© 1996 Meredith Sprunger
© 1996 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
We are repeatedly reminded that we live in a secular society. In recent decades we have experienced an erosion of values and a decline in our sense of security. The threat of a nuclear holocaust, the Vietnam war, the pervasive use of drugs, and the rise in crime and violence have undermined our confidence in our materialistic-secular civilization. There is a growing longing for something more substantial. Western Civilization is searching for a new dimension of spirituality. Phyllis Tickle in Rediscovering the Sacred: Spirituality in America (Crossroad, 1995, $19.95) observes that the sale of religious books has gone up 59% since 1992, and a Gallup study predicts the demand for books on spirituality will increase by 82% by 2010 .
There is a noticeable distinction in contemporary society between religion and spirituality, between religious institutions and spiritual reality. Today’s interest in the sacred, the transpersonal, does not run along traditional lines. Traditional religious institutions are on the decline — this, according to the 1994 Barna Survey Report (Virtual America), includes the shrinkage of Evangelicalism in the United States. People are searching for spirituality outside of the church or synagogue. Tickle believes that if the present day church is to seriously engage in the contemporary search for a new dimension of spirituality, it must be more intentionally critical of its own interpretations of religious life. Slight course corrections will not be enough; Americans, Phyllis Tickle thinks, are groping toward a second reformation, a transforming spiritual encounter that has the potential of bringing a renaissance in contemporary religion.
As readers of The Spiritual Fellowship Journal will recognize, this has been our basic theme since we started publishing the Journal in 1991. We believe mainline Christian Churches, through evolutionary experience, are poised to discover the transforming spiritual vision presented in The Urantia Book. With this discovery of the Fifth Epochal Revelation, these churches will not only regain their spiritual relevancy, they will become frontline churches in our culture.