Cristina Seaborn – a Life of Service

By Mark Wood

Support for the Fellowship enabled our publications team to produce two magazines and weekly newsletters last year. The Fellowship would like to say thank you by sharing this profile of Cristina Seaborn, a tireless volunteer who was until recently the editor of Mini Messenger, and who continues to be in charge of the Fellowship's print publications. 

Six years ago, Cristina Seaborn had a dream that she should run for election as chair of The Urantia Book Fellowship’s media and communications team.

“I was arguing with God about it at 3 o’clock in the morning. I had just become the service team chair. I was going to be doing double duty. Many people were sorry for me.”

That’s said with a dismissive smile and a soft laugh. And not a shadow of self-pity.

It was typical of the rest of our interview. Cristina is a retired music teacher and now a full-time musician, composer and director, as well as an events coordinator. So it’s not as if she could dedicate most of her waking hours to the considerable amount of work that it would take her to run three regular Fellowship publications. 

Undaunted, she took on the job: “I decided I was the right person for it because I have my finger on the pulse of the Urantia Book community. I’ve met a lot of people and we’ve had a lot of experiences together.”

And she handles it all with a formidable sense of service to The Urantia Book revelation. Behind that soft-spoken exterior is someone who has made rock-solid decisions about the spiritual priorities in her life.

That became all the more evident when I asked if she was going to be at the Fellowship’s Summer Study Session in Missouri in July 2024. It turns out that she’d cheerfully given up a golden opportunity to perform in Poland in favor of attending SSS24. 

You could see it was a hard decision to have made, and that, as a professional musician, Poland was tugging at her heart. She’s given up quite a lot to be in Missouri; she feels her first duty is to the revelation. She didn’t actually say those words and she didn’t have to. It’s what came across loudly and clearly.

In her role Cristina has been responsible for finding roughly 260 articles a year to put into the Fellowship Herald, the Mighty Messenger and Mini Messenger, in a Urantia Book-centered effort to inspire, stimulate, inform and enlighten. Close to nine thousand subscribers receive the emailed newsletters and 1,200 the printed magazines.

Fellowship publications rely on a team of other volunteers on the communications committee to help out—editors, a designer and an artist. Still, it can sometimes be a bit of a struggle to squeeze out the material to fill the publications, she says. 

But Cristina has a reputation for mining good article ideas from simple email threads. Sometimes it takes months to draw a finished piece out of the would-be author, who may not have written very much before.  

“My favorite part is when we get clarification from the author. Sometimes they talk about very complex ideas, which they haven’t yet sorted out in their heads. They’ve got good ideas but need some extra help with the writing. But the going back and forth produces some amazing results for the publications.”

She approaches the work with the soul of an artist. She includes poetry, photography, humor, art, even puzzles and games, in the publications, balancing out the more intellectual contributions, providing variety and encouraging engagement. 

Her main goal has been to inform the Urantia Book community about what the rest of the community is doing and thinking, in the way of events, projects, arts and insights. 

“I want people to know what people are achieving around the world inspired by the revelation. So they’ll say: ‘Oh, I could do that’.”

What’s her view on dissemination, I ask. Fast or slow?

“We don’t have a choice. It’s slow. It’s dense material for anyone to understand. We’re not at the stage of light and life; we’re in a state of lethargy. So there’s no question; it has to be slow.” 

Reading the book itself is necessarily a long process of course: she recalls reading it alone for two-and-a-half hours every Saturday for five years. “But I think it literally rewires the brain.”

The rich publications that she and her team have produced regularly and without fail play a role in slowly but inexorably helping to reorient minds to spiritual realities. The work would tire many others. 

Luckily, Cristina is a living example of an Archangel’s advice in The Urantia Book: “You can do important work if you do not become self-important; you can do several things as easily as one if you leave yourself out.”

Mark Wood is the new editor of Mini Messenger.

Most of the history of the Urantia movement is one where powerful acts of generosity and service have inspired the next generation of contributors and members. If reading Cristina's story inspires you, check out our volunteer opportunities here: urantiabook.org/volunteer or send us an email at fellowship@urantiabook.org to see how you can get involved.