1855 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4402 USA
On the campus of Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary
© 2025 Calvin Institute of Christian Worship
College and seminary professors offer church observation guides for their students. You can use their insights to learn more when you visit other churches. This process can also help you understand how people experience liturgical practices in your own congregation.
Many worship leaders wear themselves out trying to make worship new, fresh, relevant and, above all, different than it was last year or even last week. Maybe they don’t need to change so much and so often.
A vesper service led by singers, band, organ, and strings, the Fuller Seminary Chapel worship leaders utilize traditional and original resources to guide worshipers through a prayerful liturgy of confession and forgiveness.
Join with singer-songwriter Sandra McCracken for contemplative songs and liturgical prayers, while making space within this worship service for both lament and joy.
Maybe you feel like a bad Christian when you catch yourself thinking about work or weekday concerns during corporate worship. But doing so can help you worship more deeply and faithfully.
Scripture models well for us how to speak about immigration in worship. Together, with Abraham, Jesus, and the early church, we can model radical hospitality, we can lament the pain of leaving and the pain of the journey, we can witness God's faithfulness to the refugees and migrants in the past, and together, united as the body of Christ, we can seek responses that reflect God's heart. Ultimately, we can look forward with hope, knowing that our "citizenship is in heaven."
With a new frontier of research on children's spirituality, research as well as experience is showing churches that creating a sacred space for children, where they can encounter the living God, is vital for their faith formation.
For the Life of the World is one of the most influential books ever written on the sacraments.
Lay training in both formative and expressive liturgy helps Catholic adults and youth live out their identity in the universal priesthood of all faithful believers. Protestants can learn from this.
The Archdiocese of Los Angeles launched a summer camp to train young Catholics to lead in local liturgical ministries. They discovered that finding gifted youth requires different approaches in different cultures.
It sounds counter-intuitive, especially today. But it turns out that helping children learn to get quiet in their own ways is huge for helping them encounter God.
So many worship conversations go awry because people and congregations don’t know how to talk about what they do or value in worship. Both Christian and non-Christian scholars can help.
