1855 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4402 USA
On the campus of Calvin University
© 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.
Jennifer Schroeder
To equip ministry leaders and parents with tools to create sustainable, inclusive worship practices that value children’s voices in singing, praying, preaching, scripture reading, and communion by exploring their participation with members of ministry leadership teams, both in and outside of children’s ministry.
Brad East
To help Christians, especially evangelical Protestants, develop a renewed appreciation for and love of baptism by exploring how it can be integrated into a full-orbed vision of the Christian life and the church’s public worship.
Neal A. Lester
To document how Black American spiritual worship practices support healing, justice, and community care through a community-partnered ethnographic research and teaching project.
Amy Davis Abdallah
To explore how Christians think about, experience, and mark death, both physical and metaphorical, in order to help Christians acknowledge death more meaningfully in their personal, small-group, and corporate worship.
Jennifer Lord
To renew Protestant worshiping communities in keeping the church year, through study of and teaching about how an Orthodox parish understands and is spiritually grounded in the church year.
Clair Mesick
To study New Testament texts on despair, suicide, and mental disorder (“madness”) in their historical and cultural contexts and to consult with experts in pastoral care and psychology to consider implications for the contemporary church context and to provide resources for preaching on these topics that do not demonize mental illness.
Forrest Wakeman
To encourage deeper appreciation of God’s redemptive pursuit of God’s people through preparing for (including learning the music and studying the text) a premier performance of a large-scale choral and orchestral work that sets Old Testament texts by the biblical prophets as a dialogue between God and God’s people.
Debra Rienstra
To offer theological reflection and pathways of response about climate change to Christian communities in their worship, preaching, sacraments, Sabbath-keeping, faith formation, and community action.
Edward Foley
To empower preachers to effectively engage with science in their sermons and homilies through a training program and the creation of digital resources.
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.
Kent Burreson
To help worshiping communities respond thoughtfully to contemporary Christian worship by bringing the study of Martin Luther's writings on worship and the sacraments into dialogue with modern cultural engagement with worship.
Peter Jurchen
To strengthen vocational discipleship by researching, designing, and implementing a theologically grounded faculty and staff faith formation framework that aligns professional development with spiritual and liturgical rhythms.
