1855 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4402 USA
On the campus of Calvin University
© 2026 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 equip worshipers to lead and practice prayer in worship in order to deepen their communication with God and to root all other aspects of ministry in a relationship with God.
To promote intergenerational unity and develop prayer practices welcoming all generations and cultures by recovering contemplative traditions of the African Desert Fathers and Mothers through study, retreat, workshops, and worship experimentation.
To invite more unscripted, playful participation in congregational life and in worship by learning techniques of improvisational storytelling in order to expand worshipers’ ability to embody faith in worship and in everyday life.
To cultivate worship that is healing, embodied, and accessible for people navigating church hurt, spiritual curiosity, and evolving faith by developing worship practices that engage the whole person—body, mind, and spirit—and connect worship with everyday life through a year-long process of shared practices, theological reflection, and communal discernment.
To rediscover our own story within God’s story and to grow in gratitute, lament, and hope by learning about our pan-Baptist heritage and developing worship practices that connect the great cloud of witnesses with the church’s present and future.
To cultivate spiritual growth and sustained active participation in worship by equipping leaders and developing participatory practices that engage both in-person and online worshipers.
To foster intellectually engaging, aesthetically vibrant, and spiritually formative worship for a Christian college community by designing worship services that are shaped by a multidisciplinary, liberal arts approach to liturgy.
To foster a deeper understanding of and practice of prayer within the congregation by training leaders and developing new prayer practices for personal and communal worship that are rooted in consistent, transformational, mission-centered prayer.
To form communities whose prayers, lament, and sending are shaped by faithful attention to God’s world by commissioning pastoral and lay leadership from two congregations to participate in the Christian Climate Observers Program and to receive those experiences back into the worshiping life of their churches.
To provide spiritual formation to online and in-person congregations through posting teachings on prayer, sabbath, generosity, service, and solitude in the church’s app.
To encourage the congregation’s worship formation by training worshipers to participate in preaching, intercessory prayer, and music.
Anna Mercedes
To build the capacity of worshiping communities to be formed as peacemakers and to move through conflict transformatively through the development of restorative justice practices for use in worship.
