By Joanne Strobel, UBIS executive director, Georgia, United States
The mission of Urantia Foundation is to seed The Urantia Book and its teachings globally.
For more than 20 years, Urantia Book Internet School (UBIS) has been offering courses to students, courses which were developed and offered by fellow students of The Urantia Book. What began as a program for English speakers has evolved into a truly international school. Courses are currently offered in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. But more languages are coming soon!
Co-director Georges Michelson-Dupont, who is also the Urantia Foundation manager of translations, maintains a close and personal relationship with our translators and revisors. He has been encouraging several of them to take courses in English, which they all speak and write fluently, and then become trained in the art of facilitating our unique “UBIS Experience.”
As a result, Polish, Hungarian, German, and Chinese-speaking students of the revelation are preparing to launch courses in their native languages. It is a very exciting and expansive time for UBIS. The challenges of training, collaborating, and mentoring across languages and cultures (not to mention time zones) are monumental. But thanks to our dedicated team of volunteers, and the bedrock of support that is Urantia Foundation, the vision of worldwide education is becoming a reality.
Many changes are coming in 2022, including plans to create UBIS study groups that accommodate newer readers. After an initial test phase, we hope to encourage all language branches to offer similar six-, eight-, or ten-week topical study groups. We are also developing a course intended for emerging leaders within the Urantia community and reader organizations.
If you have never taken a course with UBIS, we invite you to do so! Registration for classes during the January trimester is open now. For more information, or to open a student account, go to new.ubis.urantia.org [2].