1855 Knollcrest Circle SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4402 USA

On the campus of Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary
© 2024 91ÁÔÆæ
CICW has awarded Vital 91ÁÔÆæ, 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.
Harold Dean Trulear
To explore and disseminate best practices for shaping and sustaining a Christian social justice witness through corporate worship.
Rolanda L. Ward
To encourage social witness within public worship through a study of congregational prayer and corporate confession.
Carolyn B. Helsel
To encourage appreciation among Christian worshipers for our Jewish neighbors and reduce anti-Semitism by creating videos and written resources aimed at equipping preachers to approach biblical references to Jewish people through a framework of gratitude for our shared religious heritage.
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.
Susan Bigelow Reynolds
To study public, lay-led Way of the Cross (Via Crucis) rituals that engage contemporary social injustices in light of the cross, exploring how communities on the margins of church and society use public ritual to practice theological agency.
Wonchul Shin
To provide Asian and Asian-American worshiping communities with rich Pan-Asian theological resources for their public worship practice as a form of public witness that will proclaim the dignity of the Asian and Asian-American community and transform the culture of anti-Asian violence and racism.
Demetrius K. Williams
To explore the cross of Christ in African American Christian experience as motivation for piety, political engagement, and social protest by researching spirituals, narratives, sermons, and other resources that highlight the importance of the cross of Christ for notions of freedom and the unity of humanity in the church's public witness.
Shively Smith
To identify the metaphors and images that shape the interpretation of Scripture within worshiping communities, and to assess the impact of these interpretive images on a community’s relationship to various “others” and socio-political realities.
Andrew Wymer and Kristen Daley Mosier
To engage the baptismal practices of diverse Christian communities in regions impacted by toxic water, and to construct a theoretical and practical vision of baptismal solidarity for the broader Church.
Lee Hardy
To study the connection between congregations' worship and mission activities, focusing on church-supported affordable housing in gentrifying urban neighborhoods.
Andrew Hofer, O.P.
To study seven early Christian preachers who model various aspects of "incarnational" preaching and produce a resource encouraging preachers to integrate public speech with all of life.
AnneMarie Mingo
To involve women of color in the development of models and resources for connecting worship and public social witness.
