John Witvliet

Biography

Dr. John D. Witvliet serves as senior scholar and program advisor for missional initiatives and professor of theology, worship and the arts at Belmont University. He nurtures engagement around Belmont’s ecumenical, Christ-centered mission across the university’s 12 colleges, leads the team that implements campuswide spiritual life programming, serves as theologian-in-residence for the Belmont Formation Collaborative and facilitates plans related to worship and the study of worship on campus.

During the 2025-26 academic year, he is leading several formational learning groups on character education, liturgical formation, receptive ecumenism and the virtue of hope for Belmont students, staff and faculty. He also serves on several university-wide planning teams, visits congregations throughout the Nashville area and is contributing editor of Comment magazine.

Before joining the Belmont faculty in June 2025, Witvliet served for 28 years as the founding director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and professor at Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary, where he continues to serve as senior advisor. At the institute, he led teams that published works on fourth-, sixteenth- and twentieth-century liturgical history; edited multicultural collections of congregational song and choral music; organized Calvin University’s annual Symposium on Worship; collaborated on seminars hosted in Nepal, Mexico City, Northern Ireland and Hong Kong; organized travel seminars in Northern Ireland and the Southern United States; administered a small grants program that awarded grants to more than 1,300 worshiping communities and teacher-scholars from Orthodox, Roman Catholic, mainline, evangelical, Pentecostal and nondenominational church traditions; shaped a learning collaborative among the 142 grantees in the Lilly Endowment’s Compelling Preaching Initiative; and curated comprehensive web resource libraries.

His areas of expertise and publications include Trinitarian theology of worship and the sacraments, the Psalms, intergenerational faith formation and worship-related arts, especially congregational music for worship and choral music. Since 2020, he has co-led exploratory courses on cultural intelligence, African American religious autobiography and global Christianity.