By Kathleen Swadling, Sydney, Australia
Mark Bloomfield was a former field representative of Urantia Foundation. He volunteered from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. He was highly successful in placing Urantia Books in public libraries, seminaries, colleges, universities, and other places of learning all over the world. He personally hand-seeded around 9,000 Urantia Books!
He was particularly inspired to seed the revelation in developing countries where he had lived and worked for many years as a humanitarian missionary. He worked with Mother Terresa in India for some years before devoting himself to seeding Urantia Books. Having experienced firsthand the heart-wrenching and atrocious plight of women and children, he decided to devote his life to treating the cause of the world’s problems rather than the symptoms. He was truly driven to get the Urantia Revelation seeded into the hands of educated people who lived among the innocent millions who were caught up in the cycle of ignorance and poverty.
During much of that time I served as Urantia Foundation’s Representative Manager, where I had the pleasure of assisting with the coordination of Mark’s many seeding projects out in the field. I attended three bookfairs in India when Mark was living there. He took care of all the arrangements for the booth including the importing and delivery of the books. He also acted as a chaperone and educator of Indian culture for us western visitors who were not familiar with the complexities of life in India. Mark’s ability to engage with interested people who visited our booth was impressive to say the least. He was eloquent, gracious, and able to adapt the Urantia Book teachings to literally hundreds of people hailing from the many different faiths practiced in India.
Mark was truly selfless and amazingly courageous in the manner in which he undertook this amazing work of seeding thousands of books. He could live on a shoestring and stay in incredibly substandard accommodations that many of us in the west would never dream of staying in. He left a significant trail of revelation behind in India, Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the United States. The stories he wrote in his regular reports of his journey, as he traveled from city to city and country to country placing books, make for fascinating reading. You can view summaries of some of his stories on the Foundation’s website at: https://www.urantia.org/search/node/mark%20bloomfield [2]
Mark has been called the “Johnny Appleseed” and the “Indiana Jones” of the Urantia movement, but he liked to call himself the “chore boy,” saying his favorite historical role-model was the young lad John Mark who spent a whole day in the hills alone with Jesus. At the end of one of his field reports, Mark wrote:
And all this goes a long way to explain why this particular fieldworker has been doing what he's been doing these years, for the chore boy of Jesus' day [John Mark] has long been the nearest he has ever had to a role model.
Mark died recently of injuries after a tragic incident in Swansea, Wales. He was just 54 years old. Our heartfelt sympathy and prayers go to Mark’s family and to all those who knew him well and called him “friend” and “brother.” May his resurrection on the Mansion Worlds be joyous and compensate for the tragic manner of his premature departure from this world. Farewell Mark, until we meet again.