© 2019 Dr. Bruce R. Jackson
© 2019 The Urantia Book Fellowship
| Urantia Book - A Spiritual Path | Volume 19, Number 1, 2019 (Summer) — Index | Mobilizing a Dispensation of Planetary Rehabilitation |
Recognizing the instructional shift needed for revelation based education that empowers morontian growth of Jesusonians and fosters the spiritual unity and human diversity of the Urantia Movement.
Many members of the Urantia Movement (UM) who have a passion for education have long wrestled with a significant teaching and learning challenge when dealing with the development of an effective educational system based on The Urantia Book (UB). While most of us have been a product of traditional teaching methods such as lecture, homework, testing, research, etc., we are all deeply challenged to evolve beyond our traditional educational experience into an instructional methodology that fosters an individualized spiritual growth experience and cultivates the emergence of a group experience of morontial living based on a union of souls.
This instructional shift from information analysis, proof text research, discussion groups, and UB quotation towards the development of an ascendant morontian experience contains the potential for soul awakening and spiritual rebirth in individuals, the classroom group, and with the UM at large. The achievement of balance between traditional instructional techniques and the promotion of spiritual growth is a significant challenge facing our revelation based education. As we develop and grow our schools, we are endeavoring to go beyond personal religious expression into the realms group experience where the spiritual impact of a union of souls guides the instruction of the Fifth Epochal Revelation (5ER).
For many years American higher education has been confronted with a very similar problem. With the advent of online instructional delivery systems in higher education we are challenged by a new emphasis on individual lifelong learning. Teachers are increasingly confronted by instructional methods that are outdated and ineffective even though such methods were part of their own educational training. While “sage on stage” teaching is fair at delivering basic information, it is not good at delivering an applied experience. For example, lectures on music history and theory may fill in gaps in student knowledge, but without applied lessons and experiential ensembles where musical objectives are learned, practiced, and performed, lectures and other traditional instructional techniques do not prepare skilled musicians.
American educational institutions struggle with the balance between traditional instruction vs. applied experience in the attempt to balance the need to make money to pay bills by teaching large groups of students vs. teaching individuals with unique needs. There is great institutional sacrifice when committing to the creative development of individual students because it requires expensive instructional mentoring, more intimate class settings, uncommon levels of institutional empathy through personalized academic advising, and entirely new approaches to inter-institutional cooperation rarely practiced in academia.
Morality is increasingly becoming a major concern of public educational institutions as it attempts to break the tread-mill approach to mass instruction while meeting the lifelong learning needs of individuals. In the current amoral climate of modern society, it is easy to make promises that are not sustainable. Though community colleges tend to fare better than their state university colleagues, they are deeply challenged with their tremendously diverse and needy student populations. True, mentoring and other one-on-one instructional methods are personnel intensive and expensive, but overworked adult students limited by schedule, family, finances, and the inability to avail themselves of personal opportunities that are already available is a dilemma that frustrates well-intentioned academics who strive to shift into a more personalized method of teaching.
Our school teachers work hard to personalize instruction, but numbers driven education is difficult to overcome in this age of spreadsheets, bean counter administrators, and results oriented thinking. While the more traditional approaches may be easier to test and quantify than personal development, educators know that applied instruction has much deeper life consequences.
Seminaries have long incorporated traditional educational methodology while they simultaneously strive to provide an environment of spiritual development. For any worthy seminary, spiritual training is equally, if not more important than knowledge-based instruction. Most seminaries have organized periods of worship and prayer, a plethora of personal and group spiritual experiences, and long list of service opportunities as an essential part of the curriculum of spiritual development of each student.
There is a reason why many seminary degrees require three years; that extended timeframe may be needed for significant spiritual growth and the many valuable experiences needed to prepare for ministry. Yet, even for seminaries contained within this spiritual focus is a problem: a one-size-fits-all approach to spirituality resulting in denominationalism. Christian seminaries are particularly prone to this and it may well be one reason why church worship styles often become fixed and inflexible: what ministers learn in seminary before ordination is what takes place in worship in their church.
Most seminaries have found that morality training is particularly difficult. When engaging in moral teaching it is all too easy to become dictators of lifestyles, arbitrators of religious perspective, and gatekeepers of the “right” way. Denominationalism generally fails to embrace diversity in religious expression as it often places limits on spiritual experience as defined by a church. It is difficult enough to create an atmosphere of individual exploration when dealing with knowledge based instruction; cultivating an environment of Spirit-led morontian growth is a much greater challenge.
For example: after my five years of seminary training where I had developed a record of trust through church service, teaching, and a significant missionary effort. The challenge my seminary faced when they discovered that I had read the UB before entering seminary was more than my institution could deal with. With only six months left on a Doctor of Music Ministry, I was forced to leave after refusing to publicly denounce the UB. The seminary forced me to leave in utter secrecy in fear of my testimony to colleagues and my students.
The UM is facing a similar dilemma as we develop an educational system that offers a morontian level spiritual experience while providing a strong informational curriculum based on the 5ER. We all have experience with the “sage on stage” instructional method and its temptation to love to be the “great teacher” imparting knowledge. But as we gain experience with our new online schools, we have learned through hard lessons the importance of avoiding spiritual-egos, judgement of others, argumentative modes of expression, and the imposition of revelatory interpretation on sincere and diverse truth seekers.
As ascendant beings we need our brothers and sisters to observe, mentor, share, learn from, and teach each other. To be spiritually healthy we must not only attend to our courtship with our Indwelling Adjuster and enhance our intellectual knowledge of the UB, we must also join with our brothers, sisters, and superhuman fellows in universal service as human-morontial beings. We were not created to be alone and isolated in our personal religious life – we truly need each other to grow in spiritual consciousness.
Even so, in this renaissance era of diversity this is a challenging task. The UM will increasingly struggle with different cultural interpretations of the 5ER. It will find discomfort in the ever expanding and unfamiliar approaches to worship, meditation, and prayer. It will continue to be deeply challenged by its far-flung population and suffer from the lack of close-knit local social groups. In this environment the UM must become more spiritual in expression and culture as it evolves its educational system into effective cooperative and complementary teaching institutions.
The UM is at a serious crossroads that will require some creative solutions in order to develop the spiritual education suggested herein. There are two things that will be vitally important to that effort: the promotion of corporate services of worship, meditation, and prayer on an international scale. We live in such an age of disconnection we all deeply need a broad spiritual communion. Churches such as Unity and online seminaries have long demonstrated that it is quite possible to do this. We have internet tools that are able to connect us around the globe, and we need to use them in promoting services of worship, meditation, and prayer to spiritually unite the diverse Jesusonians of the world. Such an experience of spiritual unity through worship, meditation, and prayer will truly change the public nature of our faith expression and the UM.
Guy Perron suggests that “there are powerful elements of psycho-spiritual work that unfold when students are engaged in this soul-expansion as we recognize what is blocking the emergence of our consciousness.” The art of consciousness instruction is a mentoring, shared, supportive, and mutual experience of spiritual evolution where “all ships in the harbor rise with the tide.” There are as many different methods of consciousness training as there are people as it requires a sustained commitment to a spiritual experience resulting from strong interpersonal and mentoring relationships. There is no one “right” way to do this, only a way that is Spirit-led.
Teaching the soul rather than the subject must be founded on worship, meditation, prayer, service, and a connection with all Thought Adjusters. It must be based on the teachings of our Sovereign through the essential leadership of the Spirit of Truth. It must be focused on cultivating an understanding of how to apply the incomparable teachings of the UB in a practical way that impacts daily living that is flexible enough for spiritual individualization. This level of consciousness training requires that each brother and sister internally grow his/her embryonic soul-consciousness under the guidance of their Indwelling Will of the Father while simultaneously growing externally thru a communal and universal experience of the inter-connectedness of human and superhuman beings living in kinship with our Mother Supreme. Through these parental relationships the siblinghood of human brothers and sisters along with our unseen universal helpers and guardian angels is fully realized in the form of a union of souls.
As our revelatory educational institutions develop, fulfilling the 5ER’s spiritual mission of uniting souls in kinship with the Family of God presents a real inter-institutional challenge. We should embrace cooperative institutional sharing of a spiritual educational mission that augments and uplifts the UM with a renewed and revitalized spiritual and universal purpose. In any young movement it is inevitable that unique groups will emerge, and this is a good thing.
"I have come into the world to proclaim spiritual liberty to the end that mortals may be empowered to live individual lives of originality and freedom before God. I do not desire that social harmony and fraternal peace shall be purchased by the sacrifice of free personality and spiritual originality. What I require of you, my apostles, is spirit unity— and that you can experience in the joy of your united dedication to the wholehearted doing of the will of my Father in heaven. You do not have to see alike or feel alike or even think alike in order spiritually to be alike. Spiritual unity is derived from the consciousness that each of you is indwelt, and increasingly dominated, by the spirit gift of the heavenly Father. Your apostolic harmony must grow out of the fact that the spirit hope of each of you is identical in origin, nature, and destiny.” [UB 141:5.1]
One of the most serious problems facing the UM today is the fact that we all live in an age of ambivalent indifference; to ignore the UB is just so very easy. For that reason, Jesusonians need to unite, work, share, and develop as a group in spiritual unity and cooperative association guided by mutual respect, consistent support, collegiality, and collaborative thinking. An isolated go-it-alone approach will only result in the continued ambivalence and indifference of the world. In contrast, if Jesusonians become a spiritually united thru their organizations celebrating diversity and modeling a spiritual union of souls, then that lesson will offer a stark contrast to the troubled earth-bound perspective that currently dominates our modern society.
Inbreeding is a problem that any new organization faces, and the UM is no exception. Many modern churches face a similar situation: the “40-year pew warmer” who feels entitled and in control. At this stage in the life of the UM we have found, like most churches, that growing a group of “like-minded” individuals is rarely able to cope with diversity and social differences. The UM is increasingly developing an “in-crowd” mentality where strangers need not apply.
My personal experience with UM is instructive on this matter. For over three years I have proposed courses, written thousands of words in online classes, and have published articles on education in the hope that I may share my 30-year experience in higher education as a music teacher and administrator. My work has largely been ignored, and I have even been told to “go away.” Frankly, if a third generation academic/ minister with expertise in curricular development having written accreditation materials for two collages and a university is of no interest to the curricular development of our UB based schools, then they need to reconsider their loss as I suspect my experience was unremarkable.
While it is clear to me that my UM experience is neither personal nor vindictive, it does indicate a failure of UM institutions to meet the central objective of their mission: to offer sincere pilgrims a place of real service. Our schools are now facing a significant task that will need the expertise of many, many people. Any educational system based on the work of a “chosen few” will only perpetrate mistakes that have been made in the past. The UM tends to “shoot itself in the foot” when it comes to outsiders. As long as the UM remains dominated by a small clique incapable of offering expansive service opportunities for the widely diverse peoples that arrive at their doorstep, the UM will continue to age, weaken, falter, and fail to grow. It is no surprise that after over 65 years the UM is facing inbreeding, and many churches from a wide variety of Christian denominations have had very similar experiences. Nonetheless, this is an issue needs serious attention.
In our enthusiasm for developing spiritual experience in our revelatory education, we are fully aware that traditional instructional methods will continue to be employed where appropriate because we are rightly reluctant to “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Even so, we are seeking courses that create an environment where the Will of God becomes the center of focus, the experience of the Mother Supreme is enhanced, the teachings of Jesus are truly experienced and lived, and the guidance of the Spirit binds both human and superhuman forces in unified universal purpose. We seek a revelatory education where unseen helpers are sought out for guidance and direction, where angelic guardians facilitate our activities to promote spiritual objectives, and all our Divine Adjusters are fully engaged by the dedication of our mortal wills. To achieve this level of consciousness training requires our united choice as individuals and as an organized movement committed to living the teachings of the UB through prayer, worship, and service. If our revelatory education achieves those objectives, then our trust in the morontian experience will deepen as individual Jesusonians, as groups, and as the Urantia Movement.
In the past, truth has grown rapidly and expanded freely when the cult has been elastic, the symbolism expansile. . . . Regardless of the drawbacks and handicaps, every new revelation of truth has given rise to a new cult, and even the restatement of the religion of Jesus must develop a new and appropriate symbolism. Modern men and women must find some adequate symbolism for their new and expanding ideas, ideals, and loyalties. This enhanced symbol must arise out of religious living, spiritual experience. And this higher symbolism of a higher civilization must be predicated on the concept of the Fatherhood of God and be pregnant with the mighty ideal of the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity. . . . The new cult must, like the old, foster sentiment, satisfy emotion, and promote loyalty; but it must do more: it must facilitate spiritual progress, enhance cosmic meanings, augment moral values, encourage social development, and stimulate a high type of personal religious living. The new cult must provide supreme goals of living which are both temporal and eternal—social and spiritual. . . . If the new cult could only be dynamic instead of static, it might really contribute something worthwhile to the progress of humankind, both temporal and spiritual. [UB 87:7.5-9]
Dr. Bruce Jackson is a retired college music and humanities teacher and administrator who lives in Columbia, Missouri. He is a trained musician who now works as a jazz and contemporary Christian music bassist, cellist, guitarist, and vocalist. He enjoys writing on The Urantia Book, and composes prayers, poetry, and music for worship. The UB found him in 1979 after reading the opening paragraphs of Paper 1 while listening to Oscar Peterson and Ray Brown. Within 12 hours he found a local bookstore and purchased the $25 copy that still sits on his desk.
| Urantia Book - A Spiritual Path | Volume 19, Number 1, 2019 (Summer) — Index | Mobilizing a Dispensation of Planetary Rehabilitation |