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.
Ruth Elaine Labeth
To study the composition of scripture-based songs in Creole churches in Guadeloupe to help worship leaders and pastors envision culturally contextualized worship.
Amy Whisenand
To explore the relationship between singing and reconciliation in the church through hosting workshops for scriptural study, practice sharing, and collaboration.
Sunggu A. Yang
To explore multidimensional preaching practices that meet listeners’ need to see, taste, feel, and even touch the compelling Word of the Triune God, resulting in a handbook to help preachers become more oriented to engaging contemporary listeners.
Sarah Travis
To enhance the worship and self-identity of very small congregations through a theology of playfulness, by networking with leaders of small congregations, and writing a resource designed to enhance worship in small churches.
Steven Felix-Jager
To support church practitioners in their aesthetic, pastoral, and theological deliberations about congregational worship music by addressing multiple modes of discernment, with the goal of leading to deeper, more empathetic understanding of worship traditions.
Layla A. Karst
To explore the pastoral and theological implications of online pandemic Liturgies of the Word, focusing especially on the translation of ritual practices between off-line and online worship and on emerging understandings of ecclesial leadership and authority.
Daria Spezzano
To draw on the teachings of Thomas Aquinas to provide tools for disaffiliated Catholic college students to engage the goodness, truth, and beauty of God in worship as a response to their search for meaning.
Vernon Whaley
To strengthen the theological training and spiritual formation of worship leaders through the development of foundational courses for a worship leadership certificate program.
Alexander Jun
To build on previous research in chapel programs at Christian colleges and universities by examining the role of chapel leaders in shaping chapel content and culture in order to demonstrate how chapel services shape the culture for diverse attendees.
James K.A. Smith
To prepare an essay that explores how contemporary visual and literary art fosters contemplative habits, an inviting 'preamble' to spiritual contemplation involved in both personal and communal liturgical practices.
Erin Raffety
To conduct interviews with persons living with chronic illness and Long COVID, and to analyze the convergence of cultural, theological, and disability-related perspectives among such persons in order to increase their full, conscious, active participation in worship.
Christopher Grundy
To foster imagination about worship spaces that can help to draw people into a deeper relationship with their natural environment, experience that environment as sacred and sacramental, form them spiritually as agents of ecological justice and recovery, and help them to process and respond faithfully to increasing ecological disasters.
