The Continental Boards of Counsellors and the National Spiritual Assemblies share in the functions of propagation and protection, but the Counsellors specialize in these functions from a different level and in a different manner. From a continental vantage point, the Counsellors bring a perspective to their functions which, when offered to a National Assembly in the form of counsel, advice, recommendations, suggestions or commentary, enriches the latter’s understanding, acquaints it with a broader experience than its own, and encourages it to maintain a world-embracing vision….
With the opening of the fourth epoch of the Formative Age, a procedure was activated by which the goals of national plans are formulated in joint consultations of National Spiritual Assemblies and Continental Counsellors. It initiated a new phase in the maturation of the Administrative Order. This development ensures two significant benefits in particular: It enables each institution to draw on the experiences and insights particular to the other, thereby making available to the planning process two distinct channels of information from two levels of Bahá’í administration; and it also assures to the Counsellors a necessary familiarity with the background, rationale, and content of national plans, which as a matter of principle they are expected to support. Both institutions obtain strength from such collaboration….
- The Universal House of Justice (From a letter dated 19 May 1994 to a National Spiritual Assembly; compilation: ‘The National Spiritual Assembly’, prepared by the Research Department of the Universal House of Justice, revised October 2023; online Baha’i Reference Library of the Baha’i World Centre)
