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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.