From: Dan Massey (703-404-2202, massey@std.saic.com)
Subject: Whither the Fellowship?

The recent ruling of the three-judge panel of the Federal Appeals Court for the Ninth District in the case of Foundation vs. Maaherra, by reversing the summary judgement of the District Court overturning the copyright in the Urantia Book, has removed the judicial finding on which the Fellowship relied for permission to publish the book independently of Urantia Foundation. While the outworking of legal issues affecting attempts to control the revelation through law is by no means complete, before proceeding further we must assess the risks and costs of various plausible courses of action. In particular, you will hear people say that the time has come for the Fellowship to make an irrevocable choice either to attack Urantia Foundation or, through an "organizational change of heart" to put aside all differences and to seek an intimate association with them. You will hear it said that, unless we choose one path or the other, our Fellowship is doomed to dissolution.

I do not agree at all with this wrongheaded notion about the flexibility of action open to the Fellowship. I am writing to set forth actions that I believe the Fellowship can readily take that are fully consistent with our purpose and mission and that lead to a new, active, and growing role for the Fellowship in the Urantia movement.

It has often been said that, to attract new participants to the Fellowship it is mandatory that we publish our version of the Urantia Book. That failure to do so means that all new readers will inevitably first contact Urantia Foundation, where they will be discouraged from socialization, directed away from contact with active readers, and indoctrinated in a bizarre interpretation of movement history and the revelation itself that gives primacy to the Foundation's Declaration of Trust and the acts of the Trustees above and beyond either the teachings of the book or the ministrations of the Spirit of Truth and the Thought Adjuster.

While I believe this last statement fairly describes the attitude and agenda of the dominant personalities at Urantia Foundation today, I reject the idea that this secular and atheistic stance by the publisher of the book prevents us from alternative effective action. Specifically, I believe we must become much more active and aggressive than we have ever been in getting about the business of the Fellowship. And what is the business of the Fellowship?

I believe the Fellowship achieved an important group identity when we recognized that our role in the Urantia movement was to serve the readership, not to direct the readership. We are at our best when we help readers work together or as individuals to accomplish their own goals for the book. We are at out best when we give readers responsibility to execute projects on behalf of the readership and the authority and resources to fulfill these responsibilities. We are at our best when we liberate readers from the fetters of outworn and ill-conceived social arrangements and empower them to be effective spokespersons for the revelation.

The time has come for us to commit our full resources to the realization of this vision of a universal service organization to the readership. We should evaluate each new initiative in terms of its ability to increase our service function and quality. We should become as aggressive in the promotion and advancement of our service role as we were becoming in publishing and marketing the book and as we were preparing to become in the development and publication of translations. We should work to make sure the world of readers knows we exist and what we stand for. We should use these efforts to draw attention to the Urantia Book (even if we do not publish it) and to help individual readers establish a more permanent and visible presence in the greater social community.

To this end, we should establish and empower visible offices throughout the world and help these offices identify and contact readers, further extending the reach of the hand of unselfish service. To this end, we should advertise our presence within appropriate communities of curiosity and faith, so that more people will learn of the cosmically unifying message of the book and persons already aware of the book will be lead to inquire about and to join our service ministry. To this end, we should make all forms of the Urantia Book, in all translations, freely available worldwide at reasonable cost. To this end, we should compile, publish, and distribute the teaching aids and commentaries we have developed across forty years, through direct and retail channels, that the quality of study and discourse concerning the book may be advanced throughout the readership.

I explicitly reject the idea of some that Uversa Press no longer has a mission to fulfill in the movement. We have expended great effort and energy on bringing this institution into being and establishing a modest position for it in the publishing industry. Even though Uversa Press may withdraw its primary product from distribution, there is no reason we should not use this as a vehicle for publication and dissemination of those materials we are willing to publish. I think we should review all the historical, interpretive, and pedagogic material now on our web page and under consideration for publishing there. From this material, we should assemble a series of books on various aspects of interest to the readership, including movement history, science, abstruse topics, and other special areas. We should publish and distribute this material and other useful secondary works as Uversa Press.

Accomplishing these goals will require a large investment of energy, time, and money. The publication of the Urantia Book was a relatively simple, single target. Our efforts there showed us what we could accomplish by working together. The time has come to put aside narrow personal agendas and narrow concepts of the socialization of the revelation derived from our early contact as readers with the limited and incomplete vision of the Sadler family. We must unite our wills and harmonize our differences to foster the growth of the Fellowship as a pluralistic, universal service organization to the readership.

If we fail in these things, the Fellowship will still survive. But if we fail to try to do these things, perhaps it were better the Fellowship had never been.