Building Revelation Infrastructure

Professionalizing the Urantia movement for global outreach—without imposing an orthodoxy

Rodan, a fervent follower of Jesus, was both an evangelist and a professional philosopher. According to Rodan, the true religionist cultivates a meditative and discerning interior life (160:1.10) and pursues the art of wise and mature living (160:2). But Rodan went wider than that. He also taught that genuine religion is both robustly communal and dynamic in its outreach. In fact, it fosters a union of souls (ha!). Such a union of faith practitioners is able “mobilize group wisdom” and “pool spiritual possessions” (160:2.2). At 160:5.3 he argues lucidly that real religion—if it is not “self-deceived”—raises up inspired individuals who are evangelistic. In other words, and to put it in humorous terms, we Urantians should do much more than foster study groups dominated by left-brained males.

Once upon a time, before paved roads and combustion engines, two of Rodan’s unnamed pupils travelled from Alexandria to Jerusalem, where they “made many converts among the Hellenists.” They catalyzed Stephen, a brilliant young follower of Jesus, to publicly preach “more as Jesus taught”—whereupon, one tragic day, Stephen became the first Christian martyr (see Acts 7 in the Bible). This cathartic event activated Jerusalem to become an outreach hub to the Roman empire. Church history arguably begins from this moment. (See 190:4 for details.)

Here’s a bold question: Is your study group capable of following Rodan to inspire youth to become modern-day apostles for the gospel movement? In this post, I’ll broach how to mobilize existing material resources to take the next step in church history—while leaving behind “churchiness” (as well as fanaticism and martyrdom).

Rodan was a consummate professional in his day, and I argue that we urgently need such competent professionals in our time. So let’s get practical and identify financial resources already available to support this approach, worldwide.

Toward a movement for Urantia Book heterodoxy

Today’s postmodern milieu is a wild confluence of cultures and religious ideas that will never countenance a Urantia-based orthodoxy.

Young people have far more attractive options at their fingertips, and their approach to spirituality is amplified by the AI engines in their palms.

As I have stated in an earlier post (“The Big Crunch”), the well-meaning attempt by boomer Fellowship administrators to create a worship ceremony at the recent Summer Session, replete with grape juice and crunchy wafers and old Christian hymns, was an honest but wrong-headed way to fill the vacuum of real religion in our movement—albeit carried out with good will (and a rather rockin’ band).

Nor should it be in the purview of our major organizations to define in-groups and out-groups. Very oddly, they exclude those who experiment with celestial contact, even though our very movement began with decades of telepathic celestial contact. Suppressing present-day contactees, or for that matter prophets and unorthodox preachers, is a prima facie attempt to impose an orthodoxy.

I advocate that our leading organizations should instead go wide and favor religious freedom. They should not try to fill the worship vacuum they have unwittingly created. They should not exclude exotic practices they have not studied. What they should do is become cheerleaders, catalyzers, funders, trainers, planners, and competent professional administrators whose work is to foster genuine religion out in the field, especially by evangelical youth.

Toward that end, they should create an infrastructure that supports the growth of a wide range of independent ministries, missions, and service experiments, and refrain from competing with them or designing an orthodoxy to regulate them.

Let’s find ways to foster—with material resources—experimental communities and pods of creative evangelists, each with unique expressions and their own home-grown rites, worship practices, and modes of outreach and sermonizing. Let them find each other and pool spiritual possessions as they see fit. This is the most effective way to raise postmodern apostles energized for worldwide outreach in a dangerous and chaotic world.

Bring on the professionals

A key missing piece here is professionalism, a topic I promised to cover in my last post, wherein I also lamented how the Urantia movement is insular and stuck in gridlock, in part because it lacks independent journalistic scrutiny and public accountability.

In other words, if we put on a journalistic hat and look at the raw data, we will quickly realize that we simply need more paid staff, mundane as that sounds. We need people well-trained and highly experienced in the business disciplines and the business methods required to foster a sustainable worldwide outreach movement. And that requires substantial funding—indeed, funds that appear to already be available.

Friends, face it. We are a movement run almost entirely by volunteers and each one is a well-meaning amateur. Most have no professional training for their self-appointed roles in the movement, let alone business-world experience, and many are unaware of church history and the journey of Christian missionaries, for better or worse, over two millennia. The effectiveness of these sincere workers for the revelation is born out by the fact that our movement is increasingly becoming irrelevant, even as the world passes us by.

Sorry to put it so starkly—so please, someone, prove me wrong.

An independent thinker and writer, Ryan McGuire, recently pointed out in an email to movement leaders that “Urantia Foundation and The Urantia Book Fellowship devote only a small portion of their actual expenditures to mission‑aligned outreach.” McGuire brought forward some striking numbers, figures available in a required annual public filing: IRS Form 990. His report is lengthy, but for now we’ll examine its data very briefly, enough to grasp our movement’s out-of-proportion financial ratios.

Did you know that the Urantia Foundation’s (UF) total net assets in 2024 were over $20 million? (See ProPublica). Meanwhile, annual revenue has more than doubled since 2011 to over $2 million, and the UF’s net revenues have been roughly double their expenses in recent years.

Of that, how much do you think went to paid full-time staffers, that is, competent professionals able to manage the spread of the Fifth Epochal Revelation to our troubled world?

Or, put it this way: How many professionals do we have on hand with the profile of a Rodan, a man capable of training the young evangelists who turned Jerusalem upside down?

The UF has only one full-time staffer, the very capable Tamara Strumfeld. All told, wage and salary expenses were about $200,000 in 2024. (See Annual Report.) Friends, do the math and consider these ratios: $20m in net assets, $2m in revenues annually, and $200k annually devoted to salaries and wages.

The Urantia Book Fellowship displays a similar ratio, with just one full-time staffer, the highly skilled and dynamic Geoff Theiss, plus assets of over $3 million and revenues that greatly exceed expenses. (See Cause IQ.)

Enough said for now. I will leave it there, a thread we will pick up again soon.