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 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.
For almost four decades thereafter the Federation was led by Bishop Francis John McConnell and Harry F. Ward, an outstanding church ethicist and activist.
In the 1930s the Federation adopted as its goal the replacement of an economic system based on the struggle for profit by "social-economic planning to develop a society without class or group discriminations and privileges."
By the onset of the 1930s and the Great Depression, the MFSA consensus position on economic affairs had come to question the basic capitalist underpinnings of the U.S. economy, and the Federation joined the ranks of those advocating for a functional socialist alternative.
However, a dedicated remnant of volunteers kept the group operating, and in 1960, new director Lee Ball began the rebuilding process and started a campaign against the Vietnam War.