23 April 2022

Jalál, 15 Jalál (Glory), 179 B.E

Seen

A pair of Canada geese (Branta canadensis) in the pond close to their nest

Done

The Building Vibrant Communities 2022 World Conferences Columbus is next weekend: April 30 - May 1, 2022. What follows is an adaptation of an email newsletter announcement about the conference distributed by the conference planners and hosts. If you’re in the area, please attend!

A rising wave of conferences is sweeping across the globe, bringing together the well-wishers of humanity to consult about how they can channel their energies and desire to promote unity and serve their fellow citizens into addressing the needs of their societies.

Gatherings at the local, national, and international levels are enabling participants to gain insights from experiences in Bahá’í community-building activities, initiatives undertaken for social action, and efforts to contribute to prevalent discourses.

In some places, conferences have an overarching theme, such as the recent gathering in Bangui, Central African Republic, in which some 500 women from the surrounding area gathered to explore the role of women in social progress.

“The full participation of women in these gatherings is essential, because women are instrumental in fostering a culture of peace,” says Louis Isidore Tenzonko-Boazamo, a member of that country’s Bahá’í National Spiritual Assembly. “This is why our very first in this series of conferences explored this theme.”

The Building Vibrant Communities 2022 World Conferences Columbus is for anyone conscious of the global challenges facing humanity - be it climate change, the pandemic, war and conflict, or widespread injustices…anyone who would seek to join us in a global effort aimed at social betterment.

Attendees can expect a gathering highlighted by presentations, small group discussions, devotions and music, for adults & teens. Families are especially welcome & special programs will be offered for children. Food will be served.

We invite you to join with friends, families, colleagues, and neighbors, across Franklin County, to explore a unified vision for a better world.

The Conference takes place 4/30 (9a-6p) and 5/1 (9a - 5p)

Click here to register

Fill out your registration completely (not just the parking pass:)

Masks are optional for this event

Noted

Astral Prospecting on Instagram and Astral Prospecting on Facebook

Marc Bosserman on Instagram Marc Bosserman on Facebook, and Marc Bosserman Music and Musings on YouTube

Tab’s Galaxy on YouTube

Quoted

This is telling. Such objectives could not be realistically contemplated if administrative institutions and agencies had not evolved markedly, endowing them with significantly heightened capacity to manage the affairs of a community whose activities have multiplied so quickly, embracing a vast and growing number of kindred souls. It would not be possible to aspire to such growth if a desire to learn—to act, to reflect, to capture insights, and to absorb the insights emerging elsewhere—had not been cultivated at all levels, extending to the grassroots of the community. And the effort implied by such projections would hardly be feasible if a systematic approach to the teaching work and to human resource development had not become increasingly manifest in the Bahá’í world. All this has brought about an advance in the Bahá’í community’s awareness of its own identity and purpose. A determination to be outward looking in the process of community building had already become an established aspect of culture in many, many places; it has now blossomed, in a rising number of communities, into a sense of real responsibility for the spiritual and material progress of larger and larger groups within society, well beyond the membership of the Bahá’í community itself. The efforts of the friends to build communities, to engage in social action, and to contribute to the prevalent discourses of society have cohered into one global enterprise, bound together by a common framework for action, focused on helping humanity to establish its affairs on a foundation of spiritual principles. The significance of the developments we have described, reaching this point one hundred years after the inauguration of the Administrative Order, cannot be overlooked. In the extraordinary rise in capacity that has occurred in the last two decades—and which has made it possible for the Bahá’í world to view its endeavours in terms of the release of the society-building power of the Faith—we see incontrovertible evidence that the Cause of God has entered the sixth epoch of its Formative Age. We announced last Riḍván that the widespread phenomenon of large numbers participating in Bahá’í activities, being kindled by faith, and acquiring the skills and abilities to serve their communities signalled that the third epoch of the Master’s Divine Plan had commenced; thus, the One Year Plan, at its inception then and at its conclusion now, has come to mark a set of historic advances made by the company of the faithful. And at the threshold of a new, mighty undertaking, this united body of believers stands ready to seize the possibilities wide open before it. ¹