They complete the core requirements for adult learners and major in Ministry Leadership. Each year 20 students from prisons around Michigan are selected and enrolled in the five year program, through which they earn a Calvin University Bachelor’s Degree. The mission of the Calvin Prison Initiative (CPI) is to provide a Christian liberal arts education to inmates in the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC). The Meeter Center provides scholarships and short-term research fellowships to faculty, pastors, graduate students and high school seniors organizes conferences, workshops, and lectures hosts summer seminars and institutes funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities provides tours and class sessions for college and middle and high school students on printing and the Reformation and hosts Reformation-related events for the Friends of the Meeter Center and the local community throughout the year. The Meeter Center seeks to foster and deepen theological and historical discovery, networking locally, nationally, and internationally with individuals and centers focused on Reformation studies, and helping students, faculty, scholars, and community members explore, assess, and connect the world of John Calvin and the Reformation to the current day.
Established in 1982, the Center makes scholarly research on Calvinism available to scholars and the wider community, and its extensive collection of books, rare books, and articles attract researchers from all over the world. Henry Meeter Center, jointly supported by Calvin Theological Seminary and Calvin University, houses one of the world’s largest collections of materials on John Calvin, Calvinism, the Reformation and early modern studies. In everything the Center does, the goal is the same: to provide new insights, fresh perspectives, relevant illustrations, and textual insights that will spark ideas and jumpstart creativity in preachers who each week have the holy but also daunting privilege of preaching God’s Word to God’s people. The Center sponsors and co-sponsors conferences and seminars the dates and application information are posted regularly on the CEP website. The website features many standing resources including audio sermons, recommended commentaries for all books of the Bible, quotes from literature to use in sermon preparation, illustration ideas from movies, and more. We also post each week a sermon starter article in Spanish and these are archived. These articles are all archived so that even preachers who do not regularly follow the Lectionary can search for-and likely find-sermon ideas on most any biblical text. Each week four new sermon starter idea articles are posted to correspond to the four Revised Common Lectionary texts assigned for the next Sunday. The Center for Excellence in Preaching resources busy pastors with the goal of helping them write fresh, vibrant sermons.