Ridvan 2007
To the Bahá’ís of the World
Dearly loved Friends,
1 The first year of the Five Year Plan bears eloquent testimony to the spirit of
devotion
with which Bahá’u’lláh’s followers have embraced the
framework for action presented in our message of 27 December 2005 and
their commitment to advancing the process of entry by troops. Where this
framework has been applied coherently in all its dimensions in a cluster,
steady progress is being achieved, both in terms of the participation of the
believers and their friends in community life and in terms of numerical growth,
with some clusters reporting enrolments in the hundreds every few months and
others in scores. Vital to this development has been a heightened
awareness of the spiritual nature of the enterprise, together with an increased
understanding of those decision-making instruments that are defined by the
principal features of the Plan.
2 Prior
to our launching the current series of global Plans focused on the single aim
of advancing the process of entry by troops, the Bahá’í
community had passed through a stage of rapid, large-scale expansion in many
parts of the world—an expansion which ultimately was impossible to
sustain. The challenge, then, lay not so much in swelling the ranks of
the Cause with new adherents, at least from populations of proven receptivity,
but in incorporating them into the life of the community and raising up from
among them adequate numbers dedicated to its further expansion. So
crucial was it for the Bahá’í world to address this
challenge that we made it a central feature of the Four Year Plan and called
upon National Spiritual Assemblies to spend the greater part of their energies
creating institutional capacity, in the form of the training institute, to
develop human resources. Ever-increasing contingents of believers, we
indicated, would need to benefit from a formal programme
of training designed to endow them with the knowledge and spiritual insights,
with the skills and abilities, required to carry out the acts of service that
would sustain large-scale expansion and consolidation.
3 Today
as we observe the workings of those clusters which are in a robust state of
growth, we note that in every one of them the friends have continued to
strengthen the institute process, while learning to mobilize their expanding
nucleus of active supporters of the Faith, to establish an efficient scheme for
the coordination of their efforts, to weave their individual initiatives and
collective endeavours into an effective pattern of
unified action, and to draw on the analysis of pertinent information in
planning the cycles of their activities. That they have found the means
for carrying forward the work of expansion and consolidation hand in hand—the
key to sustained growth—is demonstrable. Such evidence will surely
inspire every devoted believer to remain resolute on the path of systematic
learning that has been set.
4 The
accomplishments of these years of prodigious effort have not been confined to
those clusters where the work of large-scale expansion and consolidation is
being thus revitalized. The approach taken during the Four
Year Plan, followed by the Twelve Month Plan and the previous Five Year
Plan, proved instrumental in creating conditions for the believers to extend
their endeavours to a wide circle of people, engaging
them in various aspects of community life. The benefits of the
decade-long process of capacity building in the three participants of the
global Plans are now broadly apparent. Everywhere there was a need to
gain an understanding of the dynamics of human resource development.
Everywhere the friends had to learn the requirements of steady growth—to
promote systematic action and to avoid distractions, to bring certain
elements of collective decision-making close to the grassroots and to create
communities with a sense of mission, to encourage universal participation and
to accommodate different segments of society in their activities, particularly
children and junior youth, the future champions of the Cause of God and
builders of His civilization.
5 With
so firm a foundation in place, the foremost thought in the mind of each and
every believer should be teaching. Whether in their personal efforts they
teach their friends in firesides and then involve them in the core activities
or use these activities as their primary instrument for teaching, whether as a
community they make their work with children and junior youth the initial
thrust in a cluster or focus first on the older generations, whether in their
collective endeavours they visit families in teams as
part of an intensive campaign or call on seekers in their homes periodically
over time—these are decisions that can only be made according to the
circumstances and possibilities of the friends and the nature of the
populations with whom they interact. What all must acknowledge,
irrespective of circumstance, are both the crying need of a humanity that,
bereft of spiritual sustenance, is sinking deeper into despair and the urgency
of the responsibility to teach with which we each have been entrusted as
members of the community of the Greatest Name.
6 Bahá’u’lláh has commanded His followers to teach the
Cause. Already thousands upon thousands are energetically applying the
provisions of the Plan to open up avenues for them to guide souls to the
The Universal House of Justice [signed]