Curriculum

1. Sequential & Comprehensive Study of The Urantia Book

Around sixteen hours each week are devoted to the sequential study of the UB. On average two papers are covered each week, and each student is required to bring in questions and answers from the paper being studied that day. These questions are reviewed that week and constitute a pool from which test questions can be drawn. This method allows each student to be exposed to some five thousand pearls of information from the UB, while encouraging better familiarity with its teachings. (SEE the School Calendar for more information)

Each semester the student is required to write a term paper of about 10 pages. Term paper subjects range from in depth focus on topics in the UB to the review and analysis of a service project done during the year.

2. Seminars

The seminar program at The Boulder School is designed with several purposes in mind.

1. To provide the student with the opportunity to meet and study with scholars and leaders in the Urantia movement from the U.S. and around the world.
2. To explore topics of special concern and import to readers of the UB. To compare concepts from the UB with modern knowledge and thought, thereby enabling each student to be better prepared for today’s world.
3. To provide the benefits of this forum to local readers by making seminars open to the public, and also to readers and study groups everywhere through on line webinar or Zoom type technologies.

Some of the seminars presented in the past include:

• How does the concept of God in The Urantia Book compare with that in selected religions, and what opportunities for spreading the gospel does this comparison make apparent?
• Cosmology of the Universe as presented in the UB compared to modern thinking.
• Mind and personality. What are they? How do they function? How are they related?
• Life after death
• Dispelling the fear of the devil.
• Error, evil, sin and iniquity in Christianity and The Urantia Book
• Energy as presented in the UB as compared with modern scientific knowledge and theories
• The Garden Society. Is it an appropriate vision for today? If so, how so?
• The Spirit of Truth
• World government today, where it must evolve and how
• Parenting in the home life in the 21^st century; contributing to its evolution
• The history of the Trinity concept on Urantia. Evolved Trinity revealed in The Urantia Book
• The varied races on Urantia, their basic similarities, and where and how they live together peacefully.
• The history of early Christianity, its evolution up to now, and where it can go from here.
• Art, creativity and inspiration.
• A psychological profile of the twelve apostles

3. Study Group Leadership Training

Study groups have proven one of the best ways to bring readers together and to introduce new readers to the revelation. Students are expected to personally attend the local Tuesday and Friday night study groups and are encouraged to attend other local study groups.

Two or three students together are also expected start their own study group and fill it with new readers by the end of the 2nd semester of their first year and keep it going while at school and provide for its continuation if they leave town.

With the perception that study groups bring people together and because study groups have shown to be a very effective way of introducing and holding new readers, these experiences are expected to provide each student with a better understanding of starting their own study groups as they go out into the world after graduating.

4. Service Corps Coordinators

As you attend the Boulder School, you will be invited to become an active part of the school’s Service Corps, which is operating locally through the students’ participation as Service Coordinators.

Service coordinators grow the Service Corps by serving others and then engaging those others to join the corps and serve, and eventually coordinating multiple service needs with multiple servers throughout the area.

Service seems to be a form of spiritual substance and sustenance that works upon each server’s spiritual growth. It’s certainly true that when you do something good for another person it makes you feel good inside.

“Consciously or unconsciously, every one of us does render some service or other. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and will make, not only our own happiness, but that of the world at large.” Mahatma Gandhi

“Service – more service, increased service, difficult service, adventurous service, and at last divine and perfect service – is the goal of time and the destination of space.” Urantia Book

You have seen the way of service in my life among you, and blessed are you who will have the gracious courage so to serve. But why are you so slow to learn the secret of greatness in the spiritual kingdom is not like the methods of power in the material world? Jesus, Urantia Book

5. Christian Outreach

As a student, you will be challenged to live and spread the gospel of Jesus in place of preaching the gospel about Jesus into the nine churches that are all within a few blocks of the school. Working together in teams of two or three, and following Jesus’ example whereby he went to the existing evolutionary religion that held the highest and truest concepts of God, in his time the Jews, and in our time the Christians, students will be able to reach out to the following nearby Christian denominations all within a couple of blocks of the school: Baptist, Catholic, Christian Scientist, Episcopal, First Congregational, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian and Seventh Day Adventist. There is also a Buddhist Shambhala Center in the midst of all these churches for those students who may wish to introduce the teachings of The Urantia Book therein.

This challenge will be guided by the following 21 excerpts from the Jesus Papers.

1. You may preach a religion about Jesus, but, perforce, you must live the religion of Jesus.
2. Indeed, the social readjustments, the economic transformations, the moral rejuvenations, and the religious revisions of Christian civilization would be drastic and revolutionary if the living religion of Jesus should suddenly supplant the theologic religion about Jesus.
3. The hour is striking for a rediscovery of the true and original foundations of present-day distorted and compromised Christianity – the real life and teachings of Jesus.
4. The religion of Jesus does, indeed, dominate and transform it believers, demanding that men dedicate their lives to seeking for a knowledge of the will of the father in heaven and requiring that the energies of living be consecrated to the unselfish service of the brotherhood of man.
5. What an awakening the world would experience if it could only see Jesus as he really lived on earth and know, firsthand, his life-giving teachings!
6. Christianity has indeed done a great service for this world, but what is now most needed is Jesus. The world needs to see Jesus living again on earth in the experience of spirit-born mortals who effectively reveal the master to all men.
7. Modern culture must become spiritually baptized with a new revelation of Jesus’ life and illuminated with a new understanding of his gospel of eternal salvation. And when Jesus becomes thus lifted up, he will draw all men to himself.
8. Jesus’ disciples should be more than conquerors, even overflowing sources of inspiration and enhanced living to all men.
9. In winning souls for the Master, it is not the first mile of compulsion, duty, or convention that will transform man and his world, but rather the second mile of free service and liberty-loving devotion that betokens the Jesusonian reaching forth to grasp his brother in love and sweep him on under spiritual guidance toward the higher and divine goal of mortal existence.
10. The call to the adventure of building a new and transformed human society by means of the spiritual rebirth of Jesus’ brotherhood of the kingdom should thrill all who believe in him as men have not been stirred since the days when they walked about on earth as his companions in the flesh.
11. If the Christian church would dare to espouse the Master’s program, thousands of apparently indifferent youths would rush forward to enlist in such a spiritual undertaking, and they would not hesitate to go all the way through with this great adventure.
12. The great hope of Urantia lies in the possibility of a new revelation of Jesus with a new and enlarged presentation of his saving message which would spiritually unite in loving service the numerous families of his present day followers.
13. If Christianity could only grasp more of Jesus’ teachings, it could do so much more in helping modern man solve his new and increasingly complex problems.
14. Someday a reformation in the Christian church may strike deep enough to get back to the unadulterated religious teachings of Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.
15. The hope of modern Christianity is that it should cease to sponsor the social systems and industrial policies of Western civilization while it humbly bows itself before the cross it so valiantly extols, there to learn anew from Jesus of Nazareth the greatest truths mortal man can ever hear – the living gospel of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.
16. The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of nineteen centuries.
17. What a transcendent service if, through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his name, and to all other religions!
18. To “follow Jesus” means to personally share his religious faith and to enter into the spirit of the Master’s life of unselfish service for man. One of the most important things in human living is to find out what Jesus believed, to discover his ideals, and to strive for the achievement of his exalted life purpose.
19. Of all human knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it.
20. The common people heard Jesus gladly, and they will again respond to the presentation of his sincere human life of consecrated religious motivation if such truths shall again be proclaimed to the world.
21. The Kingdom of heaven consists in these three essentials: first, recognition of the fact of the sovereignty of God; second, belief in the truth of sonship with God; and third, faith in the effectiveness of the supreme human desire to do the will of God – to be like God. And this is the good news of the gospel: that by faith every mortal may have all these essentials of salvation.