" maybe I have understood it not correctly. But I got the idea from letters by the UHJ that the institute process consists of study circles, childrens classes and devotionals. Maybe I got that wrong."
Dear Janine, No, those are the three core activities of the Five Year Plan. The hope is that the Institute Process will eventually lead to the multiplication of all three, but it is only directly involved in study circles. "I have understood that we should do devotionals as much as possible in our own home, to reach the most people, because the more bahais and non-bahais have devotionals, the more people can come to them." That is the way they have been pushing devotionals but I'm not sure that is such a good idea. As I said, studies indicate that seekers want to attend worship services in a neutral place, not in strangers' homes. "If you have ten bahais in a town and one regular devotional, where everybody can come, you reach less people than if you have ten devotionals in the town at each persons home who invites his or her personal friends and family." I would be more inclined to invite my friends and family over to a regularly established worship service than a prayer meeting in my home. "Have you seen the Building Momentum video?" Bits and pieces. "There were examplesof this and how a non=bahai held a devotional in her own home as well. It does work, actually. It works better than regular devotionals in one central place, because we have held them on and off in europe and people you know personally will feel more comfortable coming to your own home than coming to a center, because you have a bond withthem." But entry by troops involves getting people to meetings whom we don't necessarily have a personal bond with. I've not seen any studies which compare the statistics on the effectiveness of well-planned worship services vs. small home based devotionals, have you? But I'll grant you that in Europe where only 4% of the population goes to church on any given Sunday, this approach might be more effective. I live in a part of the country where *most* people go to church at least two times a week and if we can't create that intense sense of community we won't get anywhere here. I agree that at some point you need to multiply these meetings simply to handle the sheer numbers of people we hope to have. But to multiply them before the numbers have begun to increase are there strikes me as doing something like going back to the good ole days of paper Assemblies and moving around to open localities. We had a goals to fulfill by God we were going to have them whether we ended up with anything viable or not! In my opinion part of the advantage of clustering is that it enabled us to combine resources in order to put in place all of the three core activities. The time to multiply, it seems to me, is when our numbers actually begin to grow as a result. But instead we seem to imagine that multiplication by itself will bring growth. I think it just drains our resources. "I think entry by troops will happen when we have 100 bahais in a town each holding their devotionals having regularly 3-4 people attending" Except I don't expect my seekers to want to go to prayer meetings with just 3-4 people attending. What are we going to do? Just pass around the prayer book? Most non-Baha'is find that boring! We need well-planned devotional meetings much like the ones in the Mashriqu'l-Adhkars. Better in fact, because most non-Baha'is find those boring too. warmest, Susan __________________________________________________ You are subscribed to Baha'i Studies as: mailto:[email protected] To unsubscribe, send a blank email to mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe, use subscribe bahai-st in the message body to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Baha'i Studies is available through the following: Mail - mailto:[email protected] Web - http://list.jccc.edu/read/?forum=bahai-st News - news://list.jccc.edu/bahai-st Public - http://www.escribe.com/religion/bahaist Old Public - http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] New Public - http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
