Apply for the Vital 91ÁÔÆæ, Vital Preaching Grants Program to support and enhance Christian worship practices. We encourage proposals on universal design, cultural engagement, preaching, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and more. Two grant streams are available.
Join us for our Symposium on 91ÁÔÆæ and Summer Seminars. Engage in inspiring sessions, workshops, and intensive seminars to deepen your understanding and practice of Christian worship.
The office of Black Church Studies at Duke Divinity School is sponsoring a week-long seminar exploring the autobiographical writings of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Howard Thurman, Ida B. Wells, and other Black autobiographers and memoirists who used their life stories as weapons in the quest for freedom and humanization.
The 91ÁÔÆæ at Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary advances Christian worship through resources, events, and grants. Since 1997, we have partnered with congregations and organizations to fulfill our mission.
Gerardo Marti on Emerging Churches and Religious Individualism
Published on
August 8, 2013
Video length
3 mins
Gerardo Marti, professor of sociology at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, is fascinated by diversity and innovation as aspects of how the world is changing and how that affects churches today.
, professor of sociology at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, is fascinated by diversity and innovation as aspects of how the world is changing and how that affects churches today.
His first three explored these themes in multicultural congregations. Marti’s fourth book explores what’s been called the emerging church or emergent Christianity. He co-authored The Deconstructed Church: The Religious Identity and Negotiated Practices of Emerging Christianity with U.K. sociologist . Their book is due out from Oxford University Press in 2014.
In June 2013, Gerardo Marti gave an extended interview while he was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a Calvin College Summer Seminar, .
In this edited excerpt, he describes distinctive worship practices in emerging churches. One distinctive is openness, and The Deconstructed Church has an entire chapter on ‘faith as conversation.’
In this edited excerpt, Marti talks about diversity within the emerging church movement.
In this edited excerpt, he talks about how emerging churches help people remain within Christianity, rather than leave it altogether.
Learn more about Gerardo Marti’s book . He presents extensive research showing that there is no single style of worship or music that determines the likelihood of achieving a multiracial church.
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Playing Well with Others: Musical Collaboration in the 91ÁÔÆæ Service
Musical collaboration in worship can be rewarding: it can build relationships, enrich the musical life of a congregation, and add more colors, timbres, and textures. 
Public 91ÁÔÆæ, Health Care, and Illness in Early Christianity
Explore how Christians in the earliest centuries of Christianity preached and prayed about illness, pain, and health care and shaped practices of baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and funerals in response to illness and injury, including during pandemics—all so that we can learn from their pastoral, theological, and practical instincts as we seek to be faithful witnesses to Christ in our own globally diverse contexts. ​
Morning Prayer with Nate Glasper and the 7:9 Project
Nate Glasper and the 7:9 Project, a multicultural group of Calvin University students, lead a time of morning song and prayer firmly grounded in scripture. Inspired by the vision of Revelation 7:9, this gathering reflects the beauty of “every nation, tribe, people, and language standing before the throne and before the Lamb.â€
