y Feast be maintained, while opening this vital activity to the
enriching influence of diverse cultures? And, in all areas of concern, how
were the necessary resources to be recruited, funded, and coordinated?

The pressure of these urgent and interlocking challenges launched the
Baha'i world on a learning process that has proved to be as important as
the expansion itself. It is safe to say that during these years there was
virtually no type of teaching activity, no combination of expansion,
consolidation and proclamation, no administrative option, no effort at
cultural adaptation that was not being energetically tried in some part of
the Baha'i world. The net result of the experience was an intensive
education of a great part of the Baha'i community in the implications of
the mass teaching work, an education that could have occurred in no other
way. By its very nature, the process was largely local and regional in
focus, qualitative rather than quantitative in its gains, and incremental
rather than large-scale in the progress achieved. Had it not been for the
painstaking, always difficult and often frustrating consolidation work
pursued during these years, however, the subsequent strategy of
systematizing the promotion of entry by troops would have had very little
with which to work.

The fact that the Baha'i message was now penetrating the lives not merely
of small groups of individuals but of whole communities also had the
effect of reviving a vital feature of an earlier stage in the advancement
of the Cause. For the first time in decades, the Faith found itself once
more in a situation where teaching and consolidation were inseparably
bound up with social and economic development. In the early years of the
century, under the guidance of the Master and the Guardian, the Iranian
believers--denied the opportunity to participate equally in whatever
limited benefits the society of the day offered--had arisen to
painstakingly construct a comprehensive community life of a kind beyond
either the need or the reach of the relatively isolated Baha'i groups
across North America and Western Europe. In Iran, spiritual and moral
advancement, teaching activities, the creation of schools and clinics, the
building of administrative institutions, and the encouragement of
initiatives aimed at economic self-sufficiency and prosperity--all had been
from an early stage inseparable features of one organically unified
process of development