Twenty-eight established intensive programmes of growth. That’s what the UK national institutional meeting last weekend has pledged to the Universal House of Justice as its contribution to the world total of 1,500 IPGs by 2011, the end of the next Five Year Plan. And just so’s you know, we have 51 clusters in the UK.

It’s going to be challenging, but it is certainly do-able.

Boy, what a meeting! Around 150 Bah?’?s attended. There were four Counsellors: Mr Shahriar Razavi representing the International Teaching Centre, and three representatives of the European Board of Counsellors. Most of our Auxiliary Board members. There were nine members of the UK National Spiritual Assembly. Most of the members of all four Regional Bah?’? Councils (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) and of their respective Training Institute Boards, together with the National Training Co-ordinators from each of the four UK countries. Members of the cluster-level agencies (Area Teaching Committees and Cluster Co-ordinators) from all of the seven advanced clusters in the UK that currently or soon will have intensive programmes of growth. Representatives from some promising B clusters. And up to six observers from each of the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden) and from the Republic of Ireland.

It was a heady mix.

The programme had three elements:

1. Presentations by three of the Counsellors;
2. Study of the 27 December 2005 message from the Universal House of Justice to the conference of the Continental Counsellors;
3. Reviewing progress in our A, B and C clusters; assessing our present human resources; setting our contribution to the Universal House of Justice’s goal of 1,500 established IPGs by 2011; and preparing outline plans for growth to make or contribution of 28 IPGs achievable

Counsellor Shahriar Razavi was in masterly form, helping us to deepen our understanding of the 27 December message with great force and clarity. Below I have put some of the jottings from my notes. (I should stress that what I write below is not a transcript of the talk and should not be taken as being authoritative in any way. The material is drawn from my notes taken during several presentations.) My notes are quite extensive and I may include more of them in another post, but we can get the flavour of the new Plan from what I’ve put here.

Counsellor Shirin Fozdar-Foroudi also spoke with great intensity and love, and I’ll include some material from my notes of her talk in another post as well.

All I can say at this stage is that the 27 December 2005 message and the words of the Counsellors presented us with a breathtaking vision for the next five years, a vision which every believer in Bah?’u'll?h really has to embrace, make part of the very core of their being, and express day by day and minute by minute if we are to achieve what the House of Justice is calling us to achieve.

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