Forward Movement turns 75 years old
Episcopal News Service. August 4, 2010 [080410-01]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
The little booklets get tucked into purses, suit pockets and back pockets. They get taken out when their readers have a quiet moment to spend in prayer. For 75 years the Forward Day By Day booklets have been giving Episcopalians and others a page-a-day way to reflect on their faith.
Now, Forward Movement, its publisher, is looking for new ways to continue living out the mission given to it during a financially bleak time in the life of the Episcopal Church and the world. Forward Movement board members, staff and experts from outside the organization are spending this anniversary year leading an effort to dream about and plan strategically for the years to come.
"We're looking at how we can make full use of social networking and digital communications to reinvigorate the life of the church," the Rev. Richard Schmidt, Forward Movement's editor and director, told Episcopal News Service recently. "I know that the future will not consist entirely of print resources, particularly not of small pocket-sized books and pamphlets. I have no expectation that that market is going to disappear in the foreseeable future, but it needs to be supplemented with other things."
"I don't see it as a question of either print or digital," he said. "I see it as a both/and."
Richelle Thompson, communications director for the Diocese of Southern Ohio and a member of Forward Movement's board, agreed. "Printing books and tracts are probably not going to carry us for the next 75 years," she told ENS, adding that in the beginning the idea of printed, personal devotional books was a "ground-breaking" effort for the Episcopal Church.
With that in mind, the board called 25 people to meet in January in Orlando to spend three days "dreaming" about the organization's next 75 years. The group was meant to echo the original Forward Movement Commission of the 1930s, Schmidt said.
"The idea was to call on the creativity and innovation of people from across the country who may or may not have any affiliation with Forward Movement to ask them to spend a couple of days dreaming," said Thompson, who attended the meeting.
Malaika Kamunanwire, senior director for marketing and communications for Episcopal Relief & Development, said that like many people she knew more about Forward Day by Day than about Forward Movement when she was asked to join the so-called "dream team."
"I was amazed at what this organization was founded on -- that it was really about reinvigorating the life of the church," she said, adding that Forward Movement was a "great change agent" in its early years and that she hoped it would "capture that same kind of intensity today."
Forward Movement's mission to reinvigorate the life of the church came out of the General Convention that convened in Atlantic City, New Jersey on Oct. 10, 1934. The world was in the midst of the Great Depression and in the church, revenues for the previous three years had fallen far short of projections. Ministries were curtailed and the church was engaged in large-scale borrowing, according to a history of Forward Movement. What was then called the Joint Committee on Program and Budget had been meeting all summer in an attempt to find ways to eliminate the debts incurred in the past three years.
"The decline in giving seemed to signal a spiritual exhaustion throughout the church," according to the history.
In the run-up to the convention two wealthy laymen from Ohio, Harvey Firestone and Charles Taft, worked against that perceived exhaustion. They led the Everyman's Offering, which when presented at the opening service of the Atlantic City convention amounted to enough to pay off the church's debts.
According to Forward Movement, Bishop Henry Wise Hobson of Southern Ohio later wrote that "something had happened which changed the whole attitude and spirit of the convention" and participants "realized that in spite of difficulties the church need not retreat." A deputy from Tennessee reportedly suggested that, instead, the church needed to move forward.
The convention created a Forward Movement Commission and gave it the charge to "reinvigorate the life of the church and to rehabilitate its general, diocesan, and parochial work." The group vowed to hold meetings and conferences on discipleship throughout the church, "use every possible means to restore confidence and loyalty to the church's national leadership" and appoint men, women and young people to serve as associate members of the commission to spread its work, the history says. It also decided to print a devotional manual on discipleship for Lent of 1935 meant to unite the church in Bible reading and prayer, according to the history.
Today, Forward Movement publishes 200 titles, included Forward Day by Day and the Spanish version, Dia a Dia. Approximately 260,000 bulk-order copies are sold of each Forward Day by Day edition, both in regular and large print, Schmidt said. Another 20,000 individuals subscribe, including at least one person in every one of the 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion. Schmidt estimates that about 10,000 copies go to non-Episcopalians.
During this 75th year, each three-month booklet is a retrospective of the best meditations for those months from past issues. A team of volunteer readers reviewed every meditation ever to appear in the publication and helped the staff winnow them down.
The questions now facing Forward Movement center around how to attract new and different readers. Kamunanwire said she saw the dream team meeting as a time when Forward Movement was saying: "we can either step forward in faith or we can push back; we can either be daring or we can sort of continue to do things the way we've been doing it and watch the audience we have slowly decline."
In the 1930s, Thompson said, "people were so hungry for this type of daily devotional that they could hold in their hands."
"I think that people are still hungry for a daily devotional, but the way that we deliver that is different because the way we get our information is different," she said.
The dream team and a strategic planning group that grew out of its January meeting wants to reach people "in a way that uses modern technology and is cutting edge because that's how we're going to attract new readers and also feed people where they are," she said.
Some things are already moving forward. Forward Movement's website is being re-designed for the second time in recent years, Schmidt said, in order to make it more interactive. One aim is to enable Forward Day by Day readers, who can already post comments on each day's meditations, to talk with one another via the site and perhaps set up online prayer groups. Podcasts are planned too, he added.
Schmidt said the staff is reviewing the title list with an eye toward reducing the number of offerings.
And the Episcopal communications leaders who were part of the team are working to keep each other informed about their work and find ways to support its logistics, he said.
"What I see is a lot of energy," Kamunanwire said, "which is exactly what this was about: reinvigorating the life of the church."