We have been told to “foster a religion.” This striking directive was explored in my last post. As you may recall, I depicted boomer Urantians as culturally biased against the trappings of socialized religion.

But what about the generations that will follow the boomers?

Gen X, Y, and Z will, no doubt, be confronting times of acute epochal crisis. But epochal revelation is designed to rise to such an occasion—under the right conditions.

Again, many members of these generations will be navigating a hardscrabble life of scarcity, disease, and conflict. Out of sheer necessity, these future readers must do more than before. They must reach higher and dig deeper.

Bearing this in mind, let’s re-engage with Revelatory Commission’s guidance issued in the mid-twentieth century, which I believe are universally applicable. And, for the sake of argument, let’s assume our movement does not collapse into obscurity during the generational hand-off from the boomers.

Fostering Rich Varieties of Religion

Given the conditions of the coming decades, education about the revelation will need to be supplemented by face-to-face religious communities devoted to gospel truth.

Some of these groups will be hybrid or entirely digital. But for now, let’s envision the case of in-person meetings. These assemblies will be the most effective, and some will gather in large homes and others in abandoned churches.

These will become places of safety, shelter, singing, sharing, bonding, and healing. Congregations that prefer formality will be uplifted by elegant rites, visionary art, and celebrations of the sacrament of remembrance. Others will choose Quaker-style silence, bearing in mind what Rodan taught us: “Meditation makes the contact of mind with spirit; relaxation determines the capacity for spiritual receptivity.”

Given such diversity of religious expression, the updated gospel teachings of Part IV will begin to flourish, drawing new followers to these openly UB-based communities.

Meanwhile, Urantia Book study will be a crucial option on the menu. Like Bible study in churches, UB study will be available just down the hall, perhaps on Tuesday nights.

There will also be distinguished visiting lecturers, and traveling preachers and evangelists will circulate, proclaiming the new gospel. Down another hall you’ll find a library with secondary works, scholarly writings, books by human sources, and classic Christian literature.

Thanks to such institutional support, hundreds and eventually thousands of advanced practitioners will emerge. At Rodan Institute we like to call this the cosmic religion of the future—that is, the holistic approach inclusive of body, mind, soul, spirit, community, planet, and cosmos.

The benign UB-based cults of the coming decades will express the positive purposes of religious socialization found at 99.6.2. They will not act out the many hazards listed at 99:6.3 that we painfully considered last time. We will have grown up, having learned the lessons of church history! It will be our homecoming, as Marvin Gawryn calls his pioneering effort to foster the socialization of religion among us.

Is This a Declaration We Can Trust?

What might be the co-creative role of the revelators, including the mysterious Revelatory Commission, in such futuristic developments?

Recall that the Urantia Foundation’s Declaration of Trust calls for “the fostering of a religion, a philosophy, and a cosmology” as its Principal Object. By all accounts, this is a weighty statement and a mighty challenge.

And what of any additional instructions? For example, just as prominent (and equally as mysterious, at least to me) is the Publication Mandate. It calls for the training of leaders and teachers, translations into other languages, and the creation of thousands of study groups. Oddly, it does not call for the fostering of religion.

And, like the quoted language in the Declaration of Trust, the Publication Mandate is attributed to the Revelatory Commission, said to be chaired by Mantutia Melchizedek.

The Publication Mandate was compiled by unnamed members of the General Council and “presented on April 4, 1955 . . . for the files of the Executive Committee.” If so, is the original still sitting in that file cabinet?

Did the Revelators Provide Other Instructions?

In this connection, let’s listen to movement historian Barbara Newsom, a founding board member of the Urantia Book Historical Society. These two documents, Barbara says, don’t exhaust the list of directives that were supposed to be passed on to posterity. There is an additional body of essential statements, according to Newsom, that are still not widely known and understood by our movement leaders. We will explore her claims in a future post.

On the other hand, another respected veteran reader, David Kantor, is one of many who challenge such claims of special mandates and instructions. After my last post, he wrote me to say that these supposed directives (such as fostering a religion or creating thousands of study groups) are “a human construct representing the best thinking of 1950.” He also writes: “I think it is an error to take them seriously. . . .They represent the personal ideologies of certain Forum members and perhaps one or two of the contact commissioners.”

I welcome my good friend’s objections, because these crucial issues need much more examination.

The Revelators Are Only Pointing Out the Obvious

Again, we’ll go deeper in future posts. But for now, I want to argue that the revelators are simply stating the obvious. In other words, they are not only making an appeal to their own authority as the eminent members of the supernatural Revelatory Commission. They are also hearkening to common sense.

In other words, even if these ideas are a human construct, they’re still intuitively valid.

Religions metabolize higher truths and convert them into living love. They foster daily practices that advance us toward fusion with our Indwelling Spirit. And such acts of cultivation undeniably have a group dimension, as is the case with all other existing religions on our planet.

The revelators were pointing out what is readily apparent to anyone who has studied the history of religion—and then they are giving it an extra push. Evidently, we need that impetus. We’re denizens of a rebellion planet, and appeals to divine authority help us break the mold of the dark past.

In that day of liberation, we will give fervent daily attention to our interior lives in the form of spiritual practices that are often punctuated by reverential group processes—or what we once called churches!