1855 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4402 USA
On the campus of Calvin University
© 2026 Calvin Institute of Christian Worship
Does your church want to be relevant to postmodern people? If so, how much should your worshiping community connect or disconnect with memory? A feature story exploring Postmodernism and Community Memory.
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Is your church commissioning liturgical art, creating art for cross cultural worship, or designing a new building? A feature story on how to involve more people from your congregation in planning and creating art for worship.
Learn how church dynamics shift as congregations change size. A feature story exploring small churches, like All Nations Christian Reformed Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that are making the most of their size.
Though you might associate "heal" with "cure," healing in worship is broader. Whether through prayer, hospitality, communion, or laying on hands, it helps people become more whole.
This workshop offered tools and ideas for creating rich, balanced language in worship. Participants explored principles for and discuss examples of welcoming traditional language gracefully; composing or improvising elements in fresh language; using songs and prayers to worship with the global church; and finding a place for lament. The session was based on the book Worship Words.
There continues to be a growing interest in church visual art galleries, exhibitions, and educational opportunities related to art within our churches.
Certainly advances in presentation technology provide opportunities to do new things in worship. But they can also enhance our ability to do the ancient things of worship. This session discusses integrating presentation technologies both into the worship space and the worship service.
This session explored an ecology of practices designed to deepen youths' participation in the Lord's Supper/Eucharist and to form them to interpret and act in the world eucharistically. Participants learned creative pedagogies for teaching youth about the Eucharist; how youth may be engaged in ministry at the Table; the importance of creating a broad ecology of liturgical and extra-liturgical Eucharistic practices through which youth may be formed; and the means to invite youths? personal and theological reflections on Eucharistic life.
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.
In this presentation, several contributors to the recent book The Church of All Ages: Generations Worshiping Together explored the issues involved, highlighted some of the findings, and stimulated further reflection.
How do Christ's life, death, and resurrection save us? What poetic imagination do we use to grasp his saving work?
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.
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.
