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.
Rolanda L. Ward
To encourage social witness within public worship through a study of congregational prayer and corporate confession.
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 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.
Harold Dorrell Briscoe
To research the historical and sociopolitical significance of Negro spirituals in movements of liberation, and to demonstrate through workshops, concerts, and an immersive learning trip how these spirituals can enrich modern Christian worship practices.
To help churches and artists learn to collaborate with each other more effectively through an artist-in-residence program that will help worshipers connect more deeply with God, scripture, and one another through the arts.
Sarah Kathleen Johnson
To facilitate healing and ethical responses to public crises by studying the unintended consequences of ritual responses to mass shootings, the enduring legacy of colonialism, and climate disasters.
To increase ecological-biblical literacy in outdoor worship participants and their communities and to encourage lectionary-focused eco-preaching through nature-based outdoor scripture study.
To encourage faculty to explore their vocation and calling as an act of worship and to share their stories in worship, podcasts, and other contexts to help both faculty and students grow in their walks with God and identify God’s work in their vocational journeys.
To enlarge worshipers’ understanding of living a sacramental life to include praying through acts of earth care and environmental justice, through crafting creation-focused liturgies, hosting guest speakers, and encouraging environmentally ethical living.
To create a more welcoming, flexible, and inclusive worship space that promotes community-led worship practices through education about theologically sensitive, contextually appropriate, and aesthetically fitting church architecture.
To promote appreciation for the diversity of gifts in the congregation and empower worshipers to live out their faith within and beyond the walls of the church by introducing visual arts, liturgical dance, and a choral program within worship services.
