Igniting the Global Road to 2030
Last month, I was back at Tillman Chapel in New York, almost ten years after we gathered there to launch the Road to 2020. On that October evening in 2016, UNITY EARTH was beginning to emerge through a growing circle of friendships, music, spiritual aspiration and shared purpose. We envisioned a multi-year global event series connecting people and sacred places, leading towards a culminating weekend dedicated to peace. We could hardly have imagined everything the journey would bring.
Returning in August 2026 for the Oneness of Humanity Award offered an opportunity to honour the many people who have carried this work. My heartfelt gratitude goes again to Olivia Hansen and the Spiritual Life TV Channel for making that occasion possible. It also became the setting for a new beginning: the launch of the Global Road to 2030. In that same chapel, the memory of one journey met the invitation of another.
Over the past ten years, UNITY EARTH has convened more than forty events around the world. Each has been, in its own way, a convergence. People have crossed oceans, spiritual traditions have met in ceremony, and musicians, scientists, Indigenous elders, peacebuilders and community leaders have found themselves sharing a circle, a meal or a pilgrimage. Looking back, I find myself increasingly interested in what this word convergence might truly mean. What is coming together, and what becomes possible through such encounters?
The French Jesuit scientist and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin offered the enduring insight that “everything that rises must converge.” My father’s deep devotion to Teilhard helped instil in me a sense of the grandeur of an evolving universe, in which consciousness, love and the movement towards unity ceaselessly act together. That vision has become part of how I understand the work of UNITY EARTH. I hear in Teilhard and others an invitation to consider whether growing into a fuller awareness of life also makes us more capable of relationship, and whether our human gatherings might participate in a larger movement, serving a cosmic purpose beyond what we can currently see.
Earlier this year, reflecting on World UNITY Week, I wrote about a great tent with many doors. Scientists, Indigenous wisdom keepers, economists, spiritual teachers and artists entered through different doorways, carrying distinctive ways of understanding the world. Across their conversations, we kept discovering questions of relationship, cooperation, belonging and wholeness. People retained the richness of their traditions while discovering something larger together. That image continues to open for me, particularly as I consider how many dimensions of convergence our gatherings can hold.
The meeting of science and the wisdom traditions is one such dimension. Ecology directs our attention towards relationships within living systems. Evolutionary biology investigates the conditions under which cooperation emerges and endures. Contemplative traditions explore how inner experience can deepen into a wider awareness of belonging, while Indigenous knowledge carries particular, enduring relationships with land, community and ancestry. These approaches have different methods and responsibilities, and their differences make the conversation valuable. Together, they can help us ask more searching questions about how to live.
Convergence becomes fruitful when we are willing to learn across those differences. An ecological insight may deepen a spiritual commitment to care for the Earth. An encounter with Indigenous wisdom may challenge assumptions about ownership and responsibility. Contemplative practice may change how someone exercises leadership, while the practical experience of a community can reveal what a beautiful theory may have overlooked. We begin to see more because we are looking together, and because we allow the encounter to change us.
Our journeys have given these ideas physical homes. At the Crestone Convergence in 2017, organisations and communities gathered in the mountains of Colorado, strengthening relationships across different movements. Later that year, UNITY EARTH was privileged to play a part in Return to Country, honouring the return of Mungo Man and the profound relationship between Aboriginal people, ancestry and Country. Here, convergence carried the weight of history and the responsibilities of healing. The place itself, and the people whose belonging to it reaches across generations, shaped the encounter.
At Lalibela in Ethiopia, the Convergence of Fire ceremony in January 2018 brought another dimension into focus. People had travelled from different parts of the world, carrying their prayers into a place of deep spiritual significance. The fire became a centre around which our differences could gather, and the “Fire of One Love” became part of the language through which we remembered what we had shared. For me, that ceremony remains an expression of how people, sacred sites and spiritual presence can meet in an experience that continues to work deeply upon us long afterwards.
This brings me to the vertical dimension of convergence, which feels essential to the whole inquiry. Alongside our encounter with one another and with mother nature is the meeting between human aspiration and divine presence. I believe we inhabit a spiritually alive universe, in which divine love and spiritual intelligences are actively engaged with our becoming. We are evolving human beings, learning through experience, reaching towards understanding and often stumbling. Within this unfinished journey, I believe we are also being guided, sustained and invited onwards.
Teilhard’s phrase opens into a further question here: if everything that rises must converge, what of the love that reaches towards us? Our prayers rise, and grace enters our lives. We seek understanding, and illumination sometimes arrives with a generosity we could never have manufactured. We gather with intentions, yet may leave with a calling we did not bring. Convergence, as I understand it, includes this meeting of Heaven and Earth: our will encountering a spiritual initiative greater than our own.
The language of “above” expresses only part of this mystery. Divine presence can also be encountered in the depths of the heart – as above so within.. What we receive inwardly asks for expression outwardly. What we encounter in the world can transform us within. Inside out and outside in, our personal and collective lives continually influence one another. A moment of inward clarity may become an act of service, and an act of service may open an entirely new understanding of our sacred selves.
Sacred travel brings these movements into close relationship. In Varanasi, our gathering connected interfaith collaboration, music, the Ganges and pilgrimage to the holy Buddhist site of Sarnath. During Holy Land Living Water in February 2020, our journey through Jordan, Palestine and Israel brought prayer and ceremony into relationship with the ecological peacebuilding work of EcoPeace Middle East. Water carried spiritual meaning while confronting us with shared practical responsibilities. Care for a river became a place where reverence and action could meet.
We enter these landscapes as guests, with obligations to listen and learn. Sacred places belong within living cultures, and our encounters deepen when we honour their custodians, communities and histories. I also believe that a place can work upon us, awakening reverence or remembrance beyond what we anticipated. We arrive carrying our stories and discover that the ground beneath us invites a different scale of attention. People and place converge, bringing present experience into relationship with deep memory and future possibility.
When the pandemic interrupted the Road to 2020, years of relationship helped make another form of gathering possible. Working with Jon Ramer and a worldwide community of partners, World UNITY Week emerged online. The circumstances changed dramatically, and the connections found new expression. That experience continues to remind me that the life of a convergence extends beyond its location or programme. What people carry away can become the beginning of something none of us had imagined.
Joan Zhao’s recent article on 2026 events Being Minneapolis and the Oneness Ceremony in New York explore how encounters such as these develop our capacity for healing and cooperation. That capacity needs expression at every level. Community initiatives can influence wider movements, while institutions and leaders can direct resources towards work taking root locally. From the bottom up and the top down, change becomes more meaningful when influence is joined with listening. The grassroots need support, and those entrusted with power need the knowledge, imagination and lived experience of the communities they serve.
These questions now travel with us on the Global Road to 2030. Across different spiritual conversations, I hear a recurring sense that 2027/2028 may be a particularly significant period. The narratives vary, yet the sense of approaching a threshold feels familiar, and we are feeling it too. For me, this calls for deeper preparation: strengthening relationships, renewing our capacity to listen and becoming more available to what this liminal time-line may ask of us. The future remains open, and our participation matters.
The Angkor Convergence, January 3–10, 2027, is a key gathering on this new road. Presented by UNITY EARTH in collaboration with World Weavers, and based at Angkor Grace in Siem Reap, Cambodia, it is an invitation to reconnect with old friends and widen the circle. New friends and allies will bring experiences, gifts and aspirations that may open possibilities we have yet to envision. Over a decade of gathering, we have seen how a friendship can become a partnership, and how an unexpected encounter can change the direction of someone’s life’s work. Angkor offers time for those relationships to deepen and for new ones to take root.
Our opening days intentionally overlap with 7 Days of Rest, January 1–7, the annual global invitation dedicated to the healing and flourishing of Earth and all her children. In the first three days, we will give particular attention to restoration and the cultivation of deep coherence. Through meditation, music, ceremony, shared meals and unhurried conversation, we will have the opportunity to become more present to ourselves, to the sacred place we are visiting, and to one another. As we rest, listen and begin to recognise what each person carries, trust can grow. We become more able to speak honestly, receive generously and discover where our purposes meet.
This is the living field from which the second half of the programme is intended to emerge. The yin movement of sacred water flows into the yang movement of fire: activation arising from the relationships and coherence we have cultivated together. There is something profoundly different about imagining a shared undertaking with people whose hopes you have heard and whose presence you have come to trust. That depth allows collaboration to become more ambitious and multidimensional, connecting inner transformation with practical initiatives, local knowledge with global relationships, and spiritual inspiration with the resources and skills needed to act.
In a reflection on the Angkor Convergence, Jeff Vander Clute observes, “The combination of water and fire is alchemical.” His words speak directly to our intention. The entire gathering is conceived as a crucible in which individuals can be transformed and our collective capacities can deepen and expand. Each person brings relationships, experience and work already alive in the world. Through our encounter, these can find new support, new partners and new directions, extending what becomes possible far beyond the people physically present.
Our aspiration is substantial: a deepening and widening of collective grassroots action for unity, peace, restoration and regeneration. A conversation at Angkor might grow into cooperation between communities, an alliance across continents or renewed strength for someone carrying difficult work at home. We will bring our commitments into the circle and ask how we can help one another carry them further. The Global Road to 2030 will take shape through such relationships, as the fire kindled in our gathering becomes sustained action in the places we each serve.
Looking back towards that first evening at Tillman Chapel, I recognise how much of the road has been made through friendship and love. Looking ahead, I feel those same foundations beneath the journey now opening. Perhaps an age of convergence becomes possible as more of us learn to participate consciously in these meetings: between disciplines, between cultures, between people and sacred places, and between humanity and the divine. Each encounter asks us to bring what is uniquely ours while becoming available to something greater.
Teilhard’s words remain an invitation. To rise may be to become capable of a wider love, a deeper understanding and a more generous participation in life. And as our paths draw together, we may discover that we are already being met—by one another, by the living Earth and by a divine presence calling us more fully into the work of creation. Our task is to receive that meeting with open hearts and help its possibilities take root in a world crying out for transformation.
We invite each of you to join this convergence at Angkor Wat in January. Find out more, and reserve your place today here https://www.worldweavers.com/the-angkor-convergence.
Ben Bowler
Executive Director, UNITY EARTH
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