Letters from the Guardian to Australia and New Zealand

Your letter dated April 27th has been received and the beloved Guardian has instructed me to answer it on his behalf. He also acknowledges receipt of the enclosures forwarded with it.

He trusts that by the time this letter reaches you the complications which arose at Convention, about the election, will have been satisfactorily straightened out; as he already cabled you, this was a question for the out-going N.S.A. to decide.

He feels that the National Spiritual Assembly during the coming year should focus both its and the believers’ attention on the all-important teaching work, and the necessity of increasing the number of groups and assemblies throughout Australia and New Zealand. The friends should be urged and encouraged to arise both as pioneers and travelling teachers, and they should receive, in cases where they cannot afford it themselves, financial aid from the National Fund. Such measures are at the present time absolutely necessary, as the believers are few, the hour very pressing, and most of them not sufficiently well-off to do such work without assistance.

The Bahá’ís in the United States have just embarked on their second Seven Year Plan; India is working hard on a Four and a half Year Plan; England is straining every nerve to achieve, during the Six Year Plan the friends have chosen for themselves, 19 assemblies. It is only right and proper that such a vast and promising territory as Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania represent, should likewise win for itself new laurels in the Bahá’í teaching field during the next few years! He therefore 62 suggests you choose, after surveying your own possibilities and soliciting suggestions from the friends, certain immediate objectives, and then work unitedly towards achieving them.

He assures you that he will offer special prayers on your behalf, that the N.S.A. members and the Bahá’ís they represent, may speedily forge ahead, and enter into a new era of development of the Faith in that distant but promising land.

The activities in which you are engaged, are the object of my fervent and constant prayers. To teach the Faith, to stimulate the dispersal and settlement of pioneers, to enable the existing groups to attain assembly status, and to multiply, steadily and speedily, the number of groups in Australia and New Zealand are the paramount tasks which demand the constant attention, the prayerful consideration and the united and vigorous collaboration of the believers, and particularly of their national elected representatives. No sacrifice is too great to further these manifold and noble aims and purposes. Effective measures, unprecedented in scope, should be carefully and immediately devised, proclaimed to the believers, and, through sustained and organised effort, carried into effect. There is no time to lose. The masses, greatly tried by the calamities of the age, restless, disappointed, and eager to obtain real and complete relief in their hour of trial, hunger for the Message of the new Day, and will, if properly approached and appealed to, embrace the great verities it enshrines. Firm and unassailable unity among those who profess to be its bearers, unshakeable fidelity to the principles on which it is founded, generous and unfailing support of the institutions designed to propagate it, are the vital prerequisites of their urgent and sacred task. Every consideration, however profitable and laudable, must for the present be subordinated to the vital needs of the strenuous task now confronting the Australian and New Zealand Bahá’í communities. The administrative machinery designed to provide the necessary agency for the diffusion of the Message has been sufficiently consolidated to enable it to perform the glorious task for which it was originally 63 erected. It should be utilised to the fullest possible extent. Its scope should simultaneously be enlarged to provide a still wider basis for the future extension of teaching activities. May the coming year witness a notable advance in the organized activities of the community for the furtherance of so glorious and meritorious a purpose.