1855 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4402 USA
On the campus of Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary
© 2024 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 lay leaders by hosting workshops that broaden understanding of what preaching can be in an intergenerational and hybrid worship context in order to expand leaders’ repertoire of meaningful ways of engaging with scripture to facilitate spiritual growth.
To help people rest and reflect more deeply in God by creating opportunities for communal contemplation of God’s love and presence in the world through engagement with nature and the creative arts.
To deepen our congregation's appreciation for the grand narrative of God’s saving work by studying eight major acts of God in the Bible and collectively creating artwork that depicts the Bible’s overarching story.
To deepen connections between worshipers and to encourage a practice of recognizing the sacred in all of life by centering corporate worship and home groups on practices of shared attention, communal creation, and joyful expression.
To foster spiritual and theological depth in worship leaders of all ages through educational opportunities and celebrating the gifts participants are developing.
To commission worshipers for the ministry of daily life through creating a testimony installation that bears witness to the congregation's ministry of work in the world and through offering spiritual training for vocational leaders.
To facilitate worship and learning opportunities centered around the sacraments of baptism and eucharist to help multicultural and multigenerational families in the local community become grounded in their faith.
To deepen the capacity of Asian American pastors for worship and congregational leadership in their cultural contexts by offering a nine-month learning cohort for pastors.
To support and diversify our ministry to those struggling with mental health by working with psychologists, theologians, ministers, therapists, worship leaders, and artists to create prayers and songs for the worship context that acknowledge and express experiences of psychological suffering.
To equip leaders to create a pilgrimage experience in their own context by together engaging the embodied experience of pilgrimage and developing worship resources for their communities out of that experience.
To enrich the theological understanding of worship in the United Holy Church of America and encourage African American worship leaders by hosting monthly virtual workshops and an in-person conference.
To gather, share, and celebrate personal testimonies and connect them to the gospel story to illustrate in gathered worship the ways participants worship in all of life.
