Materials for a Study Group
on Family and Community

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Questions on Children and Religious Community

1. What does "community" mean to children of different ages and stages?

2. What are the components of community in general which can be used to help build community for children?

3. How can we provide a framework for children to experience a spiritual community without making it seem exclusive?

4. What role do myths, symbols, rituals play in helping children to experience a sense of community? What is being developed by parents and educators within this movement?

5. What do/can children do for each other within a group to make it cohesive?

6. How can students of The UB break out of the typical "churchy" pattern of children sitting in basements fiddling with paperwork which some adults have formulated in the abstract, and which may be driving them away because of the lack of adventure, beauty, and relevancy to their lives? What activities can be provided for the kids who do not learn or experience through books, paperwork coloring or listening to adults talk?

7. What responsibilities can children have within a spiritual community? What requirements can be asked of children in order to be part of a spiritual community?

8. What are other Urantia groups doing around the country to promote a sense of community for children?

9. What is the difference and power of group religious experience? At what age does the peer group seem to become more important in helping develop a "beyond-family community," or an extended community cohesiveness?

10. What are the developmental stages of the function of community in the religious development of children?

11. How does children's religious community differ from that of adult religious community?

12. What are the basic truths which children would understand/experience that they could find easily in other religious? How do you help children discover the common truths?

13. Children often learn by modeling. What aspects of the adult religious community can they model?

These questions were designed to stimulate discussion on issues related to community:

1. How can we teach children to listen with the ear of their spirit so they grow up in spirit perception?

2. How best to encourage families to return to the family council practices of the Andites (both Urantia Book readers and others)?

3. Once family council practices are used within the family, how could families network together to resolve/mediate larger problems in a community family court?

4. Assuming that the emerging spiritual community is a living expression of the actualization of the finite Deity, the Supreme, how are we, individually and collectively, involved in this process?

5. If the actualization of the Supreme is the new wine, what are the new wineskins?

6. A current definition of "community" seems based on a materialistic viewpoint which limits participation to physical proximity (both personal and geographic). Assuming that this revelation teaches a broadened sense of community in which our citizenship offers experience on a universe scale, with both seen and unseen friends, teachers, and companions, how do we re-define our sense of "community" so that the pathways to this revealed and much broadened experience are illuminated both for ourselves and others?

7. What is the relationship between our souls and the living spiritual community?

8. What is the "Living Temple of Spiritual Fellowship"? How do we build it?

9. How can we be positively aggressive versus reactionary in response to media views of The Urantia Book and movement?

10. How do we provide support for the building of spiritual values within our families and community?

11. The church was the focus of early Christianity. What is to be our nuclear unit--the society, a study group family or individual reader?

12. So many of our readers are outside the traditional family unit--should we give the word family a new meaning as we discuss family values?

13. The Urantia Book is felt to be a complex compilation of teachings. How can we simplify our mission and message?

14. How can we learn to truly love each other; i.e., to nourish each other's souls?

15. Jesus served to check the ego concerns of the disciples and to keep them spiritually directed. How can we stay centered and focused in serving each other and growing spiritually?

16. As we are all God's children, how do we accept diverse life-styles in our fellowship?

17. In simple terms, what do the world's religions have in common and how can we build on the common beliefs?

18. How can we "as revelation believers" keep from having an exclusivistic fellowship develop?

19. What were the positive aspects of the FOG community which those involved found so strong and dear to them? How did this look to outsiders?

20. What are the pitfalls of such a community of well- meaning people dedicated to "doing the Father's will" and "proclaiming the gospel of Jesus" to the world? How did this look to "outsiders"?