© 2016 Avi Dogim, Meredith J. Sprunger, Peter Laurence
© 2016 The Urantia Book Fellowship
¶ Planners Diligent as Joint Conference Draws Nearer
The summer conference/summer study session of 2016 is gaining momentum! The In This Issue first plenary will begin Thursday evening, June 9, and the conference will concludes at noon on Sunday, June 12. The organizing entities are the Lone Star Urantia Association and the Education Committee of the Fellowship. www.Urantia-LSUA.org is also the address at which people should register, if they haven’t already. There is still plenty of time to be a part of what promises to be a warm and spiritual gathering of reunion and education.
Katrina Glavan-Heise of the LSUA is the overall head of the details, registration, and logistics for the conference. She wants people to know that there is scholarship money for which individuals may apply. “At our website where it describes the conference is a button to apply for a scholarship: www.Urantia-LSUA.org.” Katrina added that 2016 UAUS/Fellowship conference attendees wishing to rent should use the specific Budget Customer Discount (BCD) number of U001963 when they call Budget at 1-800-842-5628 to make a reservation. The BCD is effective from 7 days prior to the event until 7 days after the conference. The BCD number will automatically be placed in the reservation detail when used with this hyperlink: Reservation. (You can also use the active link in the March mini-Messenger.)
Budget Discount for Lone Star Urantia Association 2016. Katrina and Sherry are also looking for IT experts for various needs at the conference.
Sherry Layton, of the Fellowship Education Committee, who chairs the Program Committee for this Summer Study Session, which also includes David Glass, David Linthicum, and Neda Tehrani, announced that there are several applications to either present at plenaries or to give a workshop in the wake of February 29 deadline for applications. These highlights for the conference will be announced soon, including the main talks. The theme of the conference is “Jesus, the Master Teacher.” It will include special events Saturday night and presentations by dedicated readers of The Urantia Book. There will be a prayer of dedication before each plenary, along with keeping the inspirational videos and music led by Gaetan Charland will precede each plenary. Sherry said, “A full program will be presented soon that encapsulates all activities, from Tuesday through Sunday.”
There are also a number of non-conference events planned before and after the conference itself. Bobbie Dreier and Gard Jameson will host a pre-conference retreat form Tuesday evening till Thursday noon, as they have before several Summer Study Sessions. Spots for this event are nearly filled. The Council of Presidents of the UAI will host a meeting, as will the Fellowship’s General Council (after the conference). The GC meeting open to observers. During the day on Thursday, the Fellowship Membership Committee will host a gathering that will include a Society Conclave, and the education committees of the Fellowship, Foundation, and the UAI plan to meet again, on Thursday afternoon, in joint session. More details will follow.
The Urantia Book Fellowship and the Urantia Association United States are anticipating a wonderful gathering of readers of The Urantia Book of all affiliations to renew friendships, make new friends, and study “Jesus, the Master Teacher” in an atmosphere that is both spiritual and educational.
“The world needs what we have to give. As a movement, we are blessed to work towards developing a united front, a spirit of oneness on behalf of a common cause. When the world observes how we love each other, it will be more willing to give us a hearing. Some may even go on to embrace the truths they perceive we have already discovered.” –Sherry Layton
¶ Pipeline of Light
Dear Friends,
In the final quarter of 2015, our busy Pipeline of Light volunteers placed one hundred ninety-eight copies of The Urantia Book into fifteen countries. Your donations to the Pipeline helped us deliver books to readers and study groups in the Philippines, the United States, Nigeria, Chile, Canada, Ecuador, Indian, Guatemala, Uganda, Colombia, El Salvador, Korea, and Peru. We scored a new Pipeline country, Singapore.
The current efforts bring our Pipeline all-time totals to six thousand, fifteen copies of The Urantia Book placed into eighty-five countries around the world. Many thanks to the wonderful volunteers who keep this flow of books moving into the world for us!
We deeply appreciate the contributions of our volunteers and our donors. If you would like to contribute to this work, donations can be made online at: www.urantiabook.org/urantia-book-store/ contributions or by mail to: The Urantia Book Fellowship, PO Box 6631, Broomfield, CO 80021
Thank you so much for your support.
¶ Why would you donate to a Urantia organization like The Urantia Book Fellowship?
Well, because if you are reading The Urantia Book you know what it means to be spiritually hungry and you know firsthand what a difference the revelation makes when your soul is truly fed.
Further, you’ve probably experienced the ardent search for meaning and know how good it feels to find spiritual teachings that actually make sense. You probably remember how it feels to wonder, “Is God really that way?” “Who am I and how do I fit in?” “What is the value and purpose of my life?” “Why does God let evil exist?” “Why does God let good people suffer?” You know how confusing it can be when, in the process of sincerely questioning, one is confronted with the rigidity of dogmatic fundamentalism on one side and the emptiness of faithless secular science on the other.
Jesus described the pain of the search well when he poignantly said, “The world is filled with hungry souls who famish in the very presence of the bread of life; men die searching for the very God who lives within them. Men seek for the treasures of the kingdom with yearning hearts and weary feet when they are all within the immediate grasp of living faith.” [UB 159:3.8]
Those of us who are blessed to have this amazing revelation in our lives know how it feels to have satisfying and logical answers to life’s most perplexing questions. We who read The Urantia Book don’t have to fear death, or see the world as a hopeless mess, or think of God as an offended monarch, a stern and all-powerful ruler whose chief delight is to detect his subjects in wrongdoing and to see that they are adequately punished. We’ve been given a precious gift by being fully liberated from these stultifying beliefs.
Sadly, some people are so spiritually starved that they’ve lost their appetite for spiritual things, even for the truth. Nobody seems to be making much sense or speaking much truth anyway. And yet, the world needs liberating and life giving words of truth now more than ever before and we Urantia Book readers have those words.
We at The Urantia Book Fellowship still burn to share this amazing gift with the world. We haven’t given up on it and we won’t. Someone has to share this sustenance with those who hunger and thirst for it. We’re committed to this project of making the book readily available to all who seek for truth and hunger for righteousness and we’ll keep exploring every opportunity we have to show the world that this book is divinely relevant and sublimely real—that it is in fact, an epochal revelation from a friendly and well-ordered universe.
We’ll get it into the hands of those who long for it but we won’t stop there. Once they have it, we’ll do all we can to bring them together for meaningful socialization around it. In other words, we’ll keep doing what we’ve done for the last 60 years. However, we can’t do it without YOU. We need your help. Are you with us?
Please join us in this great and ongoing project by giving what you can. Make a donation by going to the Fellowship website, www.urantiabook.org and click ‘Donate”, and be at peace knowing that because you did some hungry soul will be fed and that they will find the God of their dreams and know that they are not a cosmic orphan but truly a child of the living GOD.
¶ Mid-year General Council and Executive Committee Meeting
by Larry Bowman, General Councilor
Thirteen of the 14 members of the Executive Committee, which consists of the officers and committee chairs of The Urantia Book Fellowship, arrived at a hotel in Orlando on Thursday, February 18, to participate in a brainstorming session. A few General Councilors not on EC also observed the session. By mid-afternoon on Friday the EC held its business meeting.
After dinner on Friday, 15 more Councilors arrived to be involved in a different brainstorming session, which, like the EC session, was led by Dana Bredemeyer, Judicial Chair. This session continued until mid-afternoon Saturday. That evening Agondonter Boot Camp Society of Florida sponsored a social. There were a few locals from the Orlando area who are not members of Agondonter, but they came to meet other readers of The Urantia Book. The following morning a former Councilor who happened to be in Florida on vacation missed the social but came to observe the Council meeting. When she left on Monday, she remarked that this is the most compatible GC she has seen in years.
One of the first orders of business on Sunday morning was to elect two candidates to vacancies on the Council. The first person elected was Avi Dogim of New Jersey, whom many UB readers will remember. He has served on GC before and was President of the Fellowship. Presently he is a member of the Judicial Committee. The other person elected was Miranda Clendening of Colorado, a second-generation reader. She is serving on the IC ‘17 Planning Committee and also sits in on Youth and Young Adult and International Fellowship Committees.
Cristina Seaborn announced that her term as Interfaith Chair expires in June, and she will be stepping down. She has suggested another member of Interfaith to succeed her, but at the next Council meeting others can be nominated from the floor. Cristina’s term on GC continues until 2018.
There was considerable discussion of IC ‘17. Tim Hobbs is chairman and announced that the conference will be held at University of Denver July 19 - 23.
Councilors Paul M. Anderson of Boston and Guillermo Deoto of Florida, who were elected last summer, were attending their first Council meeting. Miguel Anoba of Colorado, another newcomer, provided transportation service between the Orlando airport and the hotel. He made several roundtrips and did not get lost. He even got up early Friday morning to meet two Councilors who were getting in at 4:30 a.m. Such service!
¶ MM Spring 2016 – New GC Members
Miranda Clendening, a member of the Rocky Mountain Spiritual Fellowship, has already been deeply involved in service activities, both within the Fellowship, and the community. She is a youth counselor, an Interfaith minister, and served on the Family Committee for the 2014 Fellowship International Conference. She hopes to bring an enthusiastic and positive spirit to disseminating The Urantia Book teachings in new and creative ways world-wide, putting most of her time toward family life activities at the 2017 International Conference, and assisting the YaYA committee.
Avi Dogim has been a reader since the 1970s and has served the Fellowship in many capacities since. He is a founding member of the New York Society, a former chairman of the Fellowship’s Membership and Publications Committees, a former Fellowship President, and a current member of the Judicial Committee. He feels that while the Fellowship has already done a great deal to disseminate The Urantia Book teachings, it has the potential to achieve much more through increasingly more effective team work.
“And lead us moment by moment in the pathway of loving service.” [UB 144:5.62]
¶ Societies at Work
The Urantia Society of Greater New York meets bi-monthly at members’ homes for a program of worship, study and business. We rotate responsibilities and encourage creative prayer services and study presentations and workshops. At our November meeting, society members and guests from Ecuador enjoyed an inspired poetic, musical worship service, “Divine Love,” by Nadi Burton (3rd from left) and a professionally prepared presentation, “Fruits of the Kingdom,” by Stuart Kerr (2nd from top right).
USGNY sponsors a midtown New York City study group, and its members host regular study groups in lower Manhattan, Cliffside Park, NJ, and Somers and Goshen, NY. We have sponsored Russian and Korean translations of The Urantia Book and are currently working towards completion of a Turkish translation.
Our Society website offers a powerful new software tool freely available to the readership at-large. This tool, known as The Glossarized Urantia Book, aids in the study and research of The Urantia Book. It incorporates a glossary of key terms into the electronic text for instant access to a pronunciation guide, core definition, and links to instantly preview every occurrence of a term throughout the text.
USGNY’s website also hosts the most robust set of English and multi-lingual search engines available anywhere. All versions may be used online or downloaded for private use.
For more information or to make a contribution to the Turkish translation, please check out our website at www.urantianewyork.org.
If your study group or society has a special activity dedicated to service to the community in some way, please let us know. The unique activities undertaken by individual groups of readers can inspire and intrigue all of us. Contact us at fellowship@urantiabook.org.
¶ 2x2=MORE In Ghana Partnering with the “Spiritual Unity Tour”
by Barbara Maier
Emeka Anazado and his teenage daughter, Maya, live in Lagos, Nigeria.Our International team met them at the Nigerian Book Fair in May of 2012.There the idea of the 2x2=MORE project was born. Emeka had been a steadfast devotee of The Urantia Book, having found it online.He had never met another reader in person.Our 6-person American team had never taken the teachings to Nigeria.What a time it was. We quickly ran out of books and realized we had to do MORE to share these revelatory teachings. Now 4 years later, we are continuing to see this project and the fruits of spirit growing even greater in love and service. We have sent young adult ambassadors to Chile, Guatemala,Thailand, El Salvador, Phillipines and Croatia. (videos can be seen at www.urantiaalaska.org.) The 2x2=MORE project continues to expand and is now in the beginning stages of sponsoring international local readers to reach out into their regional communities.
In March of 2016, Emeka and Maya were sponsored by the Northern Light Society of Alaska to travel to Accra, Ghana. After a 12-hour bus trip, they joined a large group of readers from Ghana who were attending the wonderful concert and activities with Pato Banton and Antoinette Rootsdawtah. Their worldwide service, music and spiritual joy are touching so many people.
“Ghana was great. Pato and Antoinette are a bomb. It’s not just the music, it’s the love, and the spiritual vibes that generate their magic—a magic that saw Christians, Muslims, Rastafarians and traditional worshippers holding hands and worshipping the Universal Father. Even the Muslims and Rastas called Him “father” during prayers. I took their methods, which are agreeable to me, and in line with Jesus’ methods, back to Nigeria for the benefit of my countrymen.”
Ways to financially support our 2x2=MORE efforts can be found on our website www.urantiaalaska.org and by contacting Barb Maier at barbmaier@gmail.com
¶ Upcoming Events…
- Joint Summer Conference, Urantia Book Fellowship & UAI, San Antonio, TX, June 9-12, 2016
- Jesus Birthday in the Holy Lands, Aug. 10, 2016 – Aug. 23, 2016 .
For a special Saturday treat, tune into the “Cosmic Citizen” webcast with call-in 10:00 AM Mountain time. Call-in number for the webcast: www.blogtalkradio.com/CosmicCitizen. Call-in number: 646–716–8158 (North America) during the time the show is live. Archived shows are available.
For a special Tuesday treat, tune into Symmetry of Soul on Blogtalk Radio: www.blogtalkradio.com/symmetryofsoul. 6 pm. Archived shows are available.
¶ The Mighty Messenger Staff
Published by Uversa Press for the Publications Committee of The Urantia Book Fellowship
Members: Linda Buselli, Chair Larry Bowman, Cece Forrester, Sage Waitts
877.288.3772
fellowship@urantiabook.org
www.urantiabook.org