Forward Today: Good news about the Good News!

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Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash

Dear friends in Christ,

You may have seen the news. Forward Movement has received a $4 million grant from the J. C. Flowers Foundation to fund transformational discipleship resources for the Episcopal Church.

The centerpiece of the four-year project will be a new video-based course to help new-ish Christians go deeper as disciples of Jesus Christ. This would be for someone who took an Alpha course, or perhaps Forward Movement’s Transforming Questions, or maybe just came to church for a while and has decided to get serious about practicing their faith. We’ll also be creating some smaller courses on topics such as prayer and scripture.

Forward Movement’s data from the RenewalWorks program suggests that the Episcopal Church is pretty good at welcoming new members, but we often don’t do a very good job of encouraging spiritual growth. And because people who are less spiritually mature may struggle to share their faith with others, we don’t invite people to join us. So the intention of this grant-funded work is to make committed disciples who naturally reach out to make more disciples. We think we can make a difference in the Episcopal Church, and through our Christian faith, to have a positive impact on the world around us.

Please stay tuned for more details. For now, my first task is to start building the team. If you or someone you know might like to join this work, please check out our listing of open positions. We are growing rapidly to meet the needs of today’s church.

All of this is good news, because we’ll be able to help our church experience and share the Good News of the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

P.S. If you have been a donor to Forward Movement, thank you! Though we have received a large gift, your gifts matter. Our grant will pay for new work. Ongoing donor gifts fund free materials for prisons and hospitals, apps, podcasts and online resource. Every gift, whether it’s $25, $250, or $250,000 helps us change the world one life at a time.

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Forward Movement is growing. Come join the team!

A few days ago, we shared that we now have four openings for staff to join the Forward Movement team. Here is the listing of those open positions:

 

You may have seen the big news announcing that Forward Movement is receiving a $4 million grant from the J. C. Flowers Foundation to create transformational discipleship resources for the Episcopal Church. Eventually, we will be hiring a team of seven people to do that work. We have immediate openings for two staff positions to kick off the project:

 

If you feel that you may be the right person for any of these openings, please send us your materials soon. And kindly share these openings with others in your network. We want to add to our already-dynamic team to offer high-quality materials that can change lives, change the church, and change the world.

Forward Movement receives major grant for discipleship initiatives

March 24, 2025 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Forward Movement receives major grant for discipleship initiatives

J. C. Flowers Foundation awards $4 million to fund transformational work

Cincinnati, Ohio – Forward Movement is thrilled to announce it has been awarded a $4 million grant from the J. C. Flowers Foundation to fund the development of transformational discipleship resources for the Episcopal Church.

“At this critical moment in the life of our church, as the world yearns for a word of hope, we have an opportunity to boldly increase our focus on the life-changing Gospel of Jesus Christ,” said Forward Movement’s executive director, the Rev. Canon Scott Gunn. “I am incredibly grateful to Chris and Anne Flowers for their visionary generosity.”

With this grant, Forward Movement will launch a Center for Discipleship and Renewal, the centerpiece of which is a major video-based discipleship course to help Christians go deeper in their walk with Christ. In addition to this flagship course, which will serve as a follow-up to a basics course such as Alpha or Forward Movement’s Transforming Questions, the newly funded project will create smaller courses on prayer, scripture study, and other subjects to create on-ramps for churches of all sizes and contexts.

Mr. Flowers, the founder of the J. C. Flowers Foundation, spoke of the trajectory of this important work, saying, “We are happy to be on a journey from Alpha to Beta; we hope, with God’s grace, to arrive at Omega.” Data from Forward Movement’s RenewalWorks program suggests that the Episcopal Church does a good job of welcoming seekers but is often ineffective at encouraging spiritual growth and maturity. This new work aims to change that.

The idea for this grant came from conversations between Mr. Flowers and his priest, the Rev. Tim Schenck, rector of the Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Palm Beach, Florida. “As we reflected on how to draw people deeper in their faith, we kept returning to the question, ‘What’s next?’ There are so many folks out there who get the basics of Christianity, and even go to church regularly, but who want to grow spiritually,” he said. “This work is all about transforming lives.”

The chair of Forward Movement’s board is enthusiastic about new discipleship resources. The Rev. Kate Wesch, who serves as vicar at the Parish of the Epiphany in Seattle, added, “I have seen congregations grow in numbers, depth, and impact when people focus on ancient spiritual disciplines that shape our lives by connecting us to the love of God. I’m thrilled that Forward Movement will be engaging in this work in a new, wider scale.”

The J.C. Flowers Foundation also supports people returning home from prison in New York City, and works towards malaria elimination with Anglican dioceses in Southern Africa. The foundation is led by executive director Rebecca Vander Meulen, who will work with Forward Movement on this project.

Founded “to reinvigorate the life of the church” in 1935, Forward Movement is a non-profit ministry of the Episcopal Church with offices in Cincinnati, OH and staff across the United States. Its work is funded by sales, donations, and grants.

Learn more about Forward Movement’s work to inspire disciples and empower evangelists at forwardmovement.org.

 

Media contact: Jason Merritt, media@forwardmovement.org

Forward Movement
412 Sycamore Street
Cincinnati, OH 45202 USA
forwardmovement.org

Forward Today: Come join the Forward Movement team!

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Forward Movement logo with the following words below: "Now Hiring! Join the team that inspires disciples and empowers evangelists."Dear friends in Christ,

The Holy Spirit is sweeping through the church, leading us toward revitalization and a fresh desire to make disciples of all nations. I really believe that. The signs are all around.

Forward Movement is growing to meet the needs of today’s church. As is always the case, God has blessed us resources to support the work to which he is calling us. So we’re ready to add some staff.

Today, I’m delighted to announce listings for four positions. If you or someone you know might be the right person, please reach out. Details can be found on a post on our news blog.

  • Editor and Content Developer. Writes and edits new content for print and digital.
  • Designer and Production Coordinator (part-time). Ensures our resources look great and work well. Helps to deliver new resources, whether that’s a printing press or a video channel.
  • Finance Manager (part-time). Financial reporting and analysis. Oversees work of our finance team.
  • Sr. Director of Operations. This is a big one! In partnership with our executive director, leads all of Forward Movement’s work, focused especially on operational excellence with a focus on continually improving integration across our teams and disciplines.

 

There are more jobs to be posted soon, so stay tuned for that. If you wish to apply, or if you have questions, write to jobs@forwardmovement.org.

Most important, please pray for Forward Movement. In this critical moment in the life of our church, we need wisdom, strength, clarity, and courage. God is the one who can give us these things.

And, really, if you know if someone who would love to join us, kindly alert them to our postings.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

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Now hiring — come join the Forward Movement team

Forward Movement logo with the following words below: "Now Hiring! Join the team that inspires disciples and empowers evangelists."

Forward Movement is expanding to meet the urgent needs of today’s church. Back in 1935, the Episcopal Church’s General Convention created Forward Movement with a mandate to “reinvigorate the life of the church” and we’ve been doing that faithfully ever since. These days, our tagline summarizes our mission: Inspire disciples. Empower evangelists.

With an increased interest in practicing spiritual disciplines and teaching the basics of our faith, Forward Movement needs to grow to support disciples and seekers everywhere. In today’s fast-paced, rapidly evolving environment, we need resilient staff members to join our team, ready to meet the opportunities of today and tomorrow.

We currently have four open positions, and soon we expect to announce a further expansion with additional opportunities. You can find detailed position descriptions linked here. If you’d like to learn more about these positions, please feel free to contact us at jobs@forwardmovement.org.

  • Associate Editor and Content Developer. Full-time. Leads the creative process for new print and digital resources, including writing, editing, and collaborating with other content creators.
  • Senior Director of Operations. Full-time. Along with our Executive Director, leads all of Forward Movement’s work. Using the model from Rocket Fuel, serves as Integrator with our executive director as Visionary.
  • Designer and Production Coordinator. Half-time. Ensures our new offerings look great and work well. Sees to the launch of products, whether it’s a printing press, a video site, or an app store.
  • Finance Manager. Half-time. Oversees our finance team, leading the way in analysis and reporting, keeping us on track with efficient and accurate processes.

 

Applications for these positions should be submitted by April 15, 2025. Knowledge of the Episcopal Church is ideal, but some of these positions may be suitable for someone who is Episcopal-curious. English-language communication is essential, and knowledge of a second language would be excellent.

Please share this notice with anyone who might love to work at Forward Movement. We work hard, but we love our work and the impact of all we do in helping people know the transforming love of Jesus Christ.

Forward Today: There is always hope

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A cross with prayer beads hangs above the center console of a car. All we can see is the clock, a GPS unit, and the cross hanging in the foreground. In the background, through the windshield, we can see the sunrise.
Photo by Jules PT on Unsplash

Dear friends in Christ,

During my recent travels, I had an inspiring conversation with a rideshare driver. He had a cross hanging from the rearview mirror, so I asked him to tell me about his church.

Then I asked him how he became a Christian, because we were in a country that had a low percentage of Christians. The driver told me about his childhood, which was challenging. While he was in school, he got involved in gangs. One time, he was badly injured in a gang fight, and he spent some time in the hospital. It wasn’t his first visit to the hospital about a gang fight.

He told me how one of his schoolteachers came to visit him. She’d been to see him several times on his visits to the hospital after fights. This time, she had a long conversation with him. Finally, she invited him to change his life: she urged him to spend his life doing something good in the world rather than fighting for gangs. She told him about Jesus, and how much God loves him.

The driver accepted her invitation. He joined a church and changed his whole life. He found a worthwhile career. And after he retired from that, he decided to drive for a rideshare company. He said he thinks God put him here to tell people the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He’s certainly good at it!

I thought about all this because too often, in our society we may be tempted to write some people off as hopeless. But in God’s eyes, there is always hope for everyone. No one is beyond redemption.

As our world gets more and more polarized, it can be easy to give up on some people, to begin to tell ourselves that some are beyond redemption. I’m inspired by this teacher’s faith and her willingness to take the time to get to know a “gang kid.” What if we get to know our neighbors so we can love them—and perhaps invite them to know the love of Jesus?

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

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Forward Today: The gift of Lent

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Photo by Ahna Ziegler on Unsplash

Dear friends in Christ,

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Amidst all the chaos and difficulties of our present world, it might seem that Lent is an unwelcome guest. More sorrow! More hardship! But I think Lent is the gift we all need.

As for me, I’m looking forward to a season that re-focuses me on what really matters. It’s all about love. God hates nothing he has made, as today’s prayer reminds us. Lent gives us an opportunity to ignore all the things that distract us from God’s grace and mercy.

I’m so glad to have this season dedicated to prayer, to scripture reading, to reflection, to self-denial, and to repentance. Difficult? Perhaps. Joyful? Absolutely! As my friend Fr. Tim Schenck says, “What could be more joyful than returning to Jesus?”

Christianity is a team sport. I hope you’ll find your way to a local church. If they have Lenten offerings, try them out.

At Forward Movement, we offer an array of tools to help you enter fully into this season. You can read Forward Day by Day, a simple daily devotion. You can pray the Daily Office, ancient patterns of prayer that sustain Christians around the world. Or you can still get an e-book copy of this year’s new Lenten devotional, The Disciple’s Way, offering daily reflections from church leaders vigorously encouraging you to be a disciple of Jesus.

I would be remiss if I also didn’t mention a lighter way to move through this holy season, Lent Madness, also known as the Saintly Smackdown.

However you choose to observe the season, I pray that Lent is a blessing for you. It might just provide the anchor you need to remember that God loves you and everyone else. If we can remember that, we can be bearers of God’s beautiful mercy and grace in this world.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

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Forward Today: Greetings from Kansas City

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Photo by Pedro Lima on Unsplash

Dear friends in Christ,

I’m writing to you from Kansas City, where I’m attending the Episcopal Parish Network conference. It’s inspiring to hear about all the wonderful things happening across the Episcopal Church these days. In many places, lives are transformed, and the Good News of Jesus is shared in word and deed.

Here at the conference, I’m giving a talk on the spiritual state of the Episcopal Church, and it’s also true that we have plenty of room for improvement. Churches are struggling to reach people and to make things work as they used to. It’s not surprising that church leaders (including me!) don’t always get it right. Read a few pages in the New Testament, and you encounter the reality that following Jesus is not always easy or obvious.

In the Acts of the Apostles, we read about what happens when the church lets itself be led by the Holy Spirit. My hope for the church today is that we’ll do the same. We’ll have to start by admitting we don’t have the answers, and then we’ll have to pray mightily and listen attentively for the Spirit. And we can notice where the power of the Spirit is always inflaming the church with the astonishing Good News of Jesus Christ.

Conferences such as the one I’m attending now remind me of how good it is to gather with others and to share our joys, our hopes, our sorrows, our worries, and, above all, our faith in Jesus. You don’t need to get on an airplane and go to a conference for that, however. This same kind of dynamic gathering can happen in your local church, in your diocese, or just among Episcopalians and other Christians who want to hang out together.

My hope is that we who follow Jesus will always be unflinchingly honest about ourselves and our churches. There’s no bragging in sharing our joy in what God is doing in our lives and in the world around us. And there’s no shame in sharing our worry about our own journey or our churches’ calling.

In this chaotic world we now find ourselves living in, we need to constantly remind ourselves and others in the church that we can’t fix what ails the world. Jesus offers salvation to all who accept his gift. And our task is to proclaim that Good News—and to share his love with the world that craves a word of grace and mercy.

Blessings to you, wherever you are in your own journey, however it happens to be going in the moment.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

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Forward Today: Getting ready for Lent

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Dear friends in Christ,

Just two weeks from today, Lent begins. Maybe you love Lent, and this is good news for you. Or maybe you dread Lent, and you can’t imagine the burden of this season when the world seems to be coming apart. If the second one sounds like you, I invite you to look at Lent a new way.

Our prayer book liturgy bids us to use Lent to “prepare with joy for the Paschal feast.” This season can be a joyful time to get our hearts and our lives ready for Easter. And it makes total sense: what could be more joyful than returning to the love of Jesus?

It’s tempting to let the despair and chaos of the world distract us from the still, small voice of God. We might think we have other things to do, something that prevents us from observing Lent. But the opening overture of the Lenten story sets the tone. We begin our season on the first Sunday in Lent hearing about the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. Satan tried everything to tempt and to distract Jesus from his mission. And Jesus resisted all of Satan’s wiles so that he could be for us perfect love.

Let us all turn away from the distractions of despair, doom, chaos, busy-ness, and fear, and toward toward the loving embrace of Jesus as we use this season to repent and return to the Lord.

Forward Movement offers many resources to help you along the way. We have a brand new devotional book that providentially speaks the message we need to hear now: Check out The Disciple’s Way. If you need something to bring a bit of mirth to your life while still bidding you to know Jesus, try Lent Madness. Or maybe you’ll want to simply try out daily prayer or reflection for 40 days (these are free!).

If your church is offering Lenten programming, consider taking part. While it might seem like “one more thing” in a busy life, it might be just the thing to put the rest of your life in perspective. And, of course, celebrating Sundays and holy days during the season is always a good idea.

My fervent hope and prayer is that Lent will be blessings to you.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

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Forward Today: The steadfast courage of Absalom Jones

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Dear friends in Christ: We welcome back Margaret Ellsworth, Forward Movement’s Marketing Coordinator, as our guest author this week.

Tomorrow, the Episcopal Church remembers the holy life of Absalom Jones. He may not be one of the most familiar saints in our church, but if you follow Lent Madness, you’ll likely remember his name. A few years ago, Absalom Jones emerged victorious at the top of the bracket as the winner of the 2021 Golden Halo.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, here’s how Scott described this online devotion last year: “Lent Madness is a mostly silly game in which 32 saints go up against each other as voters decide who wins the Golden Halo. Among other things, voters end up learning about each of these many saints as they make their choices of who to support. When we see how God has worked in the lives of so many different kinds of people, we begin to see that God could work in our lives, too.”

This week’s saint, Absalom Jones, is one of those saints that we learned about together during Lent Madness 2021. If you open up this year’s Lent Madness Saintly Scorecard, you can read his brief bio as one of the Golden Halo winners: “Absalom Jones and his fervent hope that the Body of Christ would manifest the diversity of God’s people continues to inspire and educate people more than 200 years after his ministry. Ordained a priest in 1802, Jones was the first African-American priest in the Episcopal Church and is remembered on the feast day of February 13 for his commitment to opening the doors of the church to all people.”

Miriam Willard McKinney, one of our enthusiastic Celebrity Bloggers, helped illuminate Absalom Jones for us in her posts on the Lent Madness blog. Miriam shared about his life and also a little bit about him in his own words. She even found art in Absalom’s likeness—from portraits to peg-dolls—in the “Saintly Kitsch” round of the competition.

As Absalom advanced through the bracket, Miriam concluded her posts by asking friends, family, and colleagues: “What does Absalom Jones have to do with you?” The answers she got reflect the scope of Absalom’s life and witness—from his sacrificial acts of service to his community during a devastating epidemic, to his faithfulness to God despite the failings of the Church.

Miriam sums all these answers up for us: “Absalom Jones shows us what it looks like to be a Christian, a community organizer, a faith leader, and a friend. That’s what Absalom Jones has to do with you: he shows you how to follow Jesus, no matter what.”

This is why we do Lent Madness, as silly as it may seem: to learn about our fellow followers of Jesus, across space and time, and take inspiration from their example. I encourage you to follow Lent Madness this year if you haven’t already (sign up for email updates here!) and to pray with us to be formed in courage and love just like Absalom Jones:

Set us free, heavenly Father, from every bond of prejudice and fear; that, honoring the steadfast courage of your servant Absalom Jones, we may show forth in our lives the reconciling love and true freedom of the children of God, which you have given us in your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Margaret Ellsworth
Marketing Coordinator

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