The Baha'i Studies Listserv > Ok you had 3 new active Baha'is in your cluster over a period of one year. > Has anyone left the Faith?
Dear Firouz, Not in the last year. Do you have statistics of growth in your cluster > over last 10 or 20 years? I know from living here the last ten years that this exceeds the number of declarants we would expect over a five year period. Do you think you would not have had 3 or 4 > declarants had your community followed the same old style firesides, > teaching, and deepening classes? Yes, but it would have taken five or ten years. As you know,Firouz, I've never been a big fan of Ruhi. What turned me around is that I had this one seeker, a student who came into my office one day, plopped down on a chair and said, "Doc, I need a new religion.' So I started taking her to firesides. This woman was exceptionally bright but she also had a number of emotional problems and somehow she managed to turn every fireside into a focus on her problems and we were getting nowhere. But when we started doing Ruhi classes the situation greatly improved because there was a focus. By the time she finished Book Four (best book for seekers, IMO) she had become a Baha'i. The same thing was true of a spouse of one of the Baha'is. He had been hanging around the Faith for some 17 years before doing Ruhi classes. I might add that these two are not among the four declarants I mentioned. This happened shortly before our recent spurt. > > My experience has been mostly in developing world and that was my > observation of inflated statistics. It is the nature of statistics to be inflated, even with the best intentions, but I can tell you the record keeping is much more careful now than it was. warmest, Susan __________________________________________________ You are subscribed to Baha'i Studies as: mailto:[email protected] Unsubscribe: send a blank email to mailto:leave-546507-27401.54f46e81b66496c9909bcdc2f7987...@list.jccc.edu Subscribe: send subscribe bahai-st in the message body to [email protected] Or subscribe: http://list.jccc.edu:8080/read/all_forums/subscribe?name=bahai-st Baha'i Studies is available through the following: Mail - mailto:[email protected] Web - http://list.jccc.edu:8080/read/?forum=bahai-st News (on-campus only) - news://list.jccc.edu/bahai-st Old Public - http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] New Public - http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
