The Interregnum and What Replaced the Function

Between 1957 and 1963 the Baha'i Faith had no head. The Guardianship had ended and the Universal House of Justice had not yet been elected, and in that gap the Hands of the Cause acted collectively, with a group of them residing at the Baha'i World Centre in Haifa and exercising a stewardship they were careful to describe as temporary.

What they did with that authority is the significant part. They used it to complete the global teaching plan already under way and to bring about the election of the institution that would supersede them. The Universal House of Justice was elected in 1963, and the Hands did not seek a continuing place in the structure it established. A body holding effective power over a religion for six years and then handing it to an elected institution is not a common outcome, and Baha'i historical writing treats it as a decisive episode.

The functional gap remained, and was addressed five years later. In 1968 the Universal House of Justice created the office of Continental Counsellor, explicitly to continue at a regional level the work the Hands had done globally, and the arrangement was developed further in the years that followed. Peter Smith's reference work on the Faith sets out the sequence and the institutional reasoning behind it.