"Salvington, we have a timing problem"

How the well-meaning Urantia movement missed the ideal window for dissemination, thanks to secrecy, neglect, and complacency.

Keeping confidences is crucial in personal relationships. And while “official secrets” can have a rightful place in social relationships, the abuse of this privilege can be costly to a community. As is well known, strict secrecy was a dominant feature of the early Urantia movement, and for good reason; however, it is less understood that this enforced secrecy lingered on as a cultural habit long after publication of the book in 1955. In fact, I could sense a palpable mentality of public disengagement and social isolation during my visits to 533 in the early 1970s—that is, back in the day when I was a college student in Chicago. It deeply puzzled me and still does, and at some later date I will share anecdotes that support that strong impression.

The “wages” of a culture of secrecy

A more damaging example of excessive secrecy was the theft of historical papers documenting the early Urantia movement. As discussed before, it is an established fact that, in 1979, a trove of rare documents was surreptitiously removed from the drawers of a locked cabinet in the 533 Diversey Parkway office. Some of this precious correspondence had duplicates, but this single act—by someone committed to secrecy!—crippled the mandated effort to disclose and analyze our movement’s earliest history. Ever since, Urantia movement historians have struggled to create a definitive account that covers the first days of the Contact Commission and the earliest years of the movement. Meanwhile, decades have passed without a clear depiction of these world-historic events; plus, we still lack a clear idea of the injunctions that were left behind by the revelators.

Our origin thus remains obscure. And bear in mind that the concept of “origin” is a keystone in the triad of “origin, history, destiny”—a crucial teaching the revelation.

The missing official history reflects the “overhang,” as it were, of the Forum’s secrecy culture. This dilemma is roughly comparable to the eight decades of official UFO secrecy, which has left ufologists with an incoherent series of competing legends and confused folklore about the alleged extraterrestrial presence.

Let’s put it this way: when lack of disclosure goes too far, and when governance is less than transparent, reliable facts are scarce. As a result, honest people engage in groundless speculation; and naturally, questionable beliefs will arise to fill the information gap.

A case in point is the 2026 President’s Letter from Mo Siegel, sent out last week, which alludes to one such belief in this statement: “If seeding this revelation and its teachings into society is a thousand-year project,” Mo writes in this formal report, “we are still in the earliest chapters. If you draw a ten-inch line to represent the timeline, we have not yet reached the first inch. And yet progress is real.”

I am sure this statement is well-intended. It reassures donors, which is a positive. And Mo lists some good goals that were achieved in 2025. But this “thousand years” idea strikes me as a kind of mushroom that grows in darkness. This biblical-sounding notion of a one thousand-year mission (see Rev 20: 4-6) isn’t found in any documented statement from the revelators; I am told that is a product of “oral tradition.” And it definitely does not appear in the so-called “1955 Publication Mandate.” (Look it up here.) This idea also defies common sense and practical reality, as I see it.

Instead, and sorry to say this, this phrase is a piece of convenient folklore, one that serves to have a palliative effect. Put starkly, it gives our generation good reason to be complacent.

Is the window for dissemination passing us by?

In fact, the key statement in the Publication Mandate goes as follows: “The book belongs to the era immediately to follow the conclusion of the present ideological struggle. . . And it is for this better order of affairs on earth that the book has been made ready.”

The struggle being spoken of here refers quite obviously to the end of the Cold War. And when did that end, folks? The Cold War ended in 1991. In other words, we had 36 years to support and translate the book as we prepared for the inevitable collapse of the atheistic communist threat; after that, the real push could begin “immediately,” states the Mandate.

Sadly, our movement missed that ideal window, that “better order of affairs,” which I surmise must have stretched for 25 years between 1990 and 2015. If I am right, we now have tremendous remedial work to do, a big uphill climb, especially given that the period we are now entering feels more like a “dangerous order of affairs.”

Here’s a side note to bear in mind: professional book publishers like myself typically give a newly published book an 18-month window to make its mark. After that, a fresh new title that was once pertinent to the current zeitgeist very soon gets set aside as “old news,” as newer books on the topic hit the shelves.

The mistaken legend of “the one-thousand years”

My guess is that the “thousand years” idea started to circulate sometime after the calamitous 1989 schism between the Foundation and the Brotherhood. But let’s hold any commentary on that sad event for another day and time.

My point here is that the thousand-years motto came into use as critics began to point out that the Urantia movement was in decline.

These critics especially noted items like these: the aging out and disappearance of study groups and Societies; the decreased attendance at conferences; the dearth of young readers; and the fact that the movement had now broken up in three distinct organizations duplicating efforts and competing for the same resources.

And then there is the taboo topic that even the critics steer around: the fact that one movement organization disappeared because of neglect and suppression, that being the celestial contact mission sometimes known as the Correcting Time (and nowadays pejoratively known as the “Teaching Mission”).

Please consider: the prime years for these contacts with our invisible friends happened to also coincide with the aforementioned “better order of affairs”: that same 25 years between 1990 and 2015. I was there and these were the most productive years. In fact, this period witnessed a series of over 5,000 dialogues with over 500 angels, midwayers, ascenders, and even Paradise-origin beings. Many of the contactees were veteran readers, and they were spread out over more than two dozen locations during this period.

Wanted: Shepherds and influencers for the cosmic religion of the future

Other critics pointed out that, while thousands of books may be in print, the movement lacks an active corps of teachers and ministers. They argued that scholars, authors, reviewers, publishers, pastors, preachers, healers, worship leaders, evangelists, and media spokespeople are crucial for the formidable endeavor of introducing an epochal revelation to a troubled and confused world.

We can think of it this way: Such advocates are essential for the formidable task of carefully shepherding thought leaders into the greatly expanded paradigm of the UB text—thus turning these initiates into influencers in their own communities.

Only in the last few years are we training leaders and teachers thanks to the laudable efforts of Urantia University. But because of the long hiatus during the “cultural prime time” just after the Cold War, our movement is falling behind. An exception that may prove the rule may be the reception of the UB by the global interfaith movement. But let’s face it: the UB’s ideas have gained near-zero acknowledgment among the general intelligentsia, no coverage from departments of academia, no open acceptance by the churches, virtually no examination from the political class across the world, very little interest from youth under 40 years old, and so on.

And if the revelation does by chance get a foothold with a visionary in one of these communities, this person is usually forced to “self-censor” around their friends and colleagues to save their jobs and reputations.

In other words, the movement was indeed failing in its mission to spread the teaching, said the critics.

But hey, you can feel better now because we can turn this around by the year 3,000.

A book is just a bag of words lined up nicely on a white background. Let’s not make an idol out of any book. Let’s not be idolators. In a hundred years (and certainly in a thousand years!), the UB text will long since have been superseded by all manner of developments on our world, many very positive. More on that later, because the main point I want to offer here is that the UB’s ideal window has probably closed, and the more challenging window for any kind of advocacy work is soon closing. I would give us 75 years at best, rather than 1,000 years—and again, I would argue that the period between 1990 and 2015 was the ideal window.

I speculate, with sadness in my heart, that as we hit the year 2100, the content of the UB will be seen as out of date and out of sync with the needs of the twenty-second century.

How the revelators targeted their main audience

Why such pessimism on my part? It’s really just a dose of realism! The key reasons (among many) that we missed the ideal window is this: the concepts and language of the UB, especially Part IV, are intentionally targeted.

Stated simply, Part IV sets up a direct dialogue with the liberal wing of the Christian church. As I see it, the heyday of the revelation was earmarked for the late twentieth century, yes, beginning sometime around 1990. This is the period of America’s cultural dominance combined with the apex of the great liberal Christian tradition, yielding a platform of great power and influence worldwide.

The religious lineage being targeted is found especially in the Episcopal Church and in Methodism, Presbyterianism, the United Church of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, the Evangelical Lutherans, and others. Others have agued that the new age movement, which also emerged in these years, was also part of the intended audience (that is, before the New Age became a place of commerce and celebrity.)

The key point is this period was the high point of the mainline, nondoctrinaire, inclusive, progressive, Protestant line of development that is, perforce, now in steep decline. The target audience for the UB is not by any means the conservative churches; and that’s because they are, more or less, idolaters of the Bible, some of whom eschew the idea of evolution.

Consider: the human sources for Part IV (aside from the Bible itself) feature writers and theologians who were prominent in liberal denominations between 1980 and 1940. Scholarly support for this idea is provided in an academic essay of mine excerpted in the Addendum below.

Today, many Part IV passages have the ring and rhetoric of a passing era, fast receding from our sight and hearing range, a time now almost considered archaic by today’s theologians. The grandiloquent way the revelators rendered the teachings of Jesus, especially in his discourses and sermons, displays the high-minded and almost ponderous preaching style of an era of optimism, prior to World War II and the Holocaust, and the expansive optimism for a liberal, “open source” Christianity has now passed us by. I speculate that in 75 years from now, only a tiny sliver of educated Christians will find Part IV recognizable and inspiring.

Sadly, in 2026, all wings of the liberal church—our best target group—are in decline in the Western world; the conservative, doctrinaire, and bible-centered Christians who follow Trump or Putin are now greatly ascendant, and these folks are not anywhere near the target audience of the revelators.

But hold steady, I will cover a more hopeful perspective in my next post!

ADDENDUM (Excerpted from Reason and Revelation (Origin Press, 2024), 54–56.

“My own survey of the human sources used for the UB’s theology and philosophy of religion shows that the revelators draw heavily from post-Kantian liberal Protestant theology of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—or at least what was left of this movement (in the U.S. and the UK) after Karl Barth and his followers attempted to dethrone the liberal Christian establishment in Europe using the cudgel of Barth’s crisis theology.

”We can speculate further that the UB’s revelators purposefully turned to liberal Christian thinkers outside the orbit of Germany, doing so for a number of reasons: First, the majority of the German church was about to capitulate to Hitler. Second, a sufficient number of liberal American (or British) theologians had already trained in Germany or had been influenced by the post-Kantian tradition in other ways. Third, the ideas of this less doctrinaire lineage more closely match the tenets the UB’s authors had in mind and, at the same time, these thinkers represented the highest pinnacle of evolving Protestant thought—unencumbered by church authority—that had been achieved prior to World War II’s conclusion. Finally, the UB’s revelators had obvious practical reasons for using English-speaking authors, thus obviating the need to translate such borrowed ideas into current English usage.

“In this connection, we now know that some of the UB’s most notable source authors for theology were among the most respected American liberal theologians of the early twentieth century. The result is that the UB text itself communicates the optimism and self-confidence of that era that had survived in the academic settings of the new world previous to WWII’s final horrors. Sadly, this mentality has not survived into our era of theology, which has had to confront the post-WWII horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, nuclear weapons proliferation, the advent of abusive technocracies, rising environmental devastation, and the gross failures of global governance.

“These American source authors include the likes of Rufus Jones, one of the most influential Quakers of the 20th century and Henry Nelson Wieman, arguably America’s first Whitehead expert and a leading proponent of religious naturalism and empirical theology. In addition, no less than Charles Hartshorne—a very prominent mid-century philosopher of religion—is also a prominent human source. Others include William Hocking, an influential Harvard philosopher who trained under idealist Josiah Royce, and the prominent liberal Protestant theologian Albert C. Knudson, one of the founders of Boston personalism.”