1855 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4402 USA
On the campus of Calvin University
© 2025 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 and ordained preachers with practical tools and theological understanding to empower them to be innovative, inclusive, creative, confident, and spiritually attuned worship leaders and pastors.
Erin Raffety
To equip worshiping communities to recognize and lift up leaders with disabilities in church contexts by working with Christian leaders to model inclusive leadership practices.
To launch an intergenerational worship formation project pairing older mentors and students to learn and model prayer, worship, and scripture reading to foster deeper and lasting spiritual disciplines and a sustainable culture of vibrant faith expression.
To engage the spiritual disciplines in worship in order to promote spiritual flourishing for the seminary community as well as nearby community churches.
To ground congregants in faith rituals that tie the mind and body together by offering workshops, structured according to the order of worship, that highlight particular practices and experiences for use in worship.
To promote unity in the global church and the integration of worship with daily discipleship by equipping worship leaders and musicians with resources for communion that invite congregations into worship that remembers Christ’s sacrifice, deepens worshipers’ participation, and extends hospitality and peace beyond the sanctuary.
To support the worship of people with dementia and varied disabilities by collaborating with neighboring churches to host workshops that encourage and develop accessible, sensory-friendly worship practices.
Laura Benjamins
To evaluate the musical curriculum of local churches and offer practical insights for engaging congregants in musical theological formation.
To encourage vulnerability and authentic self- and cultural expression in worship by creating space to share new songs, artwork, and testimonies in worship.
To foster robust and nuanced dialogue inside and outside the church, to cultivate generous and durable habits of patience and mercy, and to help recover concern for neighbors through artist commissions, group study, writing, conversation, hospitality, and friendships related to the topic of shalom.
To transform physical worship spaces through visual arts that will fully reflect the beauty, dignity, and accessibility of God’s kingdom by means of collaborative design and shared creation.
To expand a collaborative preaching model that transforms the traditional sermon into a shared act of interpretation through a combination of coaching, consulting, research, peer learning, and Spanish-language accessibility.
