Dear friends in Christ,
Last week, Forward Movement’s board of directors met near Cincinnati. It was our first in-person meeting since late 2019. Of course, we were all profoundly grateful just to be together. But beyond our joy at gathering, we had important work to do.
The board has been working on strategic priorities for Forward Movement for several months now. The days of thick three-ring binders with strategic plans are over. The world is changing too fast for that. Instead, many organizations set strategic priorities. Where should an organization invest its time, energy, and money? What are the areas of work that need to be pushed to grow and change to meet the needs of a quickly-changing world?
We’re still working, so I’m not ready to share all the results yet. But I will say this. One of our emerging priorities is to capture data. We want to understand what the church needs, where it is strong, and where it needs help. We want to understand what Forward Movement does well and what we could do better. These things will help us map out our work to serve the church in the months and years to come.
This time of pandemic may seem like a strange time to be thinking strategically, but. The church was already changing quickly before the pandemic, and many of those changes have been dramatically accelerated. Whatever is coming next for the church, it will not be going back to life before the pandemic. There’s no “back to normal” because norms have shifted.
Good leaders and healthy organizations will take advantage of this disruptive time to make changes that might have seemed impossible before the pandemic. Is your church changing now? I suspect so, but is it changing in a purposeful way? If ever there were a time to let go of things that needed to end or to take up bold new ventures, this is it.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is unchanging. The hope of God in Christ is our anchor in a turbulent time. But how we preach the Gospel and how we live as a church must surely change. I am delighted that our board did hard work to help steer Forward Movement through this time so that we can emerge stronger and healthier than ever, ready to meet the needs of the church in our time.
May God bless you in this time and fill you with strength and purpose to discern how you might be called to change and grow.
Yours faithfully,
Scott Gunn
Executive Director
This fall, as I was seeking the topic for our Bible study, someone suggest that we look at the Bible stories behind the stained glass windows in our church. I loved this idea, and we spent eight weeks looking at windows and talking about the related Bible passages. One of the members has done quite a bit of work on the windows, including reading notes made by the artisan who made most of the windows. It’s been a team effort.
This is an ideal social media devotion—a way to claim an often unholy space with the holiness of preparation and repentance. Whether on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook, you can follow along for meditations or images through the season. You can savor Advent Word as an individual practice or you might form a group in your congregation.
Jesus’ disciples have been jockeying for position and prestige, which is exactly the wrong thing to do. Instead, they should be quick to yield position and jettison prestige. After all, the way of Jesus is a servant ministry.
Rhonda Lee offers a practical tour of prayer practices. If you already have a rich prayer life, this book may help you broaden your practice. If prayer is something that you’ve never quite been able to get started on, here’s the perfect encouragement to begin.
Today is one of the great red-letter days in the church calendar, the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels. Sometimes this feast day is called Michaelmas, since we are meant to celebrate Holy Eucharist (the Mass) on this day.
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