Dear friends in Christ,

Today the church celebrates one of the great feasts, the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple. We recall the time, told in the second chapter of Luke, that Mary and Joseph took young Jesus to the Temple to present him to God. This was to fulfill the law set forth in Exodus 13 commanding the firstborn to be offered to God.

When Mary and Joseph got to the Temple, they encountered Simeon, a man who had been waiting to behold his Savior. Seeing the Savior would be the culmination of his life. When he held Jesus, Simeon offered the beautiful praise we now know as the Nunc dimittis (from the Latin of the opening words).

Lord, you now have set your servant free *
to go in peace as you have promised;
For these eyes of mine have seen the Savior, *
whom you have prepared for all the world to see:
A Light to enlighten the nations, *
and the glory of your people Israel.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: *
as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.

Nearly every time I pray evening prayer, I repeat this canticle. I think of that man, essentially waiting to meet Jesus, a moment that will mark his readiness to leave his earthly pilgrimage and move on to his heavenly home. What was it like, waiting day in and day out to see his Savior? I ponder how his heart must have nearly burst with joy, holding the young child who was destined to change the world. I wonder if Simeon expected to greet his Savior as a child, or if he had been waiting for a powerful grownup? What a moment this must have been!

Simeon’s lovely song of praise reminds us that Jesus, the Light of the world, shines on every nation, on every person. Jesus’ saving love is for everyone.

I wonder if we are open to meeting our Savior in ways we might not expect? And I wonder if we are prepared to share the light of Christ’s grace, mercy, righteousness, peace, and love with the whole world?

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

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Dear friends in Christ,

This Sunday’s epistle brings us one of the greatest hits of the New Testament, mostly because it’s one of the readings of choice at just about every wedding. St. Paul writes in the first letter to the Corinthians, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” In the context of weddings, it’s easy to read that as advice for marriage. And that’s not totally wrong.

But that’s not really what St. Paul was getting at. He was writing about Christian love – the self-sacrificing, generous, beautiful work of loving others as Christ first loved us. Of course, that love is essential in marriage. But it’s bigger than that.

We live in a noisy, chaotic world. It can often feel like our world is spinning out of control. This is what happens when love isn’t the foundation. St. Paul writes, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” He’s talking about life in the church in this particular moment, but his passion to call us all to love is obviously bigger than what we do among other believers.

The scriptures call us to live always by the rule of love. It’s easier said than done. It’s easy to forget that Christian love is primarily action, not feeling. It’s easy to forget that we are called to love in every moment, with every person.

There’s a lot of loveless clanging and gonging in the halls of government, the studios of cable news, and, yes, even in the sacred walls of churches.

I can’t fix the world. But I can fix my heart, by God’s grace. If I can manage to love others as Christ first loved me, our world becomes a tiny bit more beautiful, that much more grace-filled.

This Sunday, I’m looking forward to hearing these familiar words. Not long before we remember that Jesus Christ called us to remember his outpoured love for us until he comes again, we will be reminded that day by day, we are called to make love our way.

I aim to gong and clang a bit less, and proclaim love a bit more. Will you join me?

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

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Dear friends in Christ,

This coming Sunday’s epistle comes from 1 Corinthians 12, in which Saint Paul reminds us that we Christians together are the body of Christ, and that each one of us is a member that has a crucial role to play in the body.

I was thinking about how this works out at Forward Movement, a ministry of the church that has a different calling than a local congregation. Our work is to inspire disciples and empower evangelists. We do this in lots of ways. We host conferences, publish books, create apps, provide websites, offer podcasts, and more.

Doing our work requires a variety of gifts. We need people whose spiritual calling is finding missing commas. We need people who are patient and persistent to make sure that our orders ship on time. We need people who can tell the story of Forward Movement and what we have to offer the church. And that’s not even getting the list started!

The pandemic has pushed us hard. At times, it has felt futile to struggle against the tide of adversity. And at other times, I think we’d all say the pandemic has challenged us to work in new ways that will help us be more effective in our ministry. Our whole staff is weary, but I’m also amazed by the resilience of every single person at Forward Movement, as the staff has pressed onward to carry out our mission. We know that just as this has been tough for us, it’s also been tough on the individuals and congregations we serve.

One of our latest challenges is that our warehouse has struggled to ship orders. You’ve read about all the issues with the supply chain and the world of logistics. Well, it’s no abstraction for us! To get things out on time, our Cincinnati customer service team has worked tirelessly to ship orders from our offices in Cincinnati.

This photo shows a carload of orders heading out. That’s just one of many batches. These orders—and hundreds more over the last few months—were all hand-packed by folks who stop every day at 10:00 a.m. to pray for our work and the ministry of the whole church.

I’ve certainly learned a lot about logistics and shipping! And we’ve had to change how, where, and when we work. We’ve improved our technology. We’ve learned to support one another in new ways. We’ve learned to go with a flow a bit more readily. Someday when the global health crisis is over, we’ll work better because of the challenges of the last two years.

Why am I telling all this? First, while I fully acknowledge and grieve very real costs of the pandemic in terms of death, illness, and personal struggle, I can also see that it has pushed us in some ways we needed to be pushed. I wonder if that’s true in your congregation? Second, we couldn’t have gotten through the last two years without the support of the whole church. I know that you have been patient with us. You have prayed for us. And you have supported us with an outpouring of donations to sustain our ministry. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

We’re going to get through this. Things will change, but we have each other and we have the abiding Holy Spirit with us along the way.

Blessings to you. May you have the strength and the courage to do the work God is calling you to do in this strange and challenging time, and may we never forget that Jesus has promised the Holy Spirit’s companionship with us on our journey.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

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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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Dear friends in Christ,

When I’m not traveling, I hang my proverbial hat at Christ Church Glendale near Cincinnati. In addition to Sunday morning duties, I lead a midweek Bible study.

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.

I know that the Bible study has helped me notice things in some of the windows, and I just about always learn something new when I dive into a Bible passage. Just about everyone talks about their newfound appreciation for the windows that we see every week but not have seen fully. And we also have been able to make deep scriptural connections with the windows and our own lives.

This got me thinking. What else is in our church that we might have seen but not noticed? For that matter, it’s a good reminder that our world is full of delights if we slow down to appreciate them more fully. But churches are special places that are often rich with symbols and images. Sometimes churches make their point by the sheer absence of these things. But good art and architecture always teaches us something if we are willing to be students.

What about your church? Have you slowed down to notice the small and big things? Are you ready to learn from the beauty around you?

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

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Dear friends in Christ,

I’m looking forward to Advent Word again this year. In case you haven’t heard of it, Advent Word is an international community of prayer through the Advent season. For the eighth year, Christians around the world are joined together as each day of Advent invites a focus on a particular word drawn from the lectionary.

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.

So why am I mentioning this now, when it’s not even November? In addition to the free online materials, Forward Movement has published Promise & Praise, a book for this Advent season based on this year’s Advent words. In addition to reflections by yours truly, the book includes reflections by Miriam McKenney, Hugo Olaiz, Richelle Thompson, Lisa Kimball, and Michael B. Curry. In an ordinary year, I’d wait a couple more weeks to mention a book, but this year, with shipping delays, I encourage you to order the book soon.

Unrelated to Advent Word, we are also offering Jay Sidebotham’s wonderful Slow Down. Quiet. It’s Advent colorable calendar. Again, to ensure timely delivery, order soon!

Whatever your Advent plans are this year, I encourage you to think ahead to make sure you have what you need if you’re counting on resources. But of course, it’s enough to use the gift of this season as a time to prepare our hearts to welcome Jesus Christ, and you don’t need to buy anything in order to repent.

Yours faithfully,

Scott Gunn
Executive Director

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