By Meredith
Sprunger
1. Be based
on the Fatherhood of God and the brother-sisterhood of humankind.
2. Be the
outgrowth of love.
3. Foster
sentiment, satisfy emotions, and promote loyalty.
4. Facilitate
spiritual progress through cosmic meanings, moral values, social development,
and personal living.
5. Provide
supreme goals of living that are both temporal and eternal.
6. Be based
on the biologic, social, and religious significance of the family.
7. Symbolize
the permanent in the midst of unceasing change.
8. Glorify
that which respects and unifies the diversities of society.
9. Promote
higher meanings, beautiful relationships, and the highest values.
10. Embody
some masterful mystery and connote some worthful unattainable.
11. Be
meaningful and serviceable to both the individual and the group.
12. Serve as
the skeletal structure for dynamic personal experience.
1. Dramatize
the loyalties of spiritual experience.
2. Magnify
the lures of truth, beauty, and goodness-supreme values.
3. Enhance
the service of unselfish fellowship.
4. Glorify
the potentials of family life.
5. Promote
religious education.
6. Provide
wise counsel and spiritual guidance.
7. Furnish
and promote group worship.
8. Encourage
friendship, neighborhood welfare, and moral values.
9. Spread
the gospel of eternal salvation.
1. Fixation
of ritual and theology.
2.
Developing vested interests and secular involvement.
3. Serving
the institution instead of serving God and ministering to people.
4. Forming
competitive sects and developing a "chosen people" attitude.
5.
Developing authoritarianism, dogmatism, and false ideas of sacredness.
6.
Venerating the past while ignoring present needs and timely spiritual
interpretations.
7. Failing
to hold the interest of youth and grow with the times.
8. Losing
sight of spiritual ministry and the saving message of salvation.
The central
objective of The Spiritual Fellowship is to create a polity with maximum
flexibility that will function with small groups or large congregations,
utilize lay leadership and/or ordained clergy, have cross-cultural
adaptability, and broad theological inclusiveness.
The
Spiritual Fellowship seeks to be "a gathering of persons who have accepted
a common purpose, and a common discipline to guide the pursuit of that purpose,
to the end that each involved person reaches higher fulfillment as a person,
through serving and being served by the common venture, than would be achieved
alone or in a less committed relationship."2
1 The
Urantia Book p. 966
2 Robert K.
Greenleaf, Servant Leadership, Paulist Press, New York, 1977, p. 237