The Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA) is an independent network of United Methodist clergy and laity working for justice in the areas of peace, poverty, and people's rights since 1907. History Founding The first decades of the 20th century were a time of heightened awareness in the United States of poverty and social inequality. In an effort to transform the social order and address human suffering, members of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) created in 1907 the organization that would come to be called the Methodist Federation for Social Service and later the Methodist Federation for Social Action. The aims of their Methodist Federation for Social Service (MFSS) were inspired in a large part by the importance that Methodism founder John Wesley placed on work for the betterment of humankind, and shared the theological grounding of the broader Protestant Social Gospel movement, which articulated a normative relationship between the Biblical teachings of Jesus Christ and efforts toward systemic social change. Originally the Methodist Federation for Social Service, MFSA was founded in 1907 in Washington, DC after meeting with President Roosevelt. Several Methodist Episcopal clergy (including Frank Mason North, author of "Where Cross the Crowded Ways of Life") organized the Federation to direct church attention to the enormous human suffering among the working class. The organization supported labor unions and held socialist views, calling industrial capitalism an "unchristian and antisocial". MFSA met with immediate success in rallying American Methodists around Social Gospel issues, and the MEC General Conference of 1908 adopted the denomination's historic Social Creed which was penned by the leadership of the Federation. The social creed has been adapted several times but is also the basis for many of the civil and human rights laws that exist today. The lines between the nominally independent Federation and the MEC proper were quickly blurred as the former was charged with the coordination of Social Creed-related ministries. The collaboration was a productive one, however, with MFSA members encouraging significant contributions to the labor rights, Temperance, and Women's Suffrage movements by the denomination, while conducting cutting-edge advocacy under their organization's own auspices. McConnell and Ward era For almost four decades thereafter the Federation was led by Bishop Francis John McConnell and Harry F. Ward, an outstanding church ethicist and activist. During the 1920s and 1930s this leadership was fully shared by Winifred Chappell, a deaconess and devoted advocate for the workers' struggle.