Humanity's Team

Humanity's Team is a spiritual movement whose purpose is to communicate and implement the belief that humans are all one, one with God and one with life, in a shared global state of being, so that the behavior of humanity may shift to reflect this understanding. Dubbed "a civil rights movement for the soul," the movement reports having some 15,000 adherents from more than 90 countries on six continents.

It was created by the spiritual author Neale Donald Walsch in 2003 in response to the crisis that he saw the human race facing following the 9/11 events.

Humanity's Team proposes a New Spirituality that enlarges and enhances humanity's current beliefs about God and about life in ways, the movement contends, that could change how humans live with each other, bringing peace and harmony to Earth at last.

The New Spirituality is not a new religion, according to the movement. Rather, it is an expansion of all present human theologies; an updating of them; a refreshing of them, rendering all current sacred teachings even more relevant to the present day and time.

Key to the New Spirituality is a belief that God is not separate from anything -- and neither are humans.

Humanity's Team seeks to accomplish its mission by creating and facilitating New Spirituality circles, formal classes, weekly Celebration of Life gatherings, and larger special events, seminars and retreats focusing on another way of understanding and relating to each other, to life and to God -- and, thus, another way of living. The movement also distributes free daily inspirational e-mail messages through its New Spirituality Network [http://www.newspirituality.org] .

As one of its larger special events, Humanity's Team presented a major international conference with the Institute of Advanced Theology at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, on June 3-5, 2005. The conference, "Seeds of Transformation: Toward a Spiritual Renaissance in a Time of Fundamental Change," brought together hundreds of people from around the world -- clergy and laypeople, scholars and students, professionals and laborers, business people and artists, and policy makers and concerned individuals of many faiths and traditions.

The conference provided evidence of a trend in which people around the world are opening their minds to the possibility that their current theologies may be limited in what they understand. They are not condemning or abandoning their religions, according to the presented evidence, nor are they suggesting that their religions do not have the best of intentions. Rather, according to conference organizers, people around the world are examining their belief systems, exploring new understandings about God and life, and if those new understandings align with their personal inner truth and knowing, enlarging their belief systems to include them. "Growing numbers of people are expanding their belief systems to include larger possibilities and larger realities than they might have been willing to consider before," Walsch and the theologian Bruce D. Chilton, founder and director of the Institute of Advanced Theology at Bard, wrote in a letter to conference delegates. "And they are doing this because they recognize that when we change what we believe, we will change how we behave."

The conference identified some of those new understandings and examined how the trend suggests people are enlarging their belief systems to include them.

Among the ideas considered during the conference -- ideas which many presenters said growing numbers of people around the world are willing to consider giving up -- are human ideas of being "better" than others, our ideas of being separate from one another and, in particular, their ideas that God wants it only one way on this earth and that they had better get it right or they are sure to be condemned.

External links

* [http://www.humanitysteam.org Humanity's Team global Web site, with links to country Web sites worldwide]
* [http://www.newspirituality.org New Spirituality Network Web site]
* [http://bard.humanitysteam.org "Seeds of Transformation" Web site]
* [http://www.humanitysteam.gr "Humanity's Team - Greece" Web site]
* [http://www.beliefnet.com/story/129/story_12909_1.html Belief Net article] about Humanity Team's conference at Living Enrichment Center in Wilsonville, Oregon, 1999.