Reflection Meeting: Our Thirteenth Intensive Program of Growth

Our beloved House of Justice further offers loving encouragement to us in the following paragraph of the same letter, as well as providing a  basis for which we work toward increasing the number of friends actively participating our cluster activities and services:

“Therein, then, lies the challenge that must be faced by those in the forefront of the learning process which will continue to advance over the course of the next Plan.  Wherever an intensive programme of growth is established, let the friends spare no effort to increase the level ofparticipation.  Let them strain every nerve to ensure that the system which they have so laboriously erected does not close in on itself but progressively expands to embrace more and more people.  Let them not lose sight of the remarkable receptivity they found—nay, the sense of eager expectation that awaited them—as they gained confidence in their ability to interact with people of all walks of life and converse with them about the Person of Baha’u’llah and His Revelation.  Let them hold fast to the conviction that a direct presentation of the Faith, when carried out at a sufficient level of depth and reinforced by a sound approach to consolidation, can bring enduring results.  And let them not forget the lessons of the past which left no doubt that a relatively small band of active supporters of the Cause, no matter how resourceful, no matter how consecrated, cannot attend to the needs of communities comprising hundreds, much less thousands, of men, women and children.  The implications are clear enough.  If, in a cluster, those shouldering responsibility for expansion and consolidation number in the tens, with a few hundred participating in the activities of community life, both figures should rise significantly so that by the end of the Plan, one or two hundred are facilitating the  participation of one or two thousand.”