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.
École de Théologie Évangélique du Québec
Ruth Elaine Labeth
Ruth Elaine Labeth
To study the composition of scripture-based songs in Creole churches in Guadeloupe to help worship leaders and pastors envision culturally contextualized worship.
Fresno Pacific University
Amy Whisenand
Amy Whisenand
To explore the relationship between singing and reconciliation in the church through hosting workshops for scriptural study, practice sharing, and collaboration.
George Fox University
Sunggu A. Yang
Sunggu A. Yang
To explore multidimensional preaching practices that meet listeners’ need to see, taste, feel, and even touch the compelling Word of the Triune God, resulting in a handbook to help preachers become more oriented to engaging contemporary listeners.
Knox College
Sarah Travis
Sarah Travis
To enhance the worship and self-identity of very small congregations through a theology of playfulness, by networking with leaders of small congregations, and writing a resource designed to enhance worship in small churches.
Life Pacific University
Steven Felix-Jager
Steven Felix-Jager
To support church practitioners in their aesthetic, pastoral, and theological deliberations about congregational worship music by addressing multiple modes of discernment, with the goal of leading to deeper, more empathetic understanding of worship traditions.
Loyola Marymount University
Layla A. Karst
Layla A. Karst
To explore the pastoral and theological implications of online pandemic Liturgies of the Word, focusing especially on the translation of ritual practices between off-line and online worship and on emerging understandings of ecclesial leadership and authority.
Providence College
Daria Spezzano
Daria Spezzano
To draw on the teachings of Thomas Aquinas to provide tools for disaffiliated Catholic college students to engage the goodness, truth, and beauty of God in worship as a response to their search for meaning.
Trevecca Nazarene University
Vernon Whaley
Vernon Whaley
To strengthen the theological training and spiritual formation of worship leaders through the development of foundational courses for a worship leadership certificate program.
Azusa Pacific University
Alexander Jun
Alexander Jun
To build on previous research in chapel programs at Christian colleges and universities by examining the role of chapel leaders in shaping chapel content and culture in order to demonstrate how chapel services shape the culture for diverse attendees.
Calvin University
James K.A. Smith
James K.A. Smith
To prepare an essay that explores how contemporary visual and literary art fosters contemplative habits, an inviting 'preamble' to spiritual contemplation involved in both personal and communal liturgical practices.
Center of Theological Inquiry
Erin Raffety
Erin Raffety
To conduct interviews with persons living with chronic illness and Long COVID, and to analyze the convergence of cultural, theological, and disability-related perspectives among such persons in order to increase their full, conscious, active participation in worship.
Eden Theological Seminary
Christopher Grundy
Christopher Grundy
To foster imagination about worship spaces that can help to draw people into a deeper relationship with their natural environment, experience that environment as sacred and sacramental, form them spiritually as agents of ecological justice and recovery, and help them to process and respond faithfully to increasing ecological disasters.