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.
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.
To help church leaders learn how to develop worship, discipleship, and missional practices that connect with congregants’ Monday-through-Saturday lives through skill mapping, a cohort program, and a three-day intensive.
To equip a new generation of worship leaders with musical skills and vocal techniques to foster the creation of worship experiences that connect with and reach out to people from the surrounding community.
To develop more contextualized public worship services through equipping musicians and lay preachers with resources and skills shaped by the experience of the immigrant church.
To engage youth and young adults by remembering and retelling stories of the Black church through development of a lectionary, worship guide, and Sunday School curriculum emphasizing the seven principles of Kwanzaa.
To create a worship team and provide the group with initial formative training on musical skills and biblical-theological foundations.
To create a youth choir and train choir members and worship leaders on vocal techniques.
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.
To create and implement a model of bilingual worship that will foster church unity among worshipers from different generations.
To develop a new generation of church musicians and worship leaders who, in addition to typical roles, could acquire skills required to compose new congregational songs and to produce new worship music.
To center the sacraments in worship by collaboratively creating artwork for worship that contextualizes images of bread, wine, and water for each season of the church year.
To promote a community that moves from inclusion to belonging for congregants with intellectual disabilities and their families by reducing barriers to full participation and forming the congregation to actively welcome everyone made in God’s image.
