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A Clarion Call

A Clarion Call

Are we proclaiming the Kingdom of God or are we engaged in just another academic study of yet another spiritual text? Are we letting the light of truth shine through us in service and action? Are we a beacon on the hill to those around us? KEN HELSLEY has some soul-searching questions for the Urantia community.

"We have to do more. The harvest is ripe, it's time to bring it in."

I love The Urantia Book. I found the book about eight years ago and have developed the habit of reading through it at least once a year. 

I had spent several years searching for meaning within my faith. I was sixty years old and had come out of the traditional Christian church where I grew up and served on committees, as a deacon, and even as a full-time employee for a church at one point. But I felt lost and so I began searching for something more. 

It took several years and several faulty paths before I found what I had longed for in The Urantia Book. When I first saw it on a bookstore shelf, I felt like it just jumped off the shelf and into my hand. Throughout those years of searching, I never lost my faith in God; I just knew something was missing in my understanding of God.

After reading The Urantia Book for some time, I felt I needed to find other readers to study with, so I went online and found a local group that met not too far from my home. When Covid hit, we had to disband. I then found a remote group, and over the years I’ve met and studied with several live and virtual groups and forums. I’ve truly loved every moment of every group and study session I have been involved in. 

I’ve always been impressed with the level of intellectual scholarship I’ve found among Urantia Book readers. In these groups, I’ve met and conversed with college professors, corporate executives, football coaches, nurserymen, full-time homemakers, and just about everyone in between. Every conversation has been insightful, encouraging, and stimulating, and I knew I had found my community among Urantia Book readers.

Is Our Message about the Book or of the Book?

As has become my habit, in 2024 I re-started my journey through the Foreword and 196 papers of the book. Every time I’ve done this, I’ve been amazed at what has caught my attention that didn’t seem to stay with me from a previous reading or study session. This time was no exception. 

As I was going through Part IV, “The Life and Teachings of Jesus,” something new and very startling struck me, a nagging sense that we (the Urantia community) might be heading down the same road that the early Christians trod two millennia before: are we creating a community “about,” The Urantia Book rather than one based on the message “of,” the book?

The message that Michael of Nebadon came to deliver to the world was quite simple: the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. His message was about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. For all our scholarly research, philosophical discussions, and love for the Fifth Epochal Revelation, are we missing the entire point of The Urantia Book? 

The book tells us that sooner or later another is due to arise proclaiming “the kingdom of God is at hand”—meaning a return to the high spiritual concept of Jesus, who proclaimed that the kingdom is the will of his heavenly Father dominant and transcendent in the heart of the believer. (170.5.19) Is it time for us to recapture that message and begin proclaiming it as Jesus instructed his apostles and disciples to do? We in the Urantia Book community talk a great deal about the book, but, unless we’re studying a particular paper where it is included, we talk very little about the Kingdom of Heaven. 

The Jewish people of Jesus’s day and the early Christians had many ideas about the Kingdom of Heaven, usually based on their understanding of a physical, material kingdom here on earth. Not much has changed in that view over these last two millennia. But The Urantia Book makes it unmistakably clear that what Jesus is proclaiming is a spiritual kingdom that arises within each individual and changes each of us in such a way that the world itself will change along with us:

“It therefore is evident that the true and inner religion of the kingdom unfailingly and increasingly tends to manifest itself in practical avenues of social service. Jesus taught a living religion that impelled its believers to engage in the doing of loving service. But Jesus did not put ethics in the place of religion. He taught religion as a cause and ethics as a result.” (170.3.8)

This begs the question: are we proclaiming the Kingdom of God or are we engaged in just another academic study of yet another spiritual text?

“The Kingdom,” to the Jews, was the Israelite community, to the Gentiles it became the Christian church. “To Jesus the kingdom was the sum of those individuals who had confessed their faith in the fatherhood of God, thereby declaring their wholehearted dedication to the doing of the will of God, thus becoming members of the spiritual brotherhood of man.” (170.5.11)

What Are We Doing to Proclaim the Kingdom?

The Urantia Book’s teachings are now about 100 years old, if you include the very first messages delivered to the “sleeping subject.” Today, we stand at a crossroads, one that can lead us down the path of true righteousness or down that old path of dogma, creeds, and separate castes and factions within the Urantia community. 

The Urantia community stands at a crossroads

In my search for deeper Urantia Book understanding and study materials I have come across several different factions of the Urantia community who seem to have gone off to do their own thing. There is of course the major discord that erupted between the Urantia Brotherhood and Urantia Foundation. We are all aware of that rift, which may, after a long time, finally be healing. Some factions base their practices and beliefs on The Urantia Book. Another group believes a Teaching/Magisterial mission has begun and purports to practice  communication with morontia and spiritual  entities, while others have taken this sort of practice to an even greater extreme. I will not discuss the merits of any of these movements, but only ask the question: what are we doing within each of these movements to proclaim the Kingdom of Heaven, the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man, to the masses? 

We have been given the clearest, most unequivocal, and most astounding revelation that any generation has ever been given. We can know and understand things about the Kingdom that no generation before us could because we are the first generation capable of understanding these things on a technological and spiritual level.

So what are we doing with it, other than engaging in academic study?

I am not calling for the setting up of any kind of formal religion. The Urantia Book itself tells us that organizations lead to control and dogma. Rather, I am asking each one of us, individually, what we are doing with the message that our sovereign Creator incarnated in the flesh to teach us: the message about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, and that our Father in Heaven lives within each of us.

A Book That's "Too Hard"

I’ve been engaged in several discussions stemming from the growing awareness among Urantia Book students that we are an aging population. In fact, the average age of the groups I have studied with was the late sixties to mid-seventies. Some are even in their nineties now. I know there are some younger people in the community—I’ve seen their pictures in group photos—but they are few in number. So what are we doing to attract more members into the Kingdom at a younger age? 

I was studying The Urantia Book in my office at home one day when my 11-year-old granddaughter happened to be over, and she asked, “Grandpa, what are you reading?” So I showed her and asked, “Would you like to read some with me?” “Sure, she replied.” So we read a couple of paragraphs in a paper I was studying and she looked very confused. “That’s too hard,” she said.

While she’s still young, it’s the reaction that most people have: The Urantia Book is a very complicated book. Its average reading comprehension score is college or graduate level. If our answer to an earnest inquiry about what we believe is to hand a young, impressionable mind a 2000-page tome and say, “Oh, you want to know what I believe? Here read this,” then the most common response is always going to be, “That’s too hard.” 

You don’t decide to “get in shape” after years of sedentary living by signing up to run a marathon. You start with the basics and work your way up to the bigger task; you make marathon running your ultimate goal. In school, we need to learn our ABCs before we can learn spelling and sentence structure.

The Revelation is Meant for This Generation

I’m old enough to remember the mid to late 1960s. I was still a kid, but I remember there was a huge revival in the Christian churches, at least here in America. It was called the Jesus movement. It was sparked by a bunch of radical, flower power-driven preachers who had just begun to preach the message of love and peace in the name of Jesus. They met in open-air spaces, public parks, beaches, and town squares. It was powerful. Tens of thousands of people were able to know Christ from this movement. Its message was simple: “Jesus loves you.”

Unfortunately, these preachers made the same fatal mistake as their predecessors when they sought to build congregations and organizations and obtain land and build buildings, which became just as mainstream as the churches their congregants were rejecting through the hippie and flower-power movement with their “turn on, tune in, and drop out” attitude.

The youth of this world are ready for change

I have often heard it said among the Urantia community that this revelation was meant for another generation before it could catch fire. I believe that generation has arrived. Young people all over the world are turning on, tuning in, and dropping out once again. China is undergoing a major “Lying Flat” movement where young people have just given up. Third-world countries are the only ones still producing young people in large enough numbers to replace older and dying elders, and are ripe for a major upwelling of youthful revival. Europe is floundering in decline and its youth are wondering what future they will have if things don’t change, and soon. America has a huge disparity between the wealthy elite and the deepest poverty. Its youth are aimlessly migrating looking for a better life anyplace they can find it, while surveys show that upward of 69% of young people 25 and under live in constant anxiety about the future.

But one thing above all else is clear: that the youth of this world are ready for a change. They are crying out for something new and different. 

We have the answer. We have the message: the Kingdom of Heaven (a spiritual kingdom) is within each of us, we all have one Father in Heaven and we are all brothers and sisters of that same spiritual Father. It’s time we are about our Father’s business, declare this truth to the world, and proclaim the Kingdom of God. 

I’m not advocating that we all take to the parks and beaches to hold rallies, although if you are inclined to do so and are a gifted speaker, I’m sure it would be welcomed by the youth of most nations. Rather, I am saying that we must each begin to let the light of truth shine through us through service and action, so that it will be unmistakable to the world around us that we are members of the Kingdom of God.

When the Jews rejected this message, the Father gave it to the Gentiles. When the Gentiles missed the point entirely, he gave the Fifth Epochal Revelation to the entire world through The Urantia Book. Are we going to be yet another generation who is stuck in academic debates and mired in dogma and sectarianism, or are we going to be about the Father’s business and start proclaiming the truth in a way that can be understood and spread? 

Jesus did not go about the countryside and into the towns and the villages with a Torah in hand proclaiming the law. He went about with nothing but the clothes on his back and taught the simple message of the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, and that the Kingdom of Heaven is within. 

Are You a Beacon on the Hill?

Each one of us in the  Urantia community may want to ask themselves: what am I doing to let the light of truth of the Kingdom shine through me? Am I a beacon on the hill to those around me and in my local community? Am I living the Father’s WILL in my life? 

We have to do more. The harvest is ripe, it’s time to bring it in.

Let us be reminded of Jesus’s words: “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.” (159.3.8)

Ken Helsley is a retired Federal employee who lives in Bastrop, Texas. He has been a Urantia Book reader for eight years and since retiring, has dedicated himself to becoming a better disciple of our Father in Heaven.