These ministers I interviewed over coffee were front-line with active large communities who were visiting back on a conference at Unity Village sharing their movement's challenge. Within TM we have seen this trend too as our TM elders who facilitated the late 1950's, 60's, and 1970's TM movement with Maharishi have pretty much all passed away now with their check-books gone too. There are some baby-boomers who are able and community minded with resources but they are fewer now too from the heady days of a few years ago. A lot of the upper-middle-class TM meditators left the TM movement in the 1990's. Likewise, a security person there reflecting on the Unity Village campus spoke in 3rd person about how just 10 years ago Unity V. was still a happening hopping place with a lot of people there and has really since dropped off to not much now in the last five years or so.
The challenge the Unity movement see there with these elders-in-transition is that those deeper and sustaining check-books move with these elderly and consequently those deeper check-books move away from supporting their local Unity churches and the larger Unity movement; the baby-boomers are not as able or interested in keeping up the support behind their parents. Their challenge as a movement now out in the world is the competitive marketplace in spirituality where fewer and fewer places have demographics with spiritual church-attending people. I sat with some ministers from California and Texas Unity churches, their comment was around their work engaging young families and middle-age 40's with families with programming like schools, services and such and then additionally attending to their 'transitional-elderly' who are being removed from their independence around by their baby-boomer kids, moving from their active communities and churches in to care facilities away from their communities. Like TM now, their [Unity] founding generations are passed and gone and their successive continuing elders then of the 20th Century height of their movement (1920-30-40-50's) are gone now too with their deep check-books. Like TM now is post-founder, the trick their Unity foundation boards of trustees are dealing with is trying to keep engaged whatever subsequent stalwart-generational members there are of their Unity Churches out in the world so that when those folks [baby-boom] pass away some of their check-books can come to support the physical-plant of even their Unity mecca -Unity Village in Kansas. Om, I was in Unity last nite and meditated there this morning too. Unity Village, Kansas City. Was there last week too passing through. It was really a nice place to meditate. The chapels were nice places to meditate. They were a bunch of spiritual transcendentalists that came out also at the time of the New Thought Movements [google New Thought later for the fun of it] of the late 19th and early 20th Century who though fundamentally transcendentalists in experience couched themselves in 'practical christianity'. Was a big deal in its time. Unity Village in Kansas City, Mo. is sort of like Fairfield, Iowa is now to the TM movement in the USA. An artifact of a time. -Buck back in the Meditating Community of Fairfield, Iowa .
