Speakers

Towards a Baha'i Speaker's Bureau

By John Taylor; 2007 June 16

Bill Sears in the talk I have been going over emphasized that problems like inactive believers and fund crises are easily solved by more effective teaching of the Faith; he quoted the Guardian as saying, "Drown your troubles in a torrent of new believers." This is not to be found in Ocean, but it certainly sounds like something Shoghi Effendi would have said. Mr. Sears' talk, "Promised Kingdom," aroused more comment last week than anything I have done in a long time. Indeed, if you rule out negative comment artificially caused by shooting off my mouth, probably it provoked more unreservedly positive comment than anything I have ever done, as you will see if you look at the comments at the end of last week's installments on the Badi' Blog.

I have always thought that if the Baha'i Faith is ever going to get the torrential influx of new blood that the Guardian said was the only way to solve our technical, internal problems, we will definitely have to nurture more and better speakers, and by better I mean inspirational personalities like, well, Bill Sears. As he says, the Hands were the "remnants of the Guardian," and from them you can catch the spirit of the Master and the Guardian. From a good speaker you can gain just such a "remnant" or fragrance of the Faith that nothing else can ever accomplish. Listening to Mr. Sears' words certainly electrified my sensibilities. What a pleasure it was to spend the time to write "The Promised Kingdom" down and illustrate it in PowerPoint. I am still far from finished the second half of his talk, though, so be patient.

One comment in particular struck me. It was from an old-timer in response to my complaint that few speakers today have Bill Sears’s tendency to go beyond Toronto and speak in the smaller places in the area, like Hamilton. Ernie wrote,

"I first heard of the Faith in Nancy Campbell's studio in 1949.  If anyone wants to find when the Faith was first mentioned in their area (outside of probably Toronto, Hamilton and London) there were weekend meetings set up, advertised in advance and post meeting write-ups starting in 1937 by George Spendlove and Bill Suter. This was their reaction to the First Seven Year Plan from the Guardian. I know that they 'did' Kitchener-Waterloo, Guelph, and other centers too that I don't remember now. Any records of these teaching trips would be in Wilmette since the National Teaching Committee was based there until 1948 when the NSA was formed. Bill Sears, by the way, made several tours of the smaller places where there were Baha'is, including Niagara Falls, most before he was appointed a Hand I believe."

In those days, things were better in several ways. True, there were fewer Baha'is, but, as Robert Stockman points out in his history of the early years of the Faith in America, the few Baha'is there were tended to know the writings better than we do now. They had no way around it; nothing was published and they had to write out by hand every word from every Tablet they got their hands on. Plus, they had a stricter religious training, and prayed more often than we do. And, most important, they knew how to train and nurture a stock of good speakers. Before Bill Sears came to this area I know that Marion Jack and Martha Root came through too, both excellent speakers, indeed in the opinion of the Guardian they were the two best of the best. If we could re-learn how to use and care for speakers like that, I think we would have a shot at getting that torrent of new blood that the Guardian was confident would solve all of our problems.

What would that entail? Here is what I think we should do. In every locality we should set up a speaker's bureau whose sole purpose is dredging up talent, training new speakers, and putting them to work by sponsoring regular meetings. Its first job would be to start a speaker's circuit, a regular flow of travel teachers to every area. It need not even be exclusively concerned with Baha'i speakers either. It might interface with non-Baha'i speaker's bureaus by offering exchanges, non-Baha'i speakers to our meetings, Baha'i speakers to other organizations.

The Ruhi program seems designed to lay the seeds for a crop of new speakers, but more emphasis on nurturing the speakers that come out of the institutes. This is especially true in the West. The flames of mass entry would catch quicker if we had a stronger speaker's circuit flowing through every community.

And let there be no mistake: in spite of the wealth of electronic media, there is still a huge demand for live speakers, both in and out of religious contexts. The most prominent orators command the astronomical fees for their performances that we expect from the salaries of sports stars and Corporate CEO's. I am not saying that money should have anything to do with Baha'i speaker's bureaus; I am just saying that profit is an indicator of demand and popularity. We are talking a huge need for inspiration in this dismal, crisis ridden society. As for religion, in the United States there are several mega-churches, some as large as twenty or forty thousand parishioners, who gain a huge following by throwing out most of Christianity and developing a strange sort of self-help hybrid -- according to an atheist who attended them all,

"I heard nothing in those churches that Tony Robbins has not said better."

The thing is, there are a lot of things in the Baha'i teachings that could be said better, and in a far more inspiring way, than anything Tony Robbins ever gave in his life coaching, life turnaround sessions. Nor would we have to mangle and twist our religion out of all recognition in order to do it, the way these mega-churches do. We have, after all, the example of the Master, who rode the "speaker's circuit," religious and secular, all across Europe and America. He demonstrated how it is done. Nor did He force Himself upon these places, He was so inspiring in how He presented the Teachings that often he had to turn down a half dozen requests for every engagement He could accept. If we could raise up a crop of high quality speakers, our speaker's bureaus might also have such a problem. People, believe me, are starving for the feeling that I felt as I communed with the remnant of the Guardian, over and over intensively listening and transcribing Bill Sears' pep talk.

The first step to starting a speaker's bureau would be an active mentoring program at the grassroots level. It is extremely important that experienced speakers establish close cooperation with new, up-and-coming talent. That way, important lessons about what works and what does not would not be lost. A few years ago I featured here an article about how NASA met with the spectacular failures and disasters it has because it was failing to bring old talent together with new. This is as true, or more so, with the Baha'i Faith. Bill Sears did not become the speaker he was overnight, as we have seen, he was traveling through giving talks in this area for decades before he was appointed a Hand. Lest there be any doubt about the extreme need for close personal consultation between young and old teachers, the Master said:

"On the subject of consultation, Abdu'l-Baha said, 'Man must consult with a trustworthy and wise person. His Holiness the Messenger (Mohammed) says, 'The consulted is trusted.' Therefore, if man does not consult with a trustworthy, wise person, his own mind becomes confused. When man's thoughts are scattered, he falls into many troubles. But if he concentrates on one point, then he is relieved on all sides." (SW, Vol. 9, p. 117)

Confused is a good word for how we are today, rhetorically speaking. It is pretty clear that Bill Sears was talking to a generation that was steeped in the Protestant Christian tradition, a tradition that no longer is as strong, or rather if it is, it is highly politicized and unlikely to respond to Baha'i ideas as it once did. If a Baha'i speaker emphasized prophesy today, as Bill Sears did to members of that same religious persuasion, or even mentioned world unity, he or she would be branded the Antichrist. We need to find a new target audience, and we need to do it skillfully, not forgetting the best of what worked for the old generation of speakers...

Another step towards starting a Baha'i speaker's bureau would be to make good use of the Wilmette Institute. This would surely be the easiest way to start training a stable of eloquent speakers, as well as growing an intelligent audience to listen to them.

For those who do not know about this wonderful institution, the Wilmette distance education curriculum is now designed so that you can start up your own course on the Faith in your own community without the expense of building a school and hiring instructors. All you do is get a group together and let Wilmette do the teaching over the Internet. You do not even have to buy textbooks, one of the big costs of being a student these days, everything can be printed out on your own printer. Here is how they describe it in their own words:

"All on-line courses include Web-based discussion boards for students and faculty, regular conference calls, systematic lesson plans, and a wide variety of learning projects to help students apply their learning in their local communities. All courses are available at the introductory level for those who do not want to take a university-level course, the intermediate (undergraduate) level for those wishing to go into more depth, and the advanced (graduate) level for those wishing to do extensive research or writing. More information on all of them can be found on the Web at http://www.wilmetteinstitute.us.bahai.org"

Here is their latest schedule of upcoming courses, taken from their June-December 2007 newsletter:

 
Wilmette Institute Distance-Learning Course Schedule

June 15, 2007 - September 15, 2007: The Baha'i Faith: A Comprehensive Introduction
July 15, 2007 - October 15, 2007: Judaism for Deepening and Dialog
August 15, 2007 - November 15, 2007: One Common Faith
September 15, 2007 - December 15, 2007: Baha'u'llah's Early Mystical Works: The Hidden Words, The Seven Valleys, The Four Valleys, Gems of Mysteries
October 1, 2007 - December 31, 2007: The Secret of Divine Civilization
November 1, 2007 - January 31, 2008: The Exemplar: The Life and Ministry of Abdul-Baha
November 15, 2007 - February 15, 2008: The Advent of Divine Justice
December 1, 2007 - March 1, 2008: Christianity for Deepening and Dialogue
December 15, 2007 - March 15, 2008: How to Study the Baha'i Writings