© 2002 Larry Mullins
© 2002 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
| The Greatest Thing Richard Feynman Bver Wrote | Spring 2002 — Index | Great Urantians. Lest We Forget — Peggy Johnson |
On a bright Colorado afternoon in June, The Spiritual Fellowship conducted its first worship service at the historic “Old Main” building on the campus of the University of Colorado. During the service, The Spiritual Fellowship also conducted the ordination of Dr. Meredith Sprunger as its first minister. The essence of Dr. Sprunger’s ordination address, in which he sketched out his vision for The Spiritual Fellowship, can be read in his column in this publication, Creative Outreach.
It was an emotional day in the red brick Old Main building. Those of us who have known Dr. Sprunger are aware of his long held dream for a spiritual fellowship of Urantians driven by the religious principles of the Urantia Papers. I suspect his mainstream career as a minister in the United Church of Christ would have been much smoother had he avoided any leadership roles in the Urantia movement.
However, it was the vision of Dr. Sprunger to interface the teachings of The Urantia Book with the Christian church. To this end, he has long sought to develop a religious organization based upon the Urantia Revelation. With the institution of The Spiritual Fellowship, a bold step has been made in that direction. Perhaps, one day the prophetic hope expressed by the Urantia Papers will come true:
“The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must not be longer sacrificed to even the splendid concept of the glorified Christ. What a transcendent service if, through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his name, and to all other religions! Surely the Christian fellowship of believers will not hesitate to make such adjustments of faith and of practices of living as will enable it to ‘follow after’ the Master in the demonstration of his real life of religious devotion to the doing of his Father’s will and of consecration to the unselfish service of man. Do professed Christians fear the exposure of a self-sufficient and unconsecrated fellowship of social respectability and selfish economic maladjustment? Does institutional Christianity fear the possible jeopardy, or even the overthrow, of traditional ecclesiastical authority if the Jesus of Galilee is reinstated in the minds and souls of mortal men as the ideal of personal religious living? Indeed, the social readjustments, the economic transformations, the moral rejuvenations, and the religious revisions of Christian civilization would be drastic and revolutionary if the living religion of Jesus should suddenly supplant the theologic religion about Jesus.” [UB 196:1.2]
| The Greatest Thing Richard Feynman Bver Wrote | Spring 2002 — Index | Great Urantians. Lest We Forget — Peggy Johnson |