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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