Conference Reflections – Brisbane 2025
After another year that quickly spun around the sun, it was time for our 2025 annual conference, this time in Ormiston, Brisbane at the wonderful Santa Teresa Spirituality Centre from 3 to 6 October. What a gorgeous venue with ocean views overlooking Morton Bay and Stradbroke Island! Weather was perfect, and to top it off, everyone had their very own single ensuite rooms. There was plenty of time for us to spend time with a lovely collection of old friends and new. As usual, we did a lot of talking and laughing and shared many deep and meaningful conversations. The presentations were thoughtful and insightful, and the workshops were a lot of fun. We had friends come from far and wide, and some from more local regions in Queensland.
A big thank you goes out to Graeme C who single-handedly arranged the program.
As people arrived on Friday afternoon, we had a chance to socialise over drinks and nibblies and get settled into our rooms. After dinner in the conference room, we were able to get to know one another better by introducing ourselves and sharing our first encounters with The Urantia Book. It’s always good to hear stories of people’s truth-seeking journeys.
Graeme decided to have fewer presentations than normal this year so we could have plenty of time for questions and discussion and give the presenters more wriggle-room if they started to run out of time.
Here’s a quick glimpse of the presentations and workshops:
- Hypocrisy and Other Departures from Reality—An Inquiry into Hypocrisy by Graeme C. Graeme stressed how Jesus strongly denounced hypocrisy, its evolution to the present day, and the implications for personal faith.
- Reality, Environment, Mechanisms and Motive – a Continuous Improvement Cycle by Prue Scott. Prue cleverly showed how we can get stuck in patterns and how we may elevate our thinking to personally evolve using modern technology concepts as a parallel.
- Redshift, Rotation, and that Unbelievable Rate by Nigel Nunn. Nigel explained to us how The Urantia Book reveals a cosmology that’s far beyond the reach of either scientific discovery or religious experience. Hence exploring this model will require an approach that involves philosophy, and faith. Nigel said: “At the same time, we must recognise that astronomy and cosmology – the study of “how the heavens go” – is a matter of science, not faith. So we need to approach this study not as evangelists, but as students exploring an idea.”
- Talking Back to The Urantia Book – Making the Book Personal by Chatting with the Authors and Creating Individualised Affirmations, by Stephen Carthew. In this very amusing yet serious talk, Stephen shared some of his imaginary conversations with the authors of the papers telling them of his own experience of turning some teachings into first person affirmations of faith. He said he “…encourages a creative and engaged approach within himself. While reading the book from cover-to-cover recently – and for the first time – I think this approach helped me to make the teachings more personal, immediate and real – and rather fun too.” He hoped a couple of Reversion Directors would be present at the session 😊. His humour was balanced by serious affirmations of faith inspired by the Adjuster Papers and Jesus’s teachings.
- Sharing your Faith, by Marion Steward. This workshop was a guided discussion in small groups about how our faith has evolved over our lifetime, including how our faith began, how it has changed over time, what weakens it, and what strengthens it. The groups consisted of only 3 or 4 people which provided an intimacy where heart-felt experiences could be safely and confidently shared.
- Developing Mota, by Prue Scott. This was a fun workshop in which the Urantia philosophies listed in the section of the book on Morontia Mota (which are actually Urantia counterparts of Mota) were compared with our imagined guesses as to how they might be interpreted in the Morontia realms. Prue handed us all several rounds of “morontia mota” quotes on pieces of paper and we took turns in relating how we thought they might apply on the morontia worlds.
The evenings were a special time as usual with lot of casual socialising. On Saturday night Graeme provided us with an entertaining quiz with questions on Urantia Book topics. We just called out the answers and the first one to get it right was rewarded with a chocolate handed out by Rita!
Sunday morning is always special too as we come together for prayer and worship. We ended with singing together the very moving song written and composed by Michael Hanian and Rebecca Oswald: “Pray Tell Me How”.
The study aids and secondary works store had quite a few new books on sale. They proved to be popular, so we hope those who bought these books find them helpful in their study of The Urantia Book.
Sunday afternoon allowed a couple of hours of free time so we could wander around the grounds and enjoy the mild weather and water views while chatting away with friends.
ANZURA’s AGM for members was held just before dinner. Elections were held for Vice President and Treasurer. Merindi Belarski was voted in as Vice President and Robert Coenraads will do a second term as Treasurer. Merindi needed to vacate her Secretary position to take on her new role so, as the Secretary’s position was left vacant, Kathleen Swadling volunteered to take on that position temporarily until the next elections. The Board now still consists of:
President: Rita Schaad
Vice President: Merindi Belarski
Secretary: Kathleen Swadling
Treasurer: Robert Coenraads
NZ Representative: Marion Steward
We closed the conference on Monday morning where everyone enjoyed reflecting on this special weekend by giving feedback, discussing the weekend, and sharing personal highlights. A big thank you goes out to Graeme and the administration team for planning and hosting a very enjoyable weekend.
