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Two Essential Movements

In a message to a conference held a few months into the Five Year Plan in 2001, the Universal House of Justice first explicitly referred to the concept of two essential movements:

The Five Year Plan, which will undoubtedly be the focus of your consultations over the next few days, requires concentrated and sustained attention to two essential movements. The first is the steady flow of believers through the sequence of courses offered by training institutes, for the purpose of developing the human resources of the Cause. The second, which receives its impetus from the first, is the movement of geographic clusters from one stage of growth to the next.^[1]

The first movement, then, is essentially an educational process at the grassroots of the community. The following quotation from a letter written on behalf of the House of Justice to a National Spiritual Assembly makes clear the responsibility of the institute in overseeing this process:

At this point in the growth of the Faith, the mandate of your training institute is fairly clear-cut: A sequence of courses has been adopted as the national program for the development of human resources. It is the job of the institute, then, to help a steadily increasing number of youth and adults advance through that sequence.…^[2]

A number of messages written by the House of Justice or on its behalf explain that the sequence of courses adopted by institutes should “endow growing contingents of believers with the knowledge, spiritual qualities, and skills and abilities to effectively carry out the many tasks of expansion and consolidation.”^[3] The following passage describes in the briefest way how this educational process was set in motion at the outset of the Four Year Plan in 1996 and taken to the grassroots:

During the Four Year Plan, enormous effort was exerted in raising up training institutes in every part of the globe. To reach an increasing number of believers with their programs, institutes were encouraged to adopt a decentralized system for the delivery of courses. Study circles, guided by trained tutors, enabled the educational process to be taken to the local community. As more and more believers in each country entered the institute program in this way and advanced through its sequence of courses, the human resources of the Faith steadily grew at different levels of capacity.^[4]

The establishment of this educational process was one of the major accomplishments of the Four Year Plan. The first movement was well under way, then, by the end of those four years. The concept of the second movement was introduced at the start of the Five Year Plan in 2001 when National Spiritual Assemblies were asked to divide their countries into small geographic areas that would enable the friends “to think about the growth of the Faith on a manageable scale and to design and implement plans close to the grassroots.”^[5] As a significant number of believers proceeded through the sequence of courses, they were now to be deployed at the level of the cluster to meet the needs of expansion and consolidation. “The educational process in which the friends have engaged over so many weeks and months,” it has been explained, “should give shape to the individual and collective activities they now undertake.”^[6] The House of Justice underscored this point to the National Spiritual Assembly of Brazil in a letter written on its behalf:

… the [Regional Bahá’í] Council must ensure that, as the ranks of avowed supporters of the Faith swell through the institute process, they are deployed in the field of service, reinforcing the work of large-scale expansion and consolidation. This multiplication and deployment of human resources is to be carried out, of course, in the context of a regional plan to move each cluster in the region from its current stage of growth to the next advanced stage.^[7]

From the above passage it is clear that the multiplication and deployment of human resources is carried out in the context of a plan to move a cluster from one stage of growth to the next. The 17 January 2003 message of the House of Justice to the Bahá’ís of the world further elaborates on this idea:

During the initial months of the Plan, National Spiritual Assemblies proceeded with relative ease to divide the territories under their jurisdiction into areas consisting of adjacent localities, called clusters, using criteria that were purely geographic and social and did not relate to the strength of local Bahá’í communities. Reports received at the World Centre indicate that there are now close to 17,000 clusters worldwide, excluding those countries where, for one reason or another, the operation of the Faith is restricted. The number of clusters per country varies widely—from India with its 1,580 to Singapore, which necessarily sees itself as one cluster. Some of the groupings are sparsely populated areas with only a few thousand inhabitants, while the boundaries of others encompass several million people. For the most part, large urban centers under the jurisdiction of one Local Spiritual Assembly have been designated single clusters, these in turn being divided into sectors, so as to facilitate planning and implementation.

With the various countries and territories divided into manageable areas, national communities moved quickly ahead to categorize clusters according to the stages of the development of the Faith mentioned in our 9 January message. The exercise afforded a realistic means for viewing the prospects of the community, but the task of refining the criteria needed for valid assessments is proving to be an ongoing challenge to institutions. To assign a cluster to one or another category is not to make a statement about status. Rather, it is a way of evaluating its capacity for growth, in order that an approach compatible with its evolving development can be adopted. Rigid criteria are obviously counterproductive, but a well-defined scheme to carry out evaluation is essential. Two criteria seem especially important: the strength of the human resources raised up by the training institute for the expansion and consolidation of the Faith in the cluster, and the ability of the institutions to mobilize these resources in the field of service.^[8]

Of course, the stages of growth mentioned in the 9 January 2001 message were defined as follows:

The areas into which a region divides will fall into various categories of development. Some will not yet be open to the Faith, while others will contain a few isolated localities and groups; in some, established communities will be gaining strength through a vigorous institute process; in a few, strong communities of deepened believers will be in a position to take on the challenges of systematic and accelerated expansion and consolidation.^[9]

Here is how the Universal House of Justice described the movement of clusters in its 17 January message:

In most clusters, movement from one stage of growth to the next is being defined in terms of the multiplication of study circles, devotional meetings and children’s classes, and the expansion they engender. Devotional meetings begin to flourish as consciousness of the spiritual dimension of human existence is raised among the believers in an area through institute courses. Children’s classes, too, are a natural outgrowth of the training received early in the study of the main sequence. As both activities are made open to the wider community through a variety of well-conceived and imaginative means, they attract a growing number of seekers, who, more often than not, are eager to attend firesides and join study circles. Many go on subsequently to declare their faith in Bahá’u’lláh and, from the outset, view their role in the community as that of active participants in a dynamic process of growth. Individual and collective exertions in the teaching field intensify correspondingly, further fuelling the process. Established communities are revitalized, and newly formed ones soon gain the privilege of electing their Local Spiritual Assemblies.

The coherence thus achieved through the establishment of study circles, devotional meetings and children’s classes provides the initial impulse for growth in a cluster, an impulse that gathers strength as these core activities multiply in number. Campaigns that help a sizeable group of believers advance far enough in the main sequence of courses to perform the necessary acts of service lend impetus to this multiplication of activity.^[10]

In this connection, the House of Justice wrote: “The pattern of activity that is being established in clusters around the globe constitutes a proven means of accelerating expansion and consolidation.”^[11] It indicated, however, that this was “only a beginning”:^[12]

In many parts of the world, bringing large numbers into the ranks of Bahá’u’lláh’s followers has traditionally not been a formidable task. It is therefore encouraging to see that, in some of the more developed clusters, carefully designed projects are being added to the existing pattern of growth to reach receptive populations and lift the rate of expansion to a higher level. Such projects accelerate the tempo of teaching, already on the rise through the efforts of individuals. And, where large-scale enrollment is beginning to result, provision is being made to ensure that a certain percentage of the new believers immediately enter the institute program, for, as we have emphasized in several messages, these friends will be called upon to serve the needs of an ever-growing Bahá’í population. They help deepen the generality of the Bahá’ís by visiting them regularly; they teach children, arrange devotional meetings and form study circles, making it possible to sustain expansion.^[13]

The above passage offers insight into how the two movements interact with each other. In essence, one fuels the other, as explained in the next passage:

The challenge is not simply to have a certain percentage study one or two courses, but a sequence of several courses through an effective system of distance education. And if the institute succeeds in accomplishing this, there should be a corresponding increase in the tempo of the teaching work as more and more friends arise to serve the Faith. A steady stream of newly enrolled believers will, in turn, enter the institute’s program, and in this way the system as a whole will be in a constant state of expansion.^[14]

To maintain the system envisioned at the level of the cluster, then, the ratio of believers in the sequence of courses to the total Bahá’í population needs to be kept within a certain range. Beyond the need to maintain proper ratios, however, there is the question of tempo. The deployment of believers into the field of service should lead to an intensification of teaching activities so that the rate of the expansion of the overall Bahá’í population steadily accelerates. This, in effect, is the idea underlying an intensive program of growth, as explained in the 9 January message of the Universal House of Justice:

At the core of the program must lie a sound and steady process of expansion, matched by an equally strong process of human resource development. A range of teaching efforts needs to be carried out, involving both activities undertaken by the individual and campaigns promoted by the institutions. As the number of believers in the area rises, a significant percentage should receive training from the institute, and their capabilities be directed towards the development of local communities.^[15]

What has become clear during the latter part of the Five Year Plan is that, if such programs are made up of a cycle of certain activities that is repeated every few months, it is possible to increase the rate of expansion, while at the same time maintaining the proper ratio of individuals in the sequence of courses to the total Bahá’í population. The Universal House of Justice in its Riḍván 2005 message wrote the following about such programs:

As the necessary conditions have thus been created, systematic programs for the expansion and consolidation of the Faith have been launched accordingly. A valuable body of knowledge about the nature of intensive programs of growth is accumulating, and certain features of these endeavors are now well understood. Such programs tend to consist of a series of cycles, each of several months’ duration, devoted to planning, expansion, and consolidation. Human resource development proceeds uninterrupted from one cycle to the next, ensuring that the process of expansion not only is sustained but progressively gathers momentum. While undoubtedly many more lessons are still to be garnered, the experience already gained makes it possible to replicate the approach in an ever-increasing number of clusters around the world.^[16]