In the closing years of the 20th century, the Urantia movement has survived several perilous periods.  Many of the organizations involved with The Urantia Book have come under attack--not from atheists, Christian fundamentalists, or militant materialists, but from readers of The Urantia Book!

The Urantia movement has suffered its most bitter and divisive attacks from individuals and factions within the Urantia movement itself!

But it's time for healing.

As never before in the history of this epochal revelation, we need to talk, to fellowship, to meet and mediate, to support each other, to love each other, and to pray for each other.  We need a spiritual renaissance right here and right now within our own community, the community of readers of

The Urantia Book. 

How can we teach or lead others to have a spiritual renaissance unless we first have one ourselves--as individuals and as group of religionists?

"Only transformed individuals can create a transformed world.  Only better men and women can fashion a better society.  Only spiritually advanced citizens can architect a spiritually advanced civilization."

These words are true of the Urantia movement as well.

During her last days at St. Joseph's Hospital in Chicago, Emma Christensen spoke of the need for spiritual unity within the Urantia community.  Her expression of the need for spiritual unity became a Urantia Foundation policy when, about two years ago, the Trustees formally called for unity

and cooperation among readers and reader groups.

The Trustees felt that fences needed to be mended and bridges needed to be built.  We still feel this way.  We must accept one another as we are--with all our faults, failings, sins, and shortcomings.  We need to get out of the swamps of interpersonal and inter-organizational animosity.

If we don't stop fussing and fighting, this revelation may falter, and it would be all our faults.

You may disagree with me on many matters and I with you.  But we must ever remember that we are still brothers and sisters.

Everyone who reads and believes The Urantia Book is part of a divinely blessed family. But the bitter sibling rivalries among our numbers have simply got to stop.

We may not all like one another, but we are COMMANDED to love one another. Said Jesus, "Love one another even as I have loved you.  And by this will all men know that you are my disciples if you thus love one another." (1944:04)  And this we must do!

There once was a teenaged boy in Oklahoma, where I grew up, who asked a young woman, who was resisting his advances, if she thought she could learn to love him.  And she replied, "I suppose so.  I learned to eat spinach."

Likewise, it may be difficult to make friends with people with whom we have had dire disagreements, caustic confrontations, and acrimonious arguments. We may never in this lifetime--nor in eternity--come to full agreement with each other on every single matter.  But we absolutely must forgive one another. And we must learn to love one another.  

We are all in the same boat, and that boat has been leaking in several places.  We need to repair it and resume our thrilling voyage through the uncharted waters before us as one unified crew doing the many tasks at hand, as best we each are able.

We cannot go on in ill will any longer.

WITH good will, almost anything is possible; WITHOUT good will, almost nothing is.

We may not all agree on what to DO about disunity in our young movement. But perhaps we CAN agree on what NOT to do.

We may disagree about what ARE the solutions to our present problems, but perhaps we CAN agree on what are NOT the solutions to our present problems. 

Cruelty and suspicion are not the solutions.  Malice and defamation are not the solutions.

We must learn to love and to forgive.  None of us want to see our young movement become just one more desperately divided denomination, spending more energy in infighting than outreach.

Nor do we want to devolve into some cult of Fifth Epochal Fanatics who systematically stone their prophets and lampoon their leaders.

I have long believed that if each student of The Urantia Book were to give a quick kick in the rear to his or her greatest enemy, none of us would be able to sit down for a week. We would all be sore from kicking ourselves! Luckily, God made it difficult to kick ourselves and to pat ourselves on the back.

We create the majority of our own problems. If you've got your guardian angels drinking three bottles of Maalox a day, it's time to reevaluate your life.  It's time to reassess your plan. It's time to make some changes. It's time to stop shaking fists and start shaking hands.

If we would transform this world, we must not hammer it with hatred but illumine it with love.

And now is the time for action.  In the words of Yogi Berra, when you come to a fork in the road, take it.

We have come to that fork in the road.  Some of us may like each other, others of us may not like each other-but we all have to live with each other.  And we are supposed to love one another. The Urantia movement needs fewer pointing fingers and more helping hands. We must turn our focus from the gossip of the kingdom to the gospel of the kingdom.

The former U.S. ambassador to Russia in the early 1990s, Robert Strauss, said in a CNN interview, "You can have allies in this world with whom you have many disagreements, but you can still be allies because you have so much in common with each other in your purpose and direction."  He cited U.S. relations with China, Japan, Israel, and Russia as examples.

In the Urantia movement, we need to maintain alliances with other God-knowing kingdom believers, even if we may have many points of disagreement with them. After all, if Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization could finally sit down and talk together, why can't the different factions in the Urantia movement?

If we are to bring spiritual renewal upon this planet, we first must bring it to our own ranks.

But in order to renew the Urantia movement, I will have to begin with me. You will have to begin with you.  The Trustees will have to begin with the Trustees, the Fellowship with the Fellowship, the IUA with the IUA, and so on down the line. 

As tempting as it may be for each of us to call somebody else to repentance, the uncomfortable truth is that I will have to begin with MY self, just as you will have to begin with YOUR self.

My father use to say that if each of us sweeps the sidewalk in front of his house or business, then all the sidewalks in town will be clean.  And that is what we need to do today.  All of us--Foundation people, IUA people, Fellowship people, Jesusonians, Foggers, Synergists, Undershepherds, Morningstar people, Teaching Mission people, channelers, anti-channellers, and everybody else, including those without name and number who don't know what on earth to think about all the controversies of recent years--we, each and every one of us, must become a representative of reconciliation, a focus of forgiveness, a person of contagious kindness and love. Only then can we fulfill the mandate of the master--that we love one another.

In Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address in Washington, D.C. on March 4, 1861 he said, "...in your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.  The government will not assail you.  You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.  You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect and defend' it."

Lincoln continued: "We are not enemies but friends.  We must not be enemies.  Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.  The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

This statement of Lincoln's, changed slightly to apply to all of us who read The Urantia Book, might read something like this: "Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.  The mystic cords of memory and love-which stretch between each one of us and between every heart, mind, and soul of every participant in our young movement and beyond--will yet swell the chorus of unity and brotherhood when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

There is an old saying that "life is too short to live in ill will." And that is true.  But life is ALSO too LONG to live in ill will, for soon the days become decades, the years become lifetimes.

Who among us can bear to live in smoldering resentment until his dying day? Who among us, in his right mind, would willingly nurture and brood over personal and organizational animosities, over past wrongs and grievances "til death do us part?" Surely, not one of us!

The hour has come to call a permanent cease-fire to the interpersonal and inter-organizational civil war which has raged for more than a decade in the Urantia movement.  We must make peace. 

Back in my home state of Oklahoma, every spring we would ride along the property lines of our ranch, mending fences.  And today, in the springtime of the new millennium, the mending of interpersonal fences should be our paramount task.  We must repair our broken relationships with love, forgiveness, and reconciliation--with kind acts and cooperative behaviors. 

Remember when the Apostle John was so old, weak, and feeble that he had to be carried into meetings in a chair.  Remember "when at the close of the service he was asked to say a few words to the believers, for years his only utterance was, 'My little children, love one another.'" (1554:04) That is exactly what we have to do...beginning here and beginning now.

We have tried other remedies and had precious little success.

We know love works--if it's true love, for...."All true love is from God, and man receives the divine affection as he himself bestows this love upon his fellows.  Love is dynamic.  It can never be captured.  It is alive, free, thrilling, and always moving.  Man can never take the love of the father and imprison it within his heart.  The father's love can become real to mortal man only by passing through that man's personality as he in turn bestows this love upon his fellows." (1289:3)

Where there is love, there are always miracles. 

We know love works.  It always has, and it always will. 

We are called to experience and then share God's love.

We must love one another. 

We must love one another.