The First National Spiritual Assembly of America

In the spring 1925 issue of the *Star of the West* the American Bahá'í readership received the report of the formation, in late April of that year, of the first National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of the United States and Canada.

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The institution had been called for, in successive cables and letters from Haifa, by the young Guardian Shoghi Effendi. He had been studying, since his appointment in late 1921, the question of the proper administrative form of the Bahá'í community. The American community, with its substantial established membership and its organised local life, had been chosen by the Guardian as the first community outside the Holy Land to constitute the full national institutional structure that the Master's *Will and Testament* had called for.

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The election took place at the annual convention of the American friends, held that year in Wilmette, on the temple grounds where the dome of the Mashriqu'l-Adhkár was even then beginning to rise. Delegates had come from the established Local Spiritual Assemblies of the United States and Canada — at that date, perhaps thirty-five communities of varying sizes, drawn from the eastern seaboard, the Great Lakes, the Pacific coast, and the few scattered inland centres.

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The convention conducted itself, the *Star's* report records, with the characteristic prayerful seriousness of the early Bahá'í institutional gatherings. The election of the first National Spiritual Assembly was preceded by a period of silent prayer. The delegates voted by secret ballot. The nine names that received the highest number of votes were declared the inaugural members of the new institution.

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The new National Spiritual Assembly proceeded immediately to its first session. The *Star's* report names the nine inaugural members — among them several figures already celebrated in the American Bahá'í community for their service. They drew up, at that first session, the brief charter under which they would conduct their work for the year ahead.

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The Guardian, when he received the cable from Wilmette informing him of the formation, replied at once. His cable — published by the *Star* in the following month's issue — welcomed the formation of the institution and named it as *the first national institution of the American Faith; from it the future will be built.*

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The prediction was sound. The American National Spiritual Assembly, formed in April 1925, would in the decades that followed become the most experienced and the most substantial of the world's National Spiritual Assemblies. It would oversee the completion of the Wilmette House of Worship in 1953. It would coordinate the American contribution to the Ten-Year Crusade and the successive international plans of the modern era. It would, in due course, become the model on which many of the world's other National Spiritual Assemblies would be patterned.

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