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Sociologist Jonathan Calvillo researches how hip-hop gives Christians in and beyond the church agency to deal with real-life issues and shape their faith and spirituality.
Sociologist Jonathan Calvillo grew up in Latinx Pentecostal churches where church leaders made room for young Christians to express themselves through hip-hop. His life experiences and research explore what churches can learn from hip-hop creatives.
A Bethel University grant project blessed Catholics and Protestants in the greater South Bend area of Northern Indiana. It used Richard Foster’s six streams of Christian tradition to create Via Crucis, an experience of the stations of the cross with visual art, music, poetry, and more.
Want to help your community spend more time with the psalms? With so many resources to choose from, how do you find the right ones for your context? The team at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship (CICW) is here to help. We keep this page updated with our top recommendations.
Scholar Kai Ton Chau makes the case that churches should support worship leaders by giving them opportunities to learn and grow in their jobs.
A sacred music grant project helped Catholic parishioners from many ethnicities—Anglo, Eritrean, Filipino, Latino, Nigerian, Vietnamese, and more—experience the awe and mystery of faith and God.
Intra-dynamic preaching is a new mode of preaching that promises to immerse people in God’s living word. It uses the form and language of specific art types to design sermons that resonate in people’s heads, hearts, imaginations, and bodies. Sunggu A. Yang edited a practical handbook to help preachers encounter God in scripture and aesthetically recreate that experience for listeners.
You’re probably familiar with expository and narrative sermons. Homiletics professor and author Sunggu A. Yang offers another preaching method: intra-dynamic preaching. He explains how “infusing the sacred art of preaching with the vibrant energy of the arts” can lead worshipers to unexpected moments in which God encounters and changes them.
In popular culture, the ancient Council of Nicaea is sometimes seen as a conspiracy to consolidate power. Some Baptist, evangelical, and nondenominational churches are resistant to creeds, and Christians who recite the Nicene Creed weekly or at least regularly in Catholic, Orthodox, and many Protestant traditions don’t appreciate the depth of the theology in what they are saying. Still, many theologians and historians hope that celebrating the 1,700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed in 2025 can unify global Christians.
Joining a racial justice pilgrimage in the American South helped a Canadian pastor see parallels to the experiences of Indigenous and settler peoples in his congregation. These insights are helping his church become more appreciative of God’s incarnation in Indigenous people.
The Black church has deep experience of suffering and being denied God-given and legal rights. As turbulent times affect more people, Jemar Tisby’s book The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance describes how Black Christians have kept the faith.
You don’t have to be Black or attend a predominantly Black church to celebrate Juneteenth with appreciation and respect. Many resources are available for your congregation to cosponsor or plan a God-honoring Juneteenth event or worship service.
