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.
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.
To deepen the practice, enrich, and connect the worship-discipleship program and the community outreach program in the context of the semi-rural Hispanic immigrant population.
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.
To engage the beauty of art in worship in order to awaken our understanding and imagination of what it means to care for God’s created world.
To provide educational resources and practical exercises to facilitate the contextualization of a liturgy marked by biblical and theological content and focused on developing healthy spirituality and human relationships.
To empower the congregation and local community in the practice of biblical hospitality in order to reshape the worship experience to be more hospitable by engaging in outdoor worship and community meals.
To create sacred space by experimenting with seating arrangement, various forms of artwork, and sensory experiences in innovative and interactive ways, while being responsive to the needs of ministry during the pandemic.
To educate the congregation on a holistic understanding of worship and its intersection with all church ministries and to use drama in public worship and evangelism.
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.
Khalia J. Williams
To explore the theological significance of liturgical dance in Christian worship and to discover and analyze the multiple ways that dance shapes spirituality in worship communities and in individuals.
Susan Bigelow Reynolds
To study public, lay-led Way of the Cross (Via Crucis) rituals that engage contemporary social injustices in light of the cross, exploring how communities on the margins of church and society use public ritual to practice theological agency.
To invite worshipers into reflection on traditions of liturgical art that facilitates engagement with wonder and the beauty of God, culminating in the collaborative creation of paraments for the worship space.
