A sense of weariness and resignation prevailed as the 51st General Convention of the Episcopal Church convened on October 10, 1934, in Atlantic City. Loyal church people were anxious and fearful. Distrust of church leaders was pervasive. Revenues for the previous three years had fallen far short of projections, resulting in the curtailing of ministries and large-scale borrowing. The Joint Committee on Program and Budget had been meeting all summer to attempt the apparently impossible—the gap seemed unbridgeable and the decline in giving seemed to signal a spiritual exhaustion throughout the church.

How could church morale be revived? The effort had actually begun a few months earlier, in the spring of 1934, when a group of devoted churchmen, led by Harvey Firestone and Charles Taft, both wealthy laymen from Ohio, proposed a special offering to erase the debt, using the slogan “Hold the Line.” An intensive campaign of visiting and letter-writing ensued. By the time the Everyman’s Offering (as the effort was called) was presented at the opening service of the Atlantic City Convention, enough had been raised to erase most of the debt incurred during the previous three years.

But the Everyman’s Offering did more than pay off loans. Bishop Henry Wise Hobson of Southern Ohio later wrote that “something had happened which changed the whole attitude and spirit of the Convention. The delegates realized that in spite of difficulties the church need not retreat,” and that people throughout the church were ready to shake off their lethargy. A deputy from Tennessee is reputed to have said, “This church needs more than a campaign to ‘hold the line.’ We need to move forward!”

Responding to the new spirit, the Convention created a Forward Movement Commission consisting of twenty persons charged to “reinvigorate the life of the church and to rehabilitate its general, diocesan, and parochial work.” Hobson chaired the Commission.

The Forward Movement Commission met for the first time on December 5, 1934, at St. James Church (now St. James Cathedral) in Chicago. All day and late into the night Commission members talked—and talked and talked, seemingly unable to move beyond bemoaning the problems facing the church. Finally, Hobson mentioned a little essay written by Gilbert P. Symons, a clergyman on Hobson’s staff in Southern Ohio. Hobson asked Symons to read his essay aloud to the Commission. It said that reinvigorating the life of the church would become possible only when church members began to take their discipleship seriously—not generally or vaguely, but in specific ways. Symons discussed discipleship under seven steps: Turn, Follow, Learn, Pray, Serve, Worship, Share. A long silence followed the reading. Bishop Hobson then told the Commission members to return to their rooms, pray during the night, and come back in the morning.

After an early communion service and breakfast the next day, the atmosphere had changed. The Commission seemed drawn together and quickly hammered out a four-fold plan to reinvigorate the life of the church: 

First, appeal to the whole church to renew its discipleship along definite lines. Meetings and conferences on discipleship were to be held throughout the nation, led when possible by members of the Forward Movement Commission.

Second, publish a devotional manual on discipleship for Lent of 1935 to unite the church in Bible reading and prayer.

Third, use every possible means to restore confidence and loyalty to the church’s national leadership.

Fourth, appoint associate members of the Forward Movement Commission to carry out its work throughout the church. (During the next six years, over seventy men, women, and young people would serve as associate members).

The most immediate task was the production of the Lenten manual. Gilbert Symons headed a group that together wrote a booklet called simply Discipleship, which became the first piece published under the Forward Movement name. Its clear, concise, accessible language has been one of the hallmarks of Forward Movement publications ever since. The Commission had no office, budget, or staff, but word of this booklet spread quickly. Orders were received for over 672,400 copies of Discipleship. Volunteers, many of them high school students, worked, often staying until 2:00 a.m., filling orders. The ink was hardly dry on one printing before another was ordered. The volunteers had until Ash Wednesday, March 6, to get all the copies of Discipleship wrapped, stamped, mailed, and delivered to the parishes. They met the deadline.

The other three points of the Commission’s plan proceeded swiftly. Members of the Commission contacted the bishop of every diocese and meetings were held throughout the church to exchange ideas, explain the purposes of Forward Movement, discuss discipleship, rebuild trust, and generally “to reinvigorate the life of the church.”

The sleeping church began to stir. Lent had hardly begun before Bishop Hobson began receiving requests for a devotional manual for the Easter season. A booklet entitled Disciples of the Living Christ was hastily put together and 600,000 copies distributed by Easter Day. Readers then wanted something for the summer, so Follow On, based on the Book of Acts, was produced and distributed. It was now evident that Episcopalians would use a daily devotional guide if one were available, which came as a surprise to Hobson and others since several earlier efforts at such a publication had failed after a few issues.

It was the fourth such booklet, for the fall of 1935, that was first called Forward Day by Day. Initially Forward Day by Day was issued six times a year, then five times a year. In 1969 it became a quarterly and has remained so. With a devotion for each day of the year based on the Daily Office Lectionary in The Book of Common Prayer, and now the Revised Common Lectionary on Sundays, Forward Day by Day has been a resource for Christian disciples, Episcopalians, and others, for over seven decades.

Requests for additional publications were received almost immediately. Symons quickly produced “Disciple’s Way,” expanding on the essay he had read to the Forward Movement Commission in December of 1934; the first Forward Movement tract, it remains in print. Symons also prepared a collection of prayers for private devotional use, Prayers New and Old, now in its twenty-seventh printing. Members of the Forward Movement Commission wrote other pieces, interpreting the mission of the church, deepening personal devotion, and supporting the educational, evangelistic, and pastoral work of parishes. By the 1937 General Convention, Forward Movement had produced twenty-five tracts and booklets in addition to Forward Day by Day. All this was achieved with mostly volunteer labor, with the Diocese of Southern Ohio providing office space and support staff.

In those early years, Forward Movement was far more than a publishing company. Arthur M. Sherman, a priest from Cincinnati, led conferences of clergy and lay people to consider devotional life, parish programs, preaching, evangelism, stewardship, Christian unity, and the place of the laity in the church. The Parish Group Plan, directed by David R. Covell, another Cincinnati priest, created small, intimate groups within congregations to help people grow in Christian character.

The 1937 General Convention, delighted with the results of the Forward Movement Commission’s initiatives, integrated Forward Movement into the larger  church by naming the new presiding bishop, Henry St. George Tucker, as chair of the Forward Movement Commission, with Bishop Hobson continuing to oversee operations in Cincinnati. Bishop Tucker named the first Forward Movement executive committee. That committee (now called the board of directors) has been named by and accountable to the presiding bishop ever since.

Gilbert Symons became the first editor of Forward Movement, a post he held until 1950. He wrote many of the early issues of Forward Day by Day, in addition to dozens of other titles. The Diocese of Southern Ohio paid Symons’s salary, though he devoted nearly all his time to Forward Movement. The diocese also provided rent-free office space (though expenses were shared) in downtown Cincinnati until 2004, when the scope of Forward Movement’s ministries called for more spacious quarters.

By 1940, Bishops Tucker and Hobson felt the renewed trust level in the church had reached a point where the National Council could assume many of Forward Movement’s ministries. At the General Convention of that year, therefore, the Forward Movement Commission was discharged. But Forward Movement’s success as a publisher led Tucker to ask that the executive committee continue publishing devotional and other literature for the church. To indicate more clearly the nature of its ministry, the name of the organization was changed in 1951 to Forward Movement Publications. 

Forward Movement’s ministry today draws upon this rich legacy. Our mission is unchanged: “to reinvigorate the life of the church and to rehabilitate its general, parochial, and diocesan work.”

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