© 2018 Marvin Gawryn
© 2018 The Urantia Book Fellowship
by Marvin Gawryn
I have had the great pleasure, over the past few decades, of participating in many events in the national and international interfaith movements. The four Parliaments of the World’s Religions in Capetown, Barcelona, Melbourne and most recently in Salt Lake City, have been life-transforming experiences, and great opportunities for booth participation and sharing of the Urantia Book. The Toronto Parliament, from November 1-7 this year, is likely the last time the Parliament will be held on this continent for several years, so if you’ve ever thought of going, now’s the time! 
Here’s the link with all the details: https://www.parliamentofreligions.org/parliament/2018-toronto/2018-powr .
Also, with the Urantia Book Fellowship being a member of NAIN (North American Interfaith Network), attending the annual NAIN conferences has offered rich opportunities to enjoy relationships with progressive religionists from many traditions, and share the revelation in diplomatic ways.
Since I also work as the Executive Director of the Interfaith Council of Southern Nevada, I was lucky enough to attend three interfaith conferences back-to-back this summer over seven days: the North American Assembly of URI (United Religions Initiative) and the Re-Imagining Interfaith conference, both in the Washington D.C. area; and the NAIN gathering in Edmonton (as a representative of the Fellowship).
The entire week was full of stand-out memories, but a couple of them at NAIN were especially touching. One of the plenary presenters was Rome o Dallair, who was the head of the U.N. forces in Rwanda during the time of the genocide in that country; his presentation one evening on that experience was very powerful. But earlier that afternoon, I had had the wonderful opportunity of talking for a couple of hours with a gentleman who had come all the way from Rwanda, a Tutsi who had survived the Hutu massacres, and was doing trauma recovery work with other survivors. He was very interested in hearing about a process of spiritual reparenting I was familiar with, and we shared some very powerful collaboration and bonding. The two experiences together were very moving.
And then there was a great conversation on our “worship sites” tour bus with a retired UCC minister, about many things - one of which was a book he was writing on how other traditions view Jesus. I pulled up my handy-dandy UB phone app and shared a few of my favorite Jesus passages, and an overview of the book, since he seemed interested. He’d had the book for years in his library, but found it too strange and overwhelming on first look, and had never read it. His parting comment was, “Well, the takeaway from this talk is, I definitely have to have a section in my book on the Urantia Book’s view of Jesus!” A sweet capper to a chock-full week of interfaith sharing!