1855 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4402 USA
On the campus of Calvin University
© 2026 Calvin Institute of Christian Worship
Musical collaboration in worship can be rewarding: it can build relationships, enrich the musical life of a congregation, and add more colors, timbres, and textures.
Often the task of preaching falls on the senior pastor or a few gifted speakers. However, congregations need diverse diets and voices to be nourished and equipped by the preaching of God’s word.
Nate Glasper and the 7:9 Project, a multicultural group of Calvin University students, lead a time of morning song and prayer firmly grounded in scripture. Inspired by the vision of Revelation 7:9, this gathering reflects the beauty of “every nation, tribe, people, and language standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”
This vesper service offers a journey through the psalms in a jazz style. Music is adapted from the album Connexion: A Jazz Psalter, produced by Wally Brath. Brath (piano), Nikki Lerner (voice), Greg Tardy, (saxophone, clarinet), and a Calvin University chamber orchestra lead the congregation through God’s story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration, exploring the full emotional depth of the psalms. The jazz-inspired soundtrack offers rich musical expression that complements the divine poetry.
Explore how Christians in the earliest centuries of Christianity preached and prayed about illness, pain, and health care and shaped practices of baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and funerals in response to illness and injury, including during pandemics—all so that we can learn from their pastoral, theological, and practical instincts as we seek to be faithful witnesses to Christ in our own globally diverse contexts.
How did early Christians understand and practice wealth in relation to worship/service and care of the poor?
Mark 4:34 claims Jesus never said anything to the crowds without using parables.
Raymond Wise leads this time of song, prayer, and reflection.
Many consider the author of Hebrews the most adept storyteller in the New Testament due to the epistle’s comprehensiveness and rhetorical finesse.
Listen to and learn from scholars from diverse backgrounds and cultural experiences who provided exegetical expertise and unique interpretive lenses to The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary (IVP Academic, 2024).
Jared Ortiz, professor at Hope College, Holland, Michigan, describes the Nicene Creed as a dramatic and powerful statement where every word is like a declaration of war, saying yes to the truth and no to many falsehoods.
Jane Williams, professor of theology at St. Mellitus College in London, England, sees the Nicene Creed, crafted 1700 years ago, as an extraordinary creative and exciting description of who God is and therefore what we trust in as Christians in God's world.
