From May 22-25, 171 Bahá’í delegates in the United States will gather at the Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette, Ill., to elect the nine members of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. At the same time, Bahá’í delegates in virtually every country of the world will gather to elect their National Spiritual Assemblies.

This year marks the 100th annual Bahá’í national convention in the United States.


Delegates at the first convention, held in Chicago in 1909, established an organization called Bahai Temple Unity [sic], the first national institution in the Bahá’í world.

“The desire of those early believers to build the temple in Chicago is what prompted them to hold the first national convention here” says Robert Stockman, a Bahá’í historian and author of The Bahá’í Faith in America.

Charged mainly with construction of the Temple, the Bahai Temple Unity gradually took on other tasks, such as publishing Bahá’í literature, coordinating the teaching of the Faith and assisting isolated Bahá’ís. In the 1920s, it evolved into the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada (the countries established their own separate Assemblies in 1948.)

The Bahá’í Faith has no clergy; instead, the approximately five million Bahá’ís worldwide are governed by elected councils at the international, national and local levels. They are, respectively, the Universal House of Justice, the national spiritual assemblies and the local spiritual assemblies.

The U.S. National Spiritual Assembly oversees the affairs of the 160,000 Bahá’ís who live in the 48 contiguous states. The National Spiritual Assembly members recently participated as delegates in the election of the nine members of the Universal House of Justice at the faith’s world headquarters in Haifa, Israel. The international election is held every five years.

National and Local Spiritual Assemblies are charged, according to Bahá’í writings, with the responsibility of being "channels of divine guidance, planners of the teaching work, developers of human resources, builders of communities, and loving shepherds of the multitudes."