Dear friends in Christ,

Tomorrow is a big day! Among other things, it is the Feast of The Epiphany of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Churches will gather (online or in person) to celebrate the manifestation of Jesus Christ to the whole world. If for some reason, your church isn’t celebrating this important day, you can join my friends at St. James’ Church in New York, NY for Epiphany Lessons & Carols online at 6 p.m. EST.

Tomorrow is also the day that the Good Book Club for Epiphanytide 2022 kicks off. This time around, you are invited to join Episcopalians all over the country in reading the first half of the book of Exodus. Perhaps your church is hosting a group that will read together. If not, you can join folks from all over the church.

The Good Book Club is simple. The idea is that Episcopalians everywhere join in reading a book of the Bible. Because Exodus is pretty long, this time we’ll just read the first half. (There’s also a reading plan for the second half if you want to keep reading during Lent.)

Pick your favorite Bible and use the free reading plan. If you don’t have a paper Bible you love, you can find the whole Bible online for free at Bible Gateway – lots of versions and lots of languages. There are several free resources for individuals and groups listed on the Good Book Club website. You can sign up for free emails and updates about the Good Book Club.

Meet with other students from around the world for a live, online class on the Book of Exodus with Vicki Garvey, a respected teacher and author and canon for lifelong education at the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago. In this free class, Vicki will teach about the context and themes of the Book of Exodus. Classes will meet live on Thursdays at 8 p.m. EST starting tomorrow, January 6. Register here. 

Sometimes the news of the world can seem overwhelming, and with good reason. How can we find peace? How can we find our way? The scriptures won’t solve all our problems, but they will remind us that God is sovereign and that our true joy and peace is found in God’s presence. I’m especially looking forward to time with scripture this Epiphany season.

Exodus tells us about God’s liberating love. Exodus teaches us about God’s steadfast love for us, even when we turn away. Exodus reminds us that God has revealed to us laws that help us live well. It’s just what I need this January, and it might be good for you, too.

Maybe I’ll see you online as we journey through the book of Exodus together.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

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Dear friends in Christ,

Our marketing team had a fun idea for this week’s Forward Today. What if we reviewed the “greatest hits” from the last year? They found the most popular messages from our blog and social media, and I’m excited to share them here as a way to celebrate Good News as we’ve encountered it over the last year, even amidst trying times.

Speaking of the end of the year, at Forward Movement we’ve worked hard to serve the church during a tumultuous period. We’ve continued to give thousands of free copies of Forward Day by Day to those in prison, in hospitals, in nursing homes, and serving in the armed forces. We’ve offered free resources to equip the saints and strengthen congregations. If you have the ability to make a donation to support this work of hope and encouragement, your gift will change lives through the transforming Good News of Jesus. Thank you for your gifts and for your prayers. All of us are sustained by your constant support.

Blessings to you in this Christmas season.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

Most popular on the blog:

A detour on the journey: “If you are an exhausted person who can’t muster the energy to be part of your church in the way you were two years ago, it’s OK. Rest. Even Jesus needed time for refreshment and prayer, so take the time you need. The church depends on Christ alone; the church will carry on as you rest.”

What to do when there’s too much: “What are we Christians to do in the face of impossible problems and insurmountable suffering? I believe our response begins in prayer.”

Can we understand the Trinity? Does it matter? “On Trinity Sunday, I hope we can simply enjoy the glory and majesty of God.”

Most popular on Facebook: 

Advent and beyond: “[Advent Word] is an ideal social media devotion—a way to claim an often unholy space with the holiness of preparation and repentance.”

All things may prosper (St. Michael and All Angels): “Michael is a warrior for good, someone who rights wrong and seeks justice.”

The spiritual practice of gratitude: “Thanksgiving reminds us that God’s grace defines our world.”

Most popular on Twitter:

Stir up thy power: “I am so ready for God to stir things up.”

Discovering a deeper practice of prayer: “When I was a parish priest, every now and then someone would say to me, “I want to pray, but I’m just not sure how to begin.” If this book had existed back then, I’d have given it to all sorts of folks.”

You CAN make a difference: “Don’t accept ‘there’s nothing I can do’ as reality. There’s work for you. And there’s work for your church. Jesus commands us to love our neighbors, and our neighbors around the world need our love.”

Dear friends in Christ,

We’re just a few days away from Christmas. Last year’s Christmas was bizarre, a time when we were unable to gather for worship. There were no churches full of worshipers singing their praises of the Christ child.

Christmas this year is perhaps even more strange. In many churches, worshipers will raise the rafters with glorious praise even as we enter another peak in the pandemic. We will hear the angels’ cry of peace on earth, even as division and strife grow daily.

Perhaps we’ve never needed the Christmas message more than in this moment.

You wouldn’t be alone in asking, how can we be joyful at a time like this? Perhaps we do well to recall the original Christmas story. Two thousand years ago, during a time of oppression and military occupation, in the middle of nowhere, in the midst of what looked like a very ordinary set of people, God acted decisively. The enfleshed Word of God was born.

Everything about the Christmas story tells us that God gets right into the thick of it with us. Our God is not distant and uncaring. Our God sides with the ordinary and the outcasts. Our God values mercy, hope, justice, and peace.

A couple of details in the Christmas story stand out for me this year. God sent an angel to bear glad tidings to shepherds. Shepherds! People of low status were among the first to hear the Good News of Christ’s birth, and they went quickly to see God-with-us. And after their encounter with Joseph, Mary, and Jesus, the shepherds went back to their fields. As the Gospel says, “The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.”

The shepherds are models for us all. They hear, they respond, they see, and they proclaim.

At Christmastime, as we encounter afresh the wonder of Jesus Christ’s birth, I hope we too can glorify and praise God. Perhaps you and I can be bearers of grace and mercy in a world that sometimes seems graceless and merciless.

Jesus Christ is Perfect Love incarnate, showing us how much God loves each one of us. That is Good News worth proclaiming.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

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Dear friends in Christ,

When you read investing advice, articles will usually have a disclaimer that says something like, “past performance is got a guarantee of future returns.” This is because the stock market is irregular.

With God, it’s a completely different story. God is steadfast and trustworthy. So with God, past performance does say something about the future. The Bible is full of recitations of God’s mighty deeds from the past. These are not included because of nostalgia.

Too often, our churches are infected by toxic nostalgia. We are tempted to remember “the good old days” which weren’t nearly as good as we remember them. We use our energy grieving a reality that doesn’t fit our memory of the past. We want to recreate some time from the past rather than pushing ahead.

We might be tempted to misread the recitations of history in the Bible. They aren’t there for nostalgia! God’s past deeds are remembered so that we always remember that God acts on our behalf.

This coming Sunday, we will hear the Magnificat in our lectionary readings. Mary’s song of praise is a remembrance of God’s deeds in the past. And that look backwards is meant to encourage us about the future.

As we look toward Christmas, we do well to recall how God has entered our world to redeem us. And we can expect God to work in our lives and in our world.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

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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

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