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Frederic Whitney Fitts was born in Lowell, Massachusetts on April 11, 1872. He graduated in 1893 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned his B.D. from the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, in 1901 before completing his education with a degree from Harvard University in 1902.

From 1902 to 1907, Fitts served as an associate priest of St. Stephen’s Church, Boston, and as an associate rector of St. John’s Church in nearby Roxbury. Both parishes, which served primarily poor and minority communities, were among the leading Anglo-Catholic congregations of the otherwise low and broad churches in the Diocese of Massachusetts at that time.

He became rector of St. John’s Church in 1908, a position he held for 37 years, where he was known for his instructional classes. He mentored Massey Shepherd, who was an assistant at St. John’s Church in the early 1940s. Fitts was a lecturer of interest on Church symbolism; well-known for using the Sarum ritual and scheme of liturgical colors, which was rarely practiced in the United States; and he maintained a close relationship with the Order of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge.

Frederic Fitts died in 1945.

Henry Forrester was ordained to the diaconate in 1870 and to the priesthood in 1872. He served as a missionary in the Missionary District of New Mexico and Arizona beginning in 1874. Together with the new bishop of the district, William Forbes Adams, he performed the first Episcopal worship service at the Exchange Hotel on the Plaza in Albuquerque on March 4, 1875. After Bishop Adams’s retirement several months later, Forrester took on ecclesiastical oversight of the Missionary District and established St. Paul’s in Las Vegas as the ecclesiastical center. He continued to travel widely around the territory, establishing missionary outposts in 15 towns.

In 1880, George Kelly Dunlop was elected to fill the vacancy left by Adams’ retirement. That same year, the first convention of the Missionary District was held. Dunlop appointed Forrester priest to the congregation in Albuquerque. Forrester continued to travel across the territory, encouraging the missions he had established in the district. He reported in 1882 that “land has been purchased at 4th and Silver” for $5,000 and in November the first service in St. John’s Church was attended by 33 people.

At the General Convention of 1892 the Board of Missions appointed Forrester to succeed the Rev. W. B. Gordon as the Presiding Bishop’s resident representative to the Mexican Episcopal Church, a position he held until his death in 1904.

Founded in 1895 by white and black community leaders, Fort Valley High and Industrial School was transferred to the control of The Episcopal Church in 1918 and was later renamed Fort Valley Normal and Industrial School (Fort Valley, Georgia), which operated as a two-year junior college. In 1939 Fort Valley Normal and Industrial School and the State Teachers and Agricultural College were combined by the State of Georgia to become part of the state’s university system.

Fort Valley was no longer expressly administered by the American Church Institute (ACI) after 1939 but the vast majority of its institutional appropriations continued to derive from ACI through at least 1959 and perhaps until the dissolution of ACI in 1967. The Dioceses of Atlanta and Georgia also contributed support to the college. In 1949 the school was designated as Georgia’s land-grant institution for African Americans. In 1966 a four-year liberal arts public college continued as Fort Valley State University.

In the midst of the Great Depression, the Joint Commission on the Forward Movement was established in 1934 by General Convention with the charge to point the Church “forward.” The Movement sponsored conferences, meetings, and training programs for leaders along with Bible study and prayer groups under the leadership of the Rt. Rev. Henry Wise Hobson. Forward Movement’s first publications appeared in 1935, including the first issues of Forward Day by Day, a daily devotional guide. In 1940, the General Convention adopted the program elements of Forward Movement as its unifying theme under the slogan of “Forward in Service.” The Joint Commission ceased to exist in 1940, although the publications effort continued in Cincinnati under Bishop Hobson and an Executive Committee.

Although Forward Movement Publications is authorized each triennium by the General Convention with the Presiding Bishop as its chair, the agency is self-funded and does not draw on the budget of The Episcopal Church. Forward Movement specializes in the publication of devotional tracts and spiritual guides, although its range of materials expanded after 1986 with the closing of Seabury Press, which was the national Church’s publishing house. Forward Movement has also published key ecumenical documents affecting The Episcopal Church as well as other works of historical and biographical importance.