and Southeast Asian churches, studying questions about worship and encouraging youth to learn traditional Southeast Asian instruments.
To develop liturgy and multicultural worship so as to portray the congregation’s unity in a diverse community by considering language, dance, media, visual art, music, attitude, understanding, practice, leadership, and congregational participation.
To explore how God is drawing peoples from all nations to become biblical, wholehearted worshipers through the study and development of indigenous expressions of music and the arts.
