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
CICW has awarded Vital Worship, Vital Preaching Grants for over 20 years to teacher-scholars and worshiping communities in 45+ states and provinces and across 40+ denominations and traditions—including Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, non-denominational, and other Protestant communities.
While worship styles and practices vary greatly across these traditions, the grant projects typically explore at least one of CICW’s ten core convictions related to worship. Explore the hundreds of projects we’ve funded across both streams of the program.
To train youth in a low income and refugee community in Bible study, worship leadership, and musical skills and to develop a youth band and gospel choir that will lead intergenerational worship services.
To study the theology of worship and incorporate the wisdom and practices of the Northern European, Latino, African American, Haitian, Korean, and Liberian cultures from the community into worship planning to empower the leadership and unite the congregation.
To create new resources for worship which reflect the diversity of the congregation, including the chronically mentally ill and immigrants from numerous countries, in order to unite the worshiping community.
To provide ongoing training for musicians, choirs, worship leaders, and the congregation through developing a bilingual liturgy, hymn book, and other printed resources as well as creating multicultural art and symbols for the multicultural worship environment.
To explore and nurture contextualized worship in an urban church with multi-racial and multi-class membership through consulting with urban and Southeast Asian churches, studying questions about worship and encouraging youth to learn traditional Southeast Asian instruments.
To develop liturgy and multicultural worship so as to portray the congregation’s unity in a diverse community by considering language, dance, media, visual art, music, attitude, understanding, practice, leadership, and congregational participation.
To explore how God is drawing peoples from all nations to become biblical, wholehearted worshipers through the study and development of indigenous expressions of music and the arts.
To encourage and enable Native Americans to worship God in an authentic indigenous way through a process that will include learning and offering a workshop to other churches and the community.
To gather representatives from Northeastern Asian Indian, Native American and Asian American worshipping communities to assist each in lifting up its own “voice” in Christian worship, and to develop and disseminate the resulting worship resources through a conference.
To gather Latino worship leaders to share the wealth of worship materials with deep roots in Hispanic culture and traditions that have been created in recent years, to promote critical theological reflection on the value and use of these materials, and to encourage their continuing creation.
To seek new models of worship which provide a theological framework of multicultural worship in an urban context by offering Multicultural Worship Festivals and a worship conference.
To create an indigenous worship service which integrates the best of the unique culture of their community with the strength of the Lutheran tradition, and to develop a workbook that will guide a congregation in developing worship practices that are responsive to their own particular context.
