Spiritual Assembly - Local Spiritual Assemblies

Local Spiritual Assemblies

The origin of the institution of the local Spiritual Assembly lies in Bahá'u'lláh’s book of laws, the Kitáb-i-Aqdas:

The Lord hath ordained that in every city a House of Justice be established wherein shall gather counsellors to the number of Baha, and should it exceed this number it doth not matter. They should consider themselves as entering the Court of the presence of God, the Exalted, the Most High, and as beholding Him Who is the Unseen. It behoveth them to be the trusted ones of the Merciful among men and to regard themselves as the guardians appointed of God for all that dwell on earth. It is incumbent upon them to take counsel together and to have regard for the interests of the servants of God, for His sake, even as they regard their own interests, and to choose that which is meet and seemly.

The passage gives the institution a name, a minimum number (nine, for “the number of Baha” refers to the numerical value of the letters of that word, which is nine), and a general responsibility to take care of the welfare of others even as they would take care of their own. While the resulting institution is local, in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas Bahá'u'lláh also spoke about the responsibilities of the supreme or Universal House of Justice. In response to the passage, Mírzá Asadu'lláh Isfahání, a prominent Bahá'í teacher, organized an unofficial Bahá'í consultative body in Tehran, Iran, about 1878. The first official Bahá'í consultative body was organized under `Abdu'l-Bahá’s direction by Hand of the Cause Hají Ákhúnd in Tehran in 1897; by 1899 it was an elected body. Because of the difficulties in Iran caused by persecution of the Bahá'í Faith, the Tehran body served to coordinate both local and national Bahá'í activities. It is not known what name the body was organized under.

The development of a Bahá'í community in the United States in the 1890s necessitated the creation of local Bahá'í consultative bodies there. In 1899 the Bahá'ís of Chicago elected a local council based on their awareness of the provisions of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas (which was circulated in provisional English translation as a typescript as early as 1900). The New York Bahá'ís elected a “Board of Counsel” in December 1900. In 1901 the Chicago body was reorganized and re-elected and took the name “House of Justice of Bahais of Chicago, Ills.” In response, `Abdu'l-Bahá revealed three tablets of encouragement and guidance to the body, including prayers to say at the beginning and end of their meetings, prayers that Bahá'ís use around the world today for their Spiritual Assembly meetings.

In 1902 `Abdu'l-Bahá sent a very important tablet to the Chicago governing body where he said “let the designation of that body be ‘Spiritual Assembly’—this for the reason that, were it to use the term ‘House of Justice’, the government might hereafter come to suppose that it was acting as a court of law, or concerning itself in political matters, or that, at some indeterminate future time, it would involve itself in the affairs of government.... This same designation hath been universally adopted throughout Iran.” For this reason, Bahá'í local and national governing bodies are designated “Spiritual Assemblies” to this day.

The first decade of the twentieth century saw the proliferation of local Bahá'í governing bodies. Often unaware of `Abdu'l-Bahá’s guidance, they had a variety of titles in English and Persian, such as “Council Board, “Board of Consultation,” “House of Spirituality,” and "Executive Committee." Unaware `Abdu'l-Bahá had told the Chicago Bahá'ís to elect their body every five years, they were usually elected annually or even semi-annually. The number of members varied from five to nineteen (except in New York City, where `Abdu'l-Bahá, in 1911, said they should elect twenty-seven members in order to be inclusive of and to foster unity between that city’s diverse Bahá'í groups). They were male only until `Abdu'l-Bahá said, in 1911, that women should be elected to the local governing bodies existing in the United States; their exclusion from local bodies continued in Iran until the 1950s, because of Iranian cultural conventions. In the period 1900 to 1911, consultative bodies are known to have existed in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Boston, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., Spokane, Washington, northern Hudson County, New Jersey, the greater San Francisco area, California, in the United States; and in Bombay, British Raj India; Cairo, Khedivate of Egypt; Acre, Ottoman Syria; Baku, Tbilisi, Ashgabat and Samarqand in the Russian Empire; and Mashhad, Abadih, Qazvin, and Tabriz, Persia. Consultative bodies also existed for the Jewish and Zoroastrian Bahá'ís in Tehran and for the women of a few Bahá'í communities.

Because efforts to organize local Bahá'í consultative bodies remained informal, few additional ones had formed by 1921 (notable exceptions being Cleveland, Ohio, and London), and some of the ones in the United States had lapsed. Upon assuming the Guardianship of the Bahá'í Faith, Shoghi Effendi read `Abdu'l-Bahá's Will and Testament and made establishment of local spiritual assemblies an early priority. His second general letter to the Bahá'ís of the world, dated March 5, 1922, referred to the “vital necessity of having a local Spiritual Assembly in every locality where the number of adult declared believers exceeds nine.” The letter also quoted extensively from Bahá'u'lláh and `Abdu'l-Bahá about the purposes and duties of Spiritual Assemblies. The result was a rapid proliferation of local Spiritual Assemblies; a 1928 list had the following: Australia, 6; Brazil, 1; Burma, 3; Canada, 2; China, 1; Egypt, 1; England, 4; France, 1; India, 4; Japan, 1; Korea, 1; Lebanon, 1; New Zealand, 1; Palestine, 1; Iran, 5; Russia, 1; South Africa, 1; Switzerland, 1; Syria, 1; Turkey, 1; and the United States, 47, for a total of 85 local Spiritual Assemblies worldwide. The number has grown ever since; in 2001 there were 11,740 local Spiritual Assemblies worldwide.