Dearly loved friends,
The eager expectation with which we welcomed to the World
Centre, on 27 December, sixty-four Counsellors from the five continents to
discuss, with the International Teaching Centre, the challenges and
opportunities facing the Baha'i world community, has, at the conclusion of
their historic conference, been transmuted into feelings of deepest joy,
gratitude and love.
Graced by the presence of the Hands of the Cause
Amatu'l-Baha Ruhiyyih Khanum, Ugo Giachery, 'Ali-Akbar Furutan, 'Ali-Muhammad
Varqa and Collis Featherstone, the Conference was organized and managed with
admirable foresight and efficiency by the International Teaching Centre, whose
individual members watched over and served untiringly the needs of the
participants and the progress of the Conference itself.
Convened in the concourse of the Seat of the Universal House
of Justice as the Counsellors of the Baha'i world entered upon their new
five-year term of office, within months of the termination of the Seven Year
Plan and the opening of the new Six Year Plan, its aura heightened by the
spiritual potencies of the Holy Shrines and the euphoric sense of victory and
blessing now pervading the entire Baha'i world, the Conference attained such
heights of consultative exaltation, spirituality and power as only those serving
the Blessed Beauty can enjoy.
The organic growth of the Cause of God, indicated by recent
significant developments in its life, becomes markedly apparent in the light of
the main objectives and expectations of the Six Year Plan: a vast expansion of
the numerical and financial resources of the Cause; enlargement of its status
in the world; a world-wide increase in the production, distribution and use of
Baha'i literature; a firmer and world-wide demonstration of the Baha'i way of
life requiring special consideration of the Baha'i education of children and
youth, the strengthening of Baha'i family life and attention to universal
participation and the spiritual enrichment of individual life; further
acceleration in the process of the maturation of local and national Baha'i
communities and a dynamic consolidation of the unity of the two arms of the
Administrative Order; an extension of the involvement of the Baha'i world
community in the needs of the world around it; and the pursuit of social and
economic development in well-established Baha'i communities. These are some of
the features of the Six Year Plan which will open on 21 April 1986 and
terminate on 20 April 1992.
