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
While funerals have often been seen as family affairs or private activities, the fact is that death impacts entire communities: both the faith community and the community at large.
This workshop explored the biblical teaching on the central role that the Holy Spirit plays in worship. Dependence and freedom, order and spontaneity, reverent silence and joyful noise will be some of the paradoxes to explore in the framework of Scripture. Our purpose is to inform some of our present-day worship practices and enrich, challenge, and transform them for the glory of the Lord we worship.
Rather than attempting unity in our services through a commonality of style or form, how much richer and spiritually nourishing to use a biblical or theological theme as a unifying principle. This approach allows for the use of a rich variety of forms and styles, and gives time to focus on and respond to an aspect of God and his truth in a way that is edifying and serves a catechetical function over the long run.
There continues to be a growing interest in church visual art galleries, exhibitions, and educational opportunities related to art within our churches.
This session will begin with a brief introduction to anthropological categories for talking about worship--liturgical time, space, environment, action, persons, music, language, etc. Participants will then engage in small group conversations about worship, using a process devised especially for facilitating conversations in congregations.
Whether pre-written, extemporaneous, or a combination, the prayer offered in worship on Sunday morning is probably the longest single prayer most people hear all week. As pastors and worship leaders, our public prayers reveal much about our habits of mind even as those prayers have a shaping influence on how the congregation prays all week. This workshop looked at the place of prayer in public worship and will offer practical suggestions for offering prayers that are theologically imaginative and pastorally sensitive.
Should Christian worship explicitly call our attention to and direct us toward the world and its need, to social action? Or does such worship in fact turn us away from the triune God, the proper focus of our worship? This workshop will explore some ways Abraham Kuyper and Jonathan Edwards?both theologians of beauty and glory, and both very socially engaged?might point us in the right direction.
This session reviewed several prayer texts from the third to the fifth century, and then probed the very practical ways they might challenge us to pray more deeply in worship today.
This workshop was given for those who want a deeper understanding of racial dynamics in today?s churches. Stories and examples from real congregations showed how race within churches is becoming complicated?and creatively reconstructed?through the post-1965 waves of immigration. Most important, we show how various good-intentioned priorities and programs work --and often don?t work-- in racially diverse churches.
This workshop audio will help participants begin to explore the possibilities and homiletical impact of engaging in an ongoing, vigorous program of reading for preaching.
In what unique ways can corporate worship fuel, inspire, and respond to the academic calling of the student and teacher in higher education?
In an update from their Symposium session in 2007, five Calvin College social scientists describe what they've learned through in-depth analysis of congregational and worship life.
