A vision of growth

Over 100 years ago, 'Abdu'l-Baha charted out a vision of growth and encouraged the Baha'is to adopt it.

Each person should pick one person a year and accompany them to wholeheartedly accept the Faith for themselves.
He said:

In fact, every one of the believers should choose one person every year and try to establish ties of friendship with him, so that all his fear would disappear. Only then, and gradually, must he teach that person. This is the best method.

'Abdu'l-Baha

We have never been able to expand and consolidate at such a pace. But we have to ask ourselves, why? If 'Abdu'l-Baha states that each believer should do so, why have almost no believers been able to do this?

Shoghi Effendi asks the individual to make many contacts and then choose a few to stay with. The choosing is part of the method, and it rests on there being a group ready to respond.

The most effective way for them to carry on their work is for the individual to make many contacts, select a few who they feel would become Baha'is, develop a close friendship with them, then complete confidence, and finally teach them the Faith, until they become strong supporters of the Cause of God.

Shoghi Effendi

Somewhere between a tenth of a percent and five percent of any population would enroll within about three months of meeting the Faith properly. The other 95 to 99.9 percent are served by the community's wider work, over longer timelines. Knowing the size of the ready group is what turns teaching into something a small cluster can plan, so it is worth working out for your own.

Both halves of section 01 cover the same seven years, so the two can be set side by side and worked out. One assumes ten experienced teachers carrying the effort alone. The other assumes everyone takes part, and that the souls they accompany are ready enough to arise and accompany someone in turn.

The difference is not effort. Ten teachers enrolling ten people each, every year for seven years, is strong work, and for the first three years it is the faster of the two. What it cannot do is compound, because the hundred a year is always the same hundred hands. The other line doubles only because every soul accompanied becomes, the year after, someone who accompanies. That needs two things at once: universal participation, so the work is not carried by a few, and a focus on souls who are receptive enough to arise and serve. Take either one away and the growth flattens into the first line. That is why receptivity, and a focus on learning, matter as much as they do.

Both figures are the arithmetic of the two methods as stated, not a projection of any cluster. The doubling assumes each believer, the newest included, accompanies one soul to enrollment in a year. Neither line accounts for anyone who stops.

Meeting people locally and being findable online both put the Faith in front of people who might respond. They work at different scales, and each is strongest at a different moment.

One interview reached 450,000 people, more than a believer could greet in several lifetimes, and three of them wrote in. Of the 68 who wrote in to the cluster over two years, five declared and arose to serve, roughly one in fourteen. Reach opens the door at a scale nothing local can match, and the friendship that follows is what carries someone to service.

Six of the seven stages sit on the local side, and so does every soul who has declared. That is where a cluster's hours repay themselves, with a findable presence bringing people to it.

Something that meets again next week, and a person who is expecting you. In the sample cluster all five declarations had these six behind them.

They arrived already leaning in, and what they wanted was company. Your cluster's first five will look different, and learning who they are is part of the work.

It lets someone who has already started looking find you, and puts them in touch with a person within a day. All five who declared met the Faith on their own: a classmate, a chance meeting abroad, a podcast, a coworker's post. A findable community is what lets people like that arrive.

Proclaiming the Faith ... paves the way for the action of the individual teacher ... publicity, however much it may arouse public interest in the Cause, is incapable of replacing personal teaching efforts.

The Universal House of Justice

Drawn from the seeker accompaniment training module