Forward Today: Leadership for today’s church

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Dear friends in Christ,

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I am writing this from Kanuga, an Episcopal conference center in western North Carolina. It’s a beautiful place in a lovely part of the country. But I’m not just here to enjoy nature!

As you receive this, I am just about to head back home to Cincinnati. I’ve spent three days at a conference that gathers clergy who are seeking to lead the Episcopal church in bold ways in this missionary era of the church.

Back in the 1950s or so, churches thrived because it was the “thing to do” for many Americans. But that did not encourage us to consider our calling from Jesus Christ to make disciples. It was easy to have a full church, so it might have been tempting to take for granted why we were gathered.

Now we are firmly in the post-Christendom era. Fewer people go to church out of obligation. Especially when younger people show up in a church, it’s unlikely to be because they will gain social standing by attending church. They have come because they are seeking Jesus.

As challenging as this era is, it is a blessing. It is a blessing because we need to consider carefully the ways we are carrying out the mission that Christ has given us. We can’t assume that society will educate people in the faith; our churches must form Christians. Sometimes it’s tough to be a clergy leader in this era, and so I’m grateful for time with clergy colleagues who are doing this work.

Over the last three days, I heard stories of great success, with real growth in depth and number. And I heard the pain of contending with a culture that sometimes makes it tough to be a Christian. But we’ve been reminded that we’re in this together. More important: Jesus has promised to abide with us all. We’re never alone.

So if you are ordained and reading this, take heart! There are others who share your triumphs and struggles. If you are a lay person reading this, pray for your clergy. They need your prayer.

The wonderful news is that God loves us in our thriving and in our failing. And we don’t have to save the church. Jesus promised that nothing would prevail over the church, so it will endure until his coming in glory. Thanks be to God.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

More from our ministry:

Consider the challenges facing congregations today: Signs of Life

From Grow Christians: St Mark, Sharing Love with the Unknown

Listen for God’s invitation in scripture: A Generous Beckoning

Celebrate Easter every day of the season at 50Days.org

Forward Today: Meeting Jesus

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Photo by Morgan Winston on Unsplash

Dear friends in Christ,

This coming Sunday, we hear the story of Emmaus, when Jesus met his disciples on a road. Of course, they didn’t recognize him until he broke bread with them. As they reflected on their experience, the disciples said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”

At one level, maybe they knew they were talking with Jesus on that road, but they couldn’t quite believe it. Their rational worldview told them they had seen Jesus die, and he must surely still be dead. And yet there he was. So it’s perhaps understandable if they had trouble grasping this amazing reality.

I wonder if it’s like that for us sometimes. Maybe we meet Jesus along the roads of our lives more often than we recognize. Maybe we begin to treat church like a rote experience, and we can’t quite wrap our minds around the amazing reality that Christ is present for us as bread and wine are consecrated in the Holy Eucharist.

Last month, I heard someone speak about why it’s important to go to church. She said, “I feel that I might meet Jesus out in the world, but when I go to church, it’s like having an appointment to meet him. He shows up every time.”

That’s it, right there.

Let us keep our hearts and minds open to meet Jesus in the world, especially in the last, the lost, and the least. And let us celebrate with great joy on the Lord’s Day each week, as we meet Jesus himself. As we break the bread and hear the scriptures, Jesus shows up every time.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

P.S. You can get some help reflecting on the Holy Eucharist and Christ’s presence in Furman Buchanan’s Gifts of God for the People of God Exploring Worship in the Episcopal Church.

More from our ministry:

Healing and Hope for God’s Good Creation live course begins next week

Explore the sacraments further in Walk in Love: Episcopal Beliefs & Practices

Easter isn’t a day, it’s a season! Celebrate all season long at 50days.org

Forward Today: Defined by grace and mercy

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Fresco over the altar in the chapel at Chora Church (Kariye Kilisesi) in Istanbul. Photo by Scott Gunn.

Dear friends in Christ,

I hope you’re still basking in the glow of Easter! We are just four days into the great fifty days of the Easter season. That gives us all plenty of time for more basking and rejoicing.

Sometimes I wonder what our church would be like if all our members and all our church leaders fully embraced the world-shaking truth of Easter. Jesus Christ was totally, stone-cold dead, and then he was raised to new life. This isn’t a trick or a metaphor. The earliest Christians wouldn’t have gone to their martyrdom for a metaphor.

So what does it mean that death, evil, and sin have been utterly and decisively defeated?

To be clear, Easter doesn’t render suffering obsolete. The news websites assure us of that. But Easter ought to change our understanding of what defines our world. Our world is not defined by evil and death. Rather, our world is fundamentally defined by God’s grace and mercy. When anyone suffers from this sinful world, they can be assured of God’s steadfast love in this life and the promise of life to come.

In this vein, I am still reeling from something I heard a few weeks ago. At the Episcopal Parish Network conference in March, Jon Meacham told attendees to “stop lamenting and start leading.” In other words, as a church, let’s stop acting as if evil and death rule! Let’s move forward in hope and love. Let’s point the world to a greater truth. And, yes, let us absolutely join with others to defeat every manifestation of sin we see, whether in our lives or in the world around us.

Many seekers don’t bother with church, and I don’t blame them. Too often, our vision is no bigger than the talking points of the chattering class. We should know better. Our vision should be radiantly beautiful, a world in which grace and mercy abound. It’s the vision of the Gospel, and it’s contagious. There’s a reason the earliest Christians changed the world, and it’s time for us to do it again.

Happy Easter! And now let’s get to work, joining with Mary Magdalene as we shout to the ends of the earth, “I have seen the Lord.”

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

More from our ministry:

Get Easter meditations in your inbox every day: Subscribe to 50Days.org

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Forward Today: To the Cross and beyond

Inside the Alexander Nevsky church, candlelight illumines a crucifix. Photo by Scott Gunn.

Dear friends in Christ,

In the next few days, we enter into the full depths of our faith. Starting tomorrow evening, we celebrate the Three Holy Days. As we move through the liturgies of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Great Vigil of Easter, we experience anew the wonder of the Paschal Mystery. We especially recall Jesus Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection.

I sincerely invite you to clear your schedule so that you can join with your congregation for these most holy and amazing liturgies. If you don’t have a church, now is a great time to find one!

Holy Week begins with a lovely collect at the start of the Palm Sunday liturgy:

Assist us mercifully with your help, O Lord God of our salvation, that we may enter with joy upon the contemplation of those mighty acts, whereby you have given us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This is exactly it. We are meant to enter with joy as we contemplate the mighty acts through which God has given us life and immortality. It’s true on Palm Sunday, and it’s true as we enter the Three Holy Days. Let us give thanks for our Father who loves us so much he sent his only Son to live as one of us, to die for us, and to conquer death and sin.

Through the washing of the feet, the commemoration of the Last Supper, the stripping of the Altar, the Passion reading, the veneration of the Cross, the new fire, the salvation stories, Holy Baptism, and the joyous first Eucharist of Easter, we see many of the ways God has loved us even when we didn’t love him back.

Blessings to you as we contemplate the mightiest acts of great love.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

More from our ministry:

Keep vigil at the Cross with our free Holy Hour devotional

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Pray with us all week at prayer.forwardmovement.org

Forward Today: Joy will soon dawn upon us

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Photo by Clicker Babu on Unsplash

Dear friends in Christ,

Starting Sunday, we begin our journey through Holy Week. That means Easter Day is almost upon us. As it does every year, our Lenten journey through the wilderness ends with the dawning light of ultimate joy in the promised land of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I suspect that many readers of this email will have had some kind of Lenten discipline, whether that means special prayers, or Bible studies, or practices of self-denial, or something else. For many years, I wondered about adopting Easter disciplines too.

As we approach Holy Week and Easter, I wonder if you might consider entering fully into the observances of Holy Week and then celebrating with abandon the Great Fifty Days of Easter.

The church makes Holy Week observance pretty straightforward. Some churches after daily services each day of Holy Week, but most churches at least offer Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Eve or Easter Day. Simply taking part in these liturgical offerings helps us to encounter the Paschal Mystery afresh.

But what about Eastertide? I encourage you to find some way to celebrate the full 50 days of Easter. At Forward Movement, we offer a blog with meditations each day of the season, 50days.org. You might join a book group or a prayer group for the season. And if you want other daily devotions to read, you could make your way through my latest book, Easter Triumph, Easter Joy: Meditations for the Fifty Days of Eastertide.

Easter is too amazing to celebrate just one day. How will you bask in the glow of Christ’s Resurrection?

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

More from our ministry:

Read along with the Easter lectionary: A Journey through Acts

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Even if your bracket is busted, you can still vote in Lent Madness!

Forward Today: Nothing will be impossible with God

Dear friends in Christ,

Annunciation from the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Image by Lawrence OP (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This Saturday, the church celebrates the feast of the Annunciation of Our Lord Jesus Christ to the Blessed Virgin Mary. For a moment, the solemnity of Lent is set aside for the radiant joy of the Incarnation.

It wouldn’t be hard to write a whole book on this liturgical feast day and its assigned scriptures. For today, let’s just observe two things. First, Mary’s courage and strength are a witness for us all. She had the faith to say yes to the angel’s invitation in circumstances that must surely have been puzzling or, more likely, terrifying. We should all follow’s Mary’s example when God calls us to new and uncomfortable places. Her “yes” is a one-word testimony to faithfulness: God’s faithfulness to us, and our faithfulness to God.

Second, God can do the seemingly impossible. Too often, I see us give up on situations that seem impossible. We think those two nations will never live in peace. We imagine an estranged relationship cannot be repaired. We think the church will shrink into irrelevance. We accept the idea that there must be very rich and very poor. But the Annunciation is our annual reminder that with God, all things are possible.

As we approach this numinous feast, I wish you every blessing. May we all have the faith to join Mary in saying, ““Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

More from our ministry:

Which woman speaks more than Mary in the Bible? Find out in Bible Women

Prepare for joy at the end of Lent: Easter Triumph, Easter Joy

From the Grow Christians archives on this feast: Surprising and disrupting news

Look for – and nurture – Signs of Life and spiritual growth in your church

Forward Today: Surely God’s goodness and mercy shall follow us

Photo by Jaka Škrlep on Unsplash

Dear friends in Christ,

This coming Sunday, the lectionary offers us the gift of Psalm 23. Each liturgical year, we enjoy Psalm 23 at least two times, and it never gets old.

There’s a reason this psalm is the most popular one of all 150. Psalm 23 offers lovely, poetic images to assure us that God abides with us always. We can all use this reminder. God doesn’t promise that we won’t have problems, but God does promise that when we struggle, God will be with us. As the psalm says, “for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

We might be so used to the imagery that we miss its significance. When we say the Lord is our shepherd, we are making important claims about God and our relationship with him. Shepherding is risky business. Shepherds stay with their sheep in fair and stormy weather. Shepherds have to fight off attackers. Shepherds have to chase down wayward sheep. Shepherds have to drive the sheep to the places where there is ample food and water. We’re saying quite a lot about God when we think of ourselves as sheep and God as our shepherd.

Read and meditate on Psalm 23. How has God sustained you? Does it encourage you to know that God will abide with you in good times and in difficult times?

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

More from our ministry:

From the Grow Christians archives: Children’s books about the Good Shepherd

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Pray the psalms with us every day at prayer.forwardmovement.org

Forward Today: The blessing of scripture

Dear friends in Christ,

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

The invitation to the observance of a holy Lent from the Ash Wednesday service encourages us to read and meditate on God’s holy word. This is an excellent Lenten practice and, even better, a good way to sustain ourselves throughout our lives.

I wrote a bit about reading scriptures last week. My suggestions still stand: consider reading one of the Gospels this Lent, or perhaps read your way through some psalms. This week, I wanted to add a bit more about steeping ourselves in scripture. Here are some suggestions:

  • Get a Bible you love to read. If you have a dusty old Bible that you love, great! But if you don’t love the one you have, try something else. There are modern translations, ancient translations, and easily accessible paraphrases. Check out the NRSV, the RSV, the Authorized (King James Version, the Message, the NIV, or others. You can find all these on Bible Gateway. You can get Bibles with leather covers or paperback or hardback or whatever you like. And, of course, you might just prefer to use a Bible app on your phone.
  • Try reading a whole book if you haven’t done that before. Jonah is a quick (and funny!) and inspiring read. 1 Samuel is a gripping page-turner, and so is Acts. The Gospels will remind you of the great narrative of Jesus’ life, passion, death, and resurrection. Isaiah or the psalms offer lovely poetry. And on and on.
  • Read the Bible with others. You can read parts of it with those who share your household or with friends. Join your church’s Bible study. Or mark your calendar for next January when the Good Book Club starts, and you can join a church-wide reading campaign.
  • Read a book as a companion to your journey. Forward Movement’s Bible Challenge series is perfect for this.
  • Watch videos and learn. The Bible Project offers excellent videos for free.
  • Say the Daily Office or just read the daily lessons of the Episcopal Church. You’ll make your way through a lot of the Bible over a year.

 

Reading scripture, especially with others, will offer spiritual gifts beyond measure. We are reminded of God’s great love for us, and as we read God’s deeds of old, we also know that God will bless us now and forever.

Blessings on your journey.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

P.S. To get a head start on next January’s Good Book Club reading of Genesis, you can order the newest Bible Challenge book, A Journey with Genesis, at a special pre-publication discount. Learn more here!

More from our ministry:

Pray with the women of the Bible in the expanded second edition of Bible Women

Listen to today’s Daily Office readings on our newest podcast, Scripture Day by Day

Follow the Bible’s narrative journey with The Path

Learn more about a biblical saint in this recent post from Grow Christians

Q&A: Jay Sidebotham, author of Signs of Life

Jay Sidebotham has served as a priest in the Episcopal Church for more than 30 years. He also enjoys creating artwork, including cartoons, reflecting life in the church. Before ordination, he worked in an animation studio that produced Schoolhouse Rock cartoons and then as an art director in several advertising agencies. Some say he is still in advertising.

Jay is also the founder of RenewalWorks, a ministry seeking to make spiritual growth the priority in Episcopal congregations and to build cultures of discipleship in those congregations. His new book, Signs of Life, draws on what Jay has learned in a decade of doing this work. Learn more about Jay and his work in this author Q&A.

How did the idea for this book develop?

After 10 years of work with RenewalWorks, I wanted to share what I had learned in the process. Part of my interest in writing was admittedly to help me clarify key learnings from this work, for my own understanding. I also wanted to share what I had seen churches doing to deepen the spiritual lives of the members of their congregations, in the hopes that those insights could be helpful to folks in a time of anxiety about congregational vitality and church decline.

What is your hope for this book?

My love for the church is deep. My respect for those who lead churches (clergy and lay) has only grown over the last ten years. With that hopeful perspective, I hope that by sharing some of what we’ve learned, we can expand the reach of those learnings. While I would love for every church in Christendom to take on the RenewalWorks process, I know that won’t happen. But I believe many of the insights from this work can be helpful to congregations. In this book, I’ve gathered some core principles in one accessible place, so that congregations (and their leaders, lay and clergy) can consider these principles, and perhaps apply them. All of it has as its goal the deepening of a sense of discipleship, as we seek to follow Jesus and be part of his movement in the world.

You’re well known in the Episcopal world for your prolific cartoons, found on the “Slow down. Quiet.” calendars and elsewhere. How is your creative process different for writing and visual art?

The novelist Walker Percy described modern people as waiting for news. For me, the creative process, written or visual, is about communicating some useful and even transformative news. At the heart of all creative processes, there’s an idea, a message worth getting across. In my own case, I go with the medium that can best get that message across. I can say some things in a cartoon that I couldn’t say otherwise. At other times, a written reflection is a better way to make a point. I enjoy being able to do both.

Where do you typically write?

Anywhere. No place in particular. That’s why God made laptops.

Do you have a favorite prayer?

That’s a bit like asking if I have a favorite child. One of the prayers that has guided me over the years is a prayer that appears in services for Ordination, the Liturgy for Good Friday and the Easter Vigil. It speaks of the church, and God’s commitment to the church:

O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were being cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Is there anything else you’d like to share with readers?

Just one more hope for this book, which is that everyone who reads it will see it as a prompt to think about their own spiritual growth. I’m convinced that our congregations will be as spiritually strong and vital as the members of those congregations. My hope then for the church is that every member will explore their own spiritual growth, which we’ve come to understand as growth in love of God and love of neighbor. When that happens, I believe the church will be stronger, living more fully into what God intends, what God is calling us to do and be.

Signs of Life is available on the Forward Movement website. Read a sample or order your copy today.

Forward Today: It’s never too late

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Dear friends in Christ,

Photo by Lili Popper on Unsplash

We’re just a week into our annual Lenten journey. I hope yours is a blessing to you.

Perhaps in the chaos of our times, you didn’t quite get started on Lent yet. I’m here to say, “It’s never too late.” The whole Gospel testifies to the fact that with God, it’s never too late. We can always turn to God and be warmly embraced.

So if you are thoroughly enjoying a carefully-thought-out Lenten practice, I am delighted. And if you never quite figured out how you want to observe this Lent, today is a great day to do that.

You might decide to spend some time with the scriptures. Committing to reading one of the Gospels, or maybe some psalms, is a goal you can achieve. Knowing and remembering the stories of God’s great love for us is always a blessing.

Prayer is also a fruitful practice if you don’t already have a daily habit of prayer. It can be as easy as saying a table grace before you eat. Or you could just talk to God and share what’s on your heart in the morning or evening. And, of course, you can also say morning and evening prayer with the Forward Movement prayer website or our free app (for Apple or Android). You don’t get bonus points for longer prayers. What matters most is that we are sincere when we pray.

If these suggestions don’t seem quite right, you could talk with a priest or with a wise friend. I encourage you to use the gift of this Lenten season to prepare with joy for the Paschal feast. We need Lent and Easter more than ever these days.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn's signature

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

More from our ministry:

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