Sunday, February 6, 2022
Gayle Bevill-DaDa has been appointed as Coordinator for the Office of Pioneering for the Midwest Region. She will work with the pioneering support group as they endeavor to recruit, orient and provide on-going accompaniment for pioneers in the field.
The Sunday Coffee and Teatime, held on the first Sunday of each month, is part of the on-going effort to engage pioneers. Here is how one participant reacted to the first gathering, “I felt supported and loved, like I was a part of Bahá’u’lláh’s organized effort to save this planet.”
Since the publication of the Tablets of the Divine Plan, written by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, pioneers and traveling teachers have been essential to the advancement of the Bahá’í Faith. The work of the Pioneering Office has played an integral role in the placement and support of pioneers.
These dedicated friends work with the Pioneering Office to achieve its goals for growth in the Midwest Region:
- Gisou Behrouzi, Cluster IN-03
- Jackie Schwart, Cluster OH-03
- Gladis Westmeyer, Cluster OH-07
In Citadel of Faith, Shoghi Effendi expressed the importance of supporting homefront pioneering efforts:
It is upon the individual believer, constituting the fundamental unit in the structure of the home front, that the revitalization, the expansion, and the enrichment of the home front must ultimately depend. The more strenuous the effort exerted, daily and methodically, by the individual laboring on the home front to rise to loftier heights of consecration, of self-abnegation, to contribute, through pioneering at home, to the multiplication of Bahá’í isolated centers, groups and assemblies, and to raise, through diligent, painstaking and continual endeavor to convert receptive souls to the Faith he has espoused, the number of its active and wholehearted supporters, the sooner will the vast and multiple enterprises, launched beyond the confines of the homeland, and now so desperately calling for a greater supply of men and means, be provided with the necessary support that will ensure their uninterrupted development and hasten their ultimate fruition, and the lighter will be the burden of the impending contest that must be waged, sooner or later, within the borders of the Union itself, between the rising institutions of Bahá’u’lláh’s embryonic divinely appointed Order, and the exponents of obsolescent doctrines and the defenders, both secular and religious, of a corrupt and fast-declining society. pp. 142-161
In another message, the Guardian emphasized the sacred nature of pioneering and the heavy responsibiltiy that pioneers feel:
“The pioneers themselves must realize that not only are they fulfilling the wishes of Bahá’u’lláh, and doing that which the Master Himself said He longed to do; namely, to go, if necessary on foot, and carry His Father’s Message to all the regions of the earth; but they are enhancing the prestige of the Faith to a remarkable degree in the eyes of the public …
“Therefore, each pioneer must feel his responsibility very heavily, and understand that his calling is far above the average service; and his duty to remain at his post a very pressing one indeed.”
Shoghi Effendi, Directives of the Guardian, p. 87