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.
Barry Whatley
To explore the vital role of poetic imagination and creative expression of poetry in enhancing spiritual formation and worship in the local church.
Jennifer Allen Craft
To help Christians recognize and confess how sin distorts our relationship to place and hinders our ability to love our neighbors, and to help the church develop artistic practices of placemaking that advance the kingdom of God by promoting justice, beauty, and connection.
To explore a theology of the body to provide a foundation for leadership and laity to engage theologically and practically around issues of mental health, race, gender, and ability.
To support Christian peacemakers by developing regular opportunities for virtual corporate worship and by sharing together in the joys and griefs of peacemaking through the practices of prayer and praise, celebration and lament.
To develop contemporary and inclusive worship practices that create a richer public worship experience for congregants of all ages and generations.
To train pastoral and lay leaders in biblical theological knowledge and practical worship skills to help them respond more effectively to the new realities and needs of the congregation.
To create musical settings with local rhythms for the liturgical calendar to provide a more contextualized worship experience attuned to the Puerto Rican culture and folklore.
Hyun Woo Kim
To empower Asian American churches to embrace their cultural heritage, reconcile intergenerational differences, and re-envision worship in ways that reflect their congregants’ diverse identities and experiences by integrating Asian cultural elements into Western hymnody and worship frameworks.
To promote unity within diversity in Christian worship by providing safe and hospitable spaces for multilingual songwriting processes among diverse groups, leading to the incorporation of multilingual songs into existing liturgies.
Robert Dean
To resituate homiletics within a Christological and robustly trinitarian framework by examining prominent assumptions governing preaching today, in order to revitalize North American preaching for the sake of the formation of worshiping communities.
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.”
To strengthen those who lead worship by deepening their unity with one another while cultivating skills in planning and leading worship that integrates cultural expressions with the narrative of God’s story.
