Intensity around the UK – from the Training Institute Board
6 August 2014
6 Kamál 171 B.E.
To all believers in the United Kingdom
Dearly loved Friends,
Please see below a message from the Training Institute Board for the UK for your kind attention.
With loving greetings,
Department of the Secretariat
National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’í’s of the United Kingdom
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To the Baha’is of the United Kingdom,
Dear Friends,
The Training Institute Board is moved and delighted to share with you the news that the summer intensive training fortnight at Keele University has been fully booked. Each week over 60 souls are gathering in study circles to intensively study the Creative Word and translate its transformative power into action. We are sure that the environment created by the tutors and the participants will be conducive to spiritual empowerment, the gaining of fresh insights, the renewing of enthusiasm and a deepening of motivation to serve mankind.
We are also pleased to share that during this summer and in a number of clusters across the UK, the friends are focusing their energies on significantly advancing the process of entry by troops in their communities. In some, these collective endeavours are in the form of reaching out to junior youth and their families to establish the junior youth spiritual empowerment programme. In others the focus is on meeting friends who are keen to collaborate with the Baha’i community in offering classes for the spiritual education of children. Though the particulars differ, the pattern is the same – friends are arising in increasingly large numbers to implement the guidance of the Universal House of Justice. As they do, they are finding heightened receptivity to the work that the Baha’i community undertakes and a desire from their neighbours and co-workers to become protagonists of this great and ‘irrepressible movement’.
Some reflections from both the intensive training and intensive projects in neighbourhoods:
This was my first time tutoring an intensive book and I loved it! I felt very nervous before coming, but my participants were great and I got a lot of support from the other tutors and the task force.
–From a Tutor at the Intensive Training
I loved the evening activities so that you could get a flavour of what the other books involve and also you can show off what you’ve been doing in your book – so I also liked when, for example, we joined book 3 and shared a prayer with them because we got to practice that as well… And I loved pookana definitely! That should be a compulsory game every year…
– Ruhi Bok1 Participant
I really enjoyed training, partly due to not only meeting lots of new people, but also their friendliness towards me, even if I didn’t know them that well. I enjoyed the book a lot as well, I feel a lot more enlightened to Bahá’i teachings and actually feel like a much better person because of it.
– Participant of Ruhi Book 1
After praying, studying and portraying the vision of the neighbourhood of ….. we all went and carried out outreach, the purpose of which was to have conversations with people. There was one accompanier to two or three participants in which they were free to draw on the insights they gained from the study of book 6 in their conversations. Each participant had expressed what they wanted to learn about in the preparation time, and the space provided enabled them to do that. Upon reflection they all felt that they had advanced in their ability to initiate a conversation, explore themes and idea, as well as building bonds of friendship with souls they had just met. Alongside this, the energy, enthusiasm, creativity and resulting confirmations that their visit brought has further invigorated the process in ….. markedly.
– From someone participating in a Neighbourhood-based project
With our warmest love,
The Training Institute Board for the UK
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