Zhang

I got thinking early today, about the numbers of the faithful. Have you found that the number of Baha'i in your community has increased? Decreased? Do numbers even matter? What do you think?

arthra

My experience is that communities go through stages and transitions...so some will for various reasons leave and settle some place else.. We still maintain our contacts with them over the years. So our community has changed and we have new and different people in our community... Also, having cluster activities has illustrated how people are always moving and in transition... I would say on an ongoing basis we probably have interactions with neighboring communities.

Numbers in and of themselves I think are not as valuable as the quality of the intreractions...so you might have say fifty people on a list but their level of activity (participation) is more important...

One thing you need to do is check what the needs are in your community... If you have disabled Baha'is you need to have some kind of regular contact with them so they still feel involved in the community.. If you have youth you need to be sure they are active in junior yourth and other programs...and so on.

Zhang

So I can assume that you are an optimist, in that you don't find a lack of Baha'i in a community depressing, but rather value the work being done?

I agree, but do you think it's a cause for concern when only 2 or 3 Baha'i are in a particular community? How can anyone get the job done?

LordOfGoblins

We shouldnt be worried about numbers.
Entry by Troops may commence at anytime when people are not expecting. IMO 2012 will be a significant year for the Bahai faith. The year isnt over yet!
And when it does happen if we are not spiritually prepared we may miss out on opportunities to teach effectively that we could otherwise have had..

Essence of GOD

i find being in a 2 or 3 person group, more engaging, than when iam in a 20+ groups.
because, when there are less people, you can easily be yourself and explain your view in dept and hear other peoples views more in dept.
However, when there is a large group, many thoughts and views are unspoken or lost.
but thats just me.

tonyfish58

I think what Arthra said is most important, the level of participation in the community.

Our area has changed little in the Last 30 years in Numbers. Participation is up and down. The best times were when the entire community was very active.

Even though the numbers have not grown, I think a myriad of seeds have been sown. All these seeds just need a little more water the right situation and the garden will begin to grow and blossom.

Regards Tony

Sen McGlinn

From 1979 to 2000, the Dutch community grew at 2 -3 % per year (Arjen Kersten, Bahais in Nederland, p 68 fig 5.6). So far as I know, this is still the case. That's actually very good, in historical perspective.

Rodney Stark, in The Rise of Christianity (1996) deals roughly speaking with the first three centuries of Christianity, and the first century of Mormonism, and offers a lot of food for thought for Bahais.

Stark begins by estimating that there were 1000 Christians in the Roman Empire in the year 40. He notes that in the middle of the third century, Christians were by their own account few in number (p.5), but by the year 300 there were about 5 to 7.5 million Christians: so numerous that a few years later Constantine found it expedient to embrace the church. This has led the church in its own histories, and some scholars, to suppose that there was a mass conversion event in the late third century. But constant growth of 40% per decade, or 3.42% per year, is enough to explain these results: no mass conversion event is required. This is the same growth picture that Stark had found in his previous work on the Mormon church, which has grown hugely in 100 years without mass conversions, and it is supported by the archaeological evidence of church sizes.

This fits with contemporary sociological observations of religious affiliation, which show that it proceeds through social networks. In Stark and Lofland’s study of the Moonies in the USA, public talks and media advertising were completely ineffective: all those who joined the group had interpersonal attachments (friendships) with members, and all of the first cohort of members had been friends or relatives of one another before the first Moonie arrived to spread the message. Stark has similar data for the Mormon church: one per thousand of contacts through door-to-door teaching leads to a conversion, while one in two contacts within a personal network led to a conversion (page 18).

Shoghi Effendi's view of long-term growth also fits this pattern. In an article on my Bahai studies blog, 'entry by troops', I've pointed to number of letters on behalf of the Guardian in which he seemed to be responding to Bahais who were expecting a divine, perhaps catastrophic intervention, leading to entry by troops, and cautions them that “only to the degree that they mirror forth in their joint lives the exalted standards of the Faith will they attract the masses to the Cause of God.” He relies thus on character-building, and community-building, and not on a divine intervention or a better teaching plan, or door-to-door teaching, or media advertising. In other words he is relying on network growth of just the kind that Rodney Stark has described.

His time frame for this also seems to be in line with that which Christianity exhibited, and Stark has described. In a letter on his behalf he says that “it is only when the spirit has thoroughly permeated the world that the people will begin to enter the Faith in large numbers,” and in The Promised Day is Come he says that this spiritualisation will follow, rather than leading to, the Lesser Peace

The Lesser Peace (the establishment by national governments of treaties and institutions that can guarantee global peace) is evidently far away, and was not even on the horizon in Shoghi Effendi’s day, and he must have envisioned many generations being required for “the spiritualization of the masses,” which he regarded as a precondition for conversions “in large numbers.” So it is not surprising that when he writes of entry by troops and mass conversion, in Citadel of Faith, these events take place in a distant future which cannot yet be even dimly visualised. He must have been envisioning something like the revolution in the fortunes of Christianity that occurred between 300 and 350 AD: not because people suddenly began behaving differently, but because the Christians had become so numerous that continuing steady growth through personal networks, at something like 3 or 4 percent per year, entailed the conversion of hundreds of thousands of people every year.

Zhang

Wow, that was very well informed and interesting. Thanks for your input.