1855 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4402 USA
On the campus of Calvin University
© 2026 Calvin Institute of Christian Worship
As worship leaders, we sometimes feel as if we should only focus on spiritual needs, such as praying for deeper faith, stronger character, and evangelistic opportunities. But God cares about our whole lives, not just our souls. Dietrich Bonhoeffer points out that the psalms are full of prayers for health, peace, and daily needs. That’s not selfish. It’s honest. It’s recognizing that God is with us in the everyday.
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Think back to the last time you couldn’t help but praise something. Maybe it was a jaw-dropping catch in a baseball game, a teacher who made a tough topic click, or a sunset that stopped you in your tracks. You probably responded instinctively—with a cheer, a compliment, a text, a smile. Praise flows naturally when we encounter something good or beautiful.
Salvation is one of those words so common among Christians that it can sometimes become trivialized. Being “saved” can sometimes become a label of what social group we belong to rather than a testimony of God’s gracious and powerful rescue of our souls. Retaining the full significance of the word salvation requires remembering the gravity of the situation we are in—the danger from which God rescues us.
Aging is something we typically associate with older folks in our lives. But in reality, we all are aging every single day. I first started to note this in my own life the summer before I started college. I felt a deep sense of loss entangled in this phenomenon called “growing up”—the loss of having dinner with my family every night, the loss of knowing what was going on in my siblings’ lives 24/7, the loss of watching movies together in the evenings. Looking back, it wasn’t so much the losses themselves that were painful to me. It was the fear of losses I knew were coming.
How often do you find yourself marveling at the wonder of God’s creation—the extravagance of variety in the plant and animal world, the beauty of the changing seasons, the vastness of the universe compared to our little planet? Or instead, how often do you find yourself running from task to task, consumed by today’s concerns, trying to keep it all together, and never taking time to marvel at the meaning of it all?
This series of psalm-based devotions invites worship leaders, planners, and teams to slow down, listen deeply, and be formed by scripture’s most honest and expansive prayers. Created by staff from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and trusted collaborators, these reflections draw from the rich themes of the psalms—praise and creation, fear and doubt, suffering and salvation—to ground the work of worship in a living conversation with God. Together, they help teams not just plan services, but cultivate attentiveness, unity, and spiritual depth.
In the Old Testament, the temple was a place of worship where God’s presence dwelled. Three times each year, the Israelites would make pilgrimages to Jerusalem to worship at the temple, singing a group of psalms called the Songs of Ascent as they traveled in anticipation of gathering to worship God. They helped the pilgrims share excitement for the journey, pray for God’s protection, and celebrate the unity of their faith.
Suffering is something none of us can avoid. It can take many shapes: academic pressure, broken friendships, financial strain, family struggles, or even the quiet ache of feeling alone. In Psalm 13, David puts words to what many of us feel in seasons of suffering: “How long, Lord?” He is brutally honest about his pain, confusion, and sense of God’s silence.
Those with interest in classical music know that it is not a stretch to say that Nadia Boulanger single-handedly shaped the course of classical music during the twentieth century. She was a composer, organist, conductor, and pianist, but most of all, she was a teacher. Everyone studied with Nadia Boulanger: Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, George Walker, Philip Glass, you name it.
As inhabitants of the modern age, we are deeply marked by skewed ways of thinking that thwart our humanness, our involvement with the world, and our spirituality. This is a philosophical tune-up that directly challenges and dispels modernity’s implicit philosophy. My philosophical proposals in my 2023 book Doorway to Artistry target the creative process, but they positively affect and bring healing to all arenas of life and work and worship. I pose that we as human persons are meant to live out a joyous “yes” to the real, and our involvement with the real takes the form of intimate encounter and communion. My approach reflects especially on God’s creative act and God’s created things. It taps epiphany, the redemptive encounter, and the Eucharist as paradigms for our knowing, our artistry, and all our everyday involvement with the world, so it should make us better at our stewardly dominion and voicing creation’s praise in worship.
In this panel, Hispanic pastors share the learnings and experiences lived by their congregations after completing projects related to the development of their understanding and practices about worship. Together, they represent a variety of Hispanic denominations as well as of "dreams" they were able to realize (learning about the Creeds, bilingual worship, multigenerational worship, worship in non-traditional settings). Their congregations were part of the first cohort of Hispanic congregations receiving "worship grants" under a new initiative CICW launched in July of 2022.
How does one think about diversity as a Christian or as the church? How might working with and among—or even just thinking about—migrant neighbors contribute to our ecclesial identity? The language of catholicity allows us to imagine the unity of the church not in a monocultural way, but rather as a community inclusive of people of all languages and ethnicities. Migration and migrants today especially remind the church of its own catholic identity. How does the church's identity as a migrant church foster a healthy catholicity in the church's worship? This session will include the use of salsa music to invite participation in a more catholic way of life, asking what multicultural, cross cultural, and intercultural ways of being a church on the move might look like in worship.
Songs from the people of Korea can deeply enrich your liturgy whether you have Korean-speaking members in your congregation or not. This workshop will introduce a variety of bilingual Korean-English songs that have been newly translated in the past few years as well as strategies to lead them effectively in your own worshiping context.
